Hi everyone! Reading the archives of this forum has been tremendously helpful to me, but I have woefully few comp lit scholars in my life and I'm hoping to get advice from comp lit students here on a few things that are currently making me a bit anxious!
I'm currently an undergrad comp lit major who will be graduating within the next semester or two, but I'm graduating either two or three semesters early and I'm wondering if I should prolong my undergrad career by that extra semester so I can become more proficient in my languages, either by studying abroad within undergrad or taking more courses at my university. However, my less immediate concern is about what I'll study in grad school.
Languages: I'm a native English speaker and I will probably graduate as a double major in German (3-4 years; B2/C1, leaning towards C1). I've also studied Mandarin (equivalent of two years - one college year and Middlebury; probably like a B1?/HSK3-4), and French (equivalent of 1 year; probably A2/B1) in college. I'm going abroad and taking about 200 credit hours of German this summer so I can hopefully reach C1.
Would it benefit me to do a degree in East Asian Studies, study abroad, or otherwise augment my language proficiencies before I apply to a comp lit program, or am I overthinking this? I've looked at grad student profiles on various comp lit departmental websites, but I'm still not exactly sure how proficient accepted applicants are in their languages, and if anyone has personal anecdotes, I'd greatly appreciate it/feel less uncertain about this. I'm worried that I'm not proficient enough in my languages to be accepted to a program and won't be given a sufficient amount of time to learn them before having to do grad-level coursework in them, or that I'll be rejected out of hand for low proficiencies.
Interests: Probably like a lot of undergrads looking to go to grad school, I have a lot of interests, but I'd have to say that my primary interests are physical illness, epistemology, and identity/memory/mind as constructs in fiction, probably philosophy and literature. I'd also like to do work on Proust for sure, and maybe the Four Classics of Chinese literature. Are these interests unusual for a comp lit scholar? Am I less competitive if I don't take up national literatures as my specializations? I'm a bit worried because, to be honest, my primary interest within French literature (and motivation for studying the language) is Proust, and I don't envision myself ever excitedly doing research on, say, the themes that link together centuries of German literature. While I've found a few, but I'd be very happy if someone could point me to scholars or departments that specialize in or are particularly attentive to my interests; I've been bookmarking every prof with similar interests because they seem rare to me.
Hopefully my questions aren't too silly! Thanks for reading.