Comparative Literature is an interdisciplinary program that promotes the comparative study of literatures in different languages and the study of the relationship between literature and other human activity. It pays attention to language and to the relationship between literature and other disciplines and practices, such as the visual and performing arts, philosophy, history, the social sciences, religion, and mathematics.
Comparative Literature students at Dartmouth enjoy studying literature and culture from an array of critical perspectives. Among these are rhetoric and poetics, translation and reception, film theory and media studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, theories of ethnic and national identities, and gender and queer theory. Majors develop competence in at least one language other than their native language and work with original texts in more than one language.

