Abstract:

This study aims to evaluate the opinions of prospective Turkish teachers who took Comparative Literature Studies course at a university in Central Anatolia in the Fall semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. It was carried out with the data obtained from the semi-structured interview form applied to 18 students studying in the last year of the Faculty of Education. Before writing the opinion, the students were informed about the definition of the concept of "comparative literature", its attributed meanings, its history and methods of analysis, and the main sources and field experts related to the field of study were introduced. François Coppée's Sadaka and Tevfik Fikret's Ramadan Charity poems from French literature, which are most familiar to students who also take World Literature course, were analyzed in the classroom environment as comparative examples, similarities, differences and common points between the texts were determined and inferences were made. At the end of the 14-week training period, the candidates were given three different types of texts as epic, poetry and novel, and they were asked to write the contributions of the texts to them and the problems they experienced during the reading process in the interview form. As a result of the research, the candidates stated that they got to know different literatures and gained a broad perspective, gained awareness of understanding literary interactions, and noticed the aesthetic structure in the texts. In terms of education, they are united in the opinion that comparative reading improves their higher-order thinking skills. On the other hand, they reported that they had difficulty in making sense of the images, symbols and motifs in the texts due to the lack of information in the production process of the texts.

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