The course aims to provide students with an overview of the history, methods, essential issues of comparative literature studies. Tools will be proposed to develop a critical attitude towards the literary text: the ability to ask questions about its forms and contents; the ability to frame it in the context of reference; the ability to compare it with other texts in a thematic, formal, historical, and cultural sense. The course will provide a comparative perspective on the work of two of the most important contemporary authors of French and Italian literature: Michel Houellebecq and Walter Siti. Their works will be read and commented to show how both authors become spokesmen of a discourse deliberately immoralist, stinging, paradoxical, disturbing, forcing the reader to assume a competitive attitude towards the text. Ample excerpts from the novels will be read and commented in class, in the light of the secondary bibliography and hermeneutic tools of the discipline. The aim is to show how literary discourse is always constitutively complex, ambivalent, open to uncomfortable or problematic content that precisely in the novel space can find voice, and can be articulated in a different way than the mere communicative or ideological discourse.