Booklists

LITERARY STUDIES COMPREHENSIVE READING LIST

Contributed by Middlebury College Literary Studies Professor and Editor of the New England Review Stephen Donadio.

PRIMARY LIST:

Homer, Iliad, Odyssey

Aeschylus, Oresteia; Prometheus Bound

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus

Vergil, Aeneid

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

Dante, The Divine Comedy; The Letter to Can Grande

Boccaccio, Decameron

Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author; Rules Of The Game; Henry IV; It Is So (If You Think It So)

Cervantes, Don Quixote

Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville

Calderón, Life Is A Dream

Lope de Vega, Sleepwell (Fuente ovejuna)

Borges, Ficciones

Moliere. Tartuffe; Don Juan; The Misanthrope

Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil;  selections from the literary and art criticism

Proust, Swann's Way; The Past Recaptured

Goethe, Faust, Part One and Act Five from Part Two.

Kafka, The Trial; The Castle; Amerika

Mann, Tonio Kröger; Death in Venice; The Magic Mountain

Wang Wei, The Poetry of Wang Wei, ed. Pauline Yu; Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei, ed.
Wai-lim Yip (Grossman Pub.); The Poems of Wang Wei,trans. G.W. Robinson (Penguin Books)
Also see: James Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry.

Cáo Xuegin (Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in), Dream of the Red Chamber (C.C. Wang trans., abr.); The Story of the Stone (David Hawkes, trans.: Vols. I, II and--if available-III); also see:  Liu Wu-chi, An Introduction to Chinese Literature,  pp. 237-246; C.T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, intro. and chap. VII; Jeanne Knoerle, S.P., The Dream of the Red Chamber.

Lu-Xùn (Lu Hsun), Complete Short Stories (Indiana UP).  Also see:  C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957, pp. 3-54;  T.A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies of the Leftist Literary Movement in China: articles on Lu Xún; Milena Dolezelova, "Lu Xún's 'Medicine': in Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era; William A. Lyell, Jr., Lu Hsun's Visions of Reality.

Gogol, The Inspector General; "The Nose"; "The Overcoat"; "Notes of a Madman"; Dead Souls.

Dostoevsky,The Double; Notes from Underground; Crime and Punishment (Norton Critical Ed.);
The Devils; The  Brothers Karamazov  (Norton Critical Ed.)

Tolstoy, The Cossacks; War and Peace; (Norton Critical Ed.); Anna Karenina (Norton Critical Ed.);
The Death of Ivan Ilych.

Shakespeare, As You Like It; Hamlet; Othello; King Lear; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra; The Tempest; Henry IV, 1 & 2.

Milton, Lycidas; Comus; the sonnets; Paradise Lost

Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"; "Michael"; "Resolution and Independence"; "Ode:  Intimations of Immortality"; The Prelude; "Elegaic Stanzas"; Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Joyce, Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

Emerson, Nature; "The American Scholar"; "The Divinity School Address"; Essays: First and Second Series

Melville, Moby-Dick; "Bartleby the Scrivener"; Billy Budd; "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and letters to Hawthorne.

Faulkner, Light in August; The Sound and The Fury; Absalom, Absalom!

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (tr. E. Seidensticker). The Diaries (tr. R. Bowring).

Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Four Major Plays (tr. D. Keene): The Love-Suicides of Sonezaki; The Battle of Coxinga; The Uprooted Pine; The Love-Suicides of Amijima.

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro (tr. E. McClellan).

BACKGROUND READINGS

Plato, Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Symposium; Republic

Aristotle, Poetics

Old Testament, Genesis; Exodus; Ecclesiastes; Psalms; Job; Song of Songs

New Testament, Matthew; John;Revelation; Epistle to the Romans

Rousseau, Confessions; Social Contract; Discourse on Inequality; Discourse on the Origins of Languages; Letter to D'Alembert

Darwin, The Origin of Species

Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; selections from Capital

Freud, The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis; The Interpretation of Dreams; Civilization and its Discontents

 

The following is a compilation of books that have been recommended
by Abroad View authors (e-mail us your recommendations):

AMITAV GHOSH (INDIA) Ghosh’s novels have won numerous awards both in and outside of India. Popular titles include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, and The Glass Palace. His most recent novel, The Hungry Tide, was released in April 2005.

ELENA PONIATOWSKA (FRANCE/MEXICO) Poniatowska was the first woman to win Mexico’s national journalism award. Popular titles include Massacre in Mexico; Here’s to You, Jesusa; Tinisima and, most recently, The Skin of the Sky.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ (COLOMBIA) One Hundred Years of Solitude is often called a masterpiece. Other novels include Love in the Time of Cholera and Of Love and Other Demons. He has published numerous short stories and has begun to publish his memoirs. In 1982 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

HARKUKI MURAKAMI (JAPAN) Murakami’s novels are often surreal and funny. Norweigan Wood was a bestseller in Japan. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle won the Yomiuri Literary Award, a Japanese literary prize. Kafka on the Shore is Murakami’s most recent release.

J. M. COETZEE (SOUTH AFRICA) Coetzee’s 1983 novel, Life & Times of Michael K, won Great Britain’s acclaimed Booker Prize, as did his 1999 novel, Disgrace. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (PORTUGAL) Saramago is a poet, essayist, and novelist. In 1998 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some of his most acclaimed novels are Baltasar and Blimunda, Blindness, and All The Names.

MILAN KUNDERA (CZECH REPUBLIC/FRANCE) Kundera mixes philosophy and political commentary with fiction. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was made into a movie in the 1980s. Other titles of note include The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Identity: A Novel; and Ignorance: A Novel.

YU HUA (CHINA) Hua’s novels have had much success in China but only two have been translated into English. A 1994 movie was based on Hua’s novel To Live. To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant are available in English.