Principal course content usually includes some of the following: the currency, reception, and influence of writers and their works in countries other than those of their origin; the transmission and evolution of international literary movements; the characteristics of and relationships between genres, themes and motifs; folk literature and folklore; criticism, aesthetics; intermediaries and the relations between literatures, as well as those between literatures and the other disciplines. Background sources usually include history, the social and behavioral sciences, philosophy, religion and theology, and natural sciences.
In his Introduction to Comparative Literature (1974), François Jost provides more specific examples of four major categories of comparatist study:
The value of studies such as those identified by Jost is still recognized, but in recent years the essentially historic effort represented by these subjects has given way to a project of understanding and articulating the theory of literary study. Comparative Literature today is not just a set of practices (e.g., comparing texts in different languages, comparing literary and "non-literary" texts, comparing literature and other arts) but also a perspective on literature as an activity involved in a complex web of cultural relations. In this context, comparatist practices acquire a new theoretical awareness. Eva Kushner, a past president of the International Comparative Literature Association and one of the founders of Comparative Literature in Canada, writes that:
Comparative literature has gradually become the comparative study of critical theory, as well as of the literary texts themselves, and this is what makes possible an osmotic relationship of comparative literature with the study of national literatures: all national literatures, today, share general problematics and theoretical concerns for the discussion of which comparative literature may be a meeting-ground, in theory as well as in practice. ("Comparative Literary History among the Human Sciences," 1988)
Kushner argues that Comparative Literature has shifted its main focus to the "workings of the literary system," that is, to the generation of literary texts within a culture relative to that culture's history, linguistic development, economic practices, philosophical and aesthetic assumptions and so on. This theoretical approach, or rather collection of theoretical approaches to national literatures in different states of development, can help us understand literary systems and make us aware of the historical specificity of our own categories of literary study, and the need to modify those categories when we study different or emerging literatures. The theoretical sophistication of such an approach determines, according to Kushner, that "comparative literary studies have the potential to become the new focus of a modern Humanities curriculum."
The importance of Comparative Literature to the advancement of literary study is evident from the number of comparatist schools who have made crucial contributions to literary theory in Canada and abroad: M. H. Abrams, Robert Alter, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Wlad Godzich, Wolfgang Iser, Barbara Johnson, Thomas Pavel, Gayatri Spivak, And Peter Szondi, to name a few.
In addition to its recognized role in shaping the fundamentals of modern literary study, Comparative Literature constitutes a significant intellectual response to the contemporary international situation. With the advent of closer ties among the countries of the European Community, the radical revision of relationships within the former Soviet world and the rediscovery of national cultures within newly independent states, the multiplying of economic ties between countries on the Pacific Rim, and the urgent need for co-operation and comprehension between cultural groups within Canada, universities must respond to the call for cross-cultural understanding and develop opportunities for intellectual activity in an international context.
The advent of mass media, rapid communication, and information-processing technology has brought about the unprecedented merging and overlapping of cultural traditions which some scholars recognize as the postmodern condition. Language departments in most major universities, including the University of Western Ontario, are responding with a new emphasis on cultural studies, or on language-learning within the framework of an understanding of the political, social, and literary world within which the language operates. Comparative Literature, a discipline which has always emphasized linguistic competence and conscientious study of works within their national context as a prerequisite to comparative work, is in line with the new trend toward cultural studies and has the potential to contribute to and expand on it. It is one element of the integrated and interdisciplinary humanities curriculum that is becoming a standard of many modern universities.