The Comparative Literature Reading Selection List assists majors in reading historically important texts across literary genres. The list should not be seen as prescriptive, and majors are not encouraged to shape their course work around it. Rising sophomores and juniors should devote some of their time during the summer to reading the listed texts of particular interest to them.
Pre-2020 Instructions: In consultation with their advisers, second-semester seniors are expected to select forty texts from the Reading Selection List: twelve of the fiction works, twelve of the poetic works, two of the epics, seven of the dramas, and seven of the nonfiction works (essays, criticism, travelogues, memoir, and so on). These can be read either in the original or in translation. Students should avoid including works that receive extensive treatment in the senior thesis. By mid-April, the adviser should initialize this individualized list of thirty texts and send it to the Director of Undergraduate Studies for final approval.
Additional information about the purposes of the Reading Selection List is found under senior comprehensive exams. Any student who would like to propose additions to the list may email suggestions to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
FICTION (INCLUDING NOVELS AND SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS) (Select 12)
Abū Muhammad al-Qāsim, al-Hariri Maqamat trans. by Michael Cooperson as Impostures)(Classical Arabic)(
Achebe, Chinua, Arrow of God or Things Fall Apart (English)
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah (English)
Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, "Agunot," "The Lady and the Peddler," "Ido and Enam," "Forevermore," or other stories (Hebrew)
Agnon, Shmuel Yosef. Only Yesterday (or any other novel) (Hebrew)
Aidoo, Ama Ata, Our Sister Killjoy (English)
Aitmatov, Chingiz, The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years, Jamila, and The Place of the Skull (Russian)
Aleichem, Sholem, Tevye the Milkman and The Railroad Stories (Yiddish)
Al-Jahiz, Kitab al-Bukhala (Book of Misers) or Risdlat al-qiydn (Epistle on the Singing Girls) (classical Arabic)
Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espíritus, La ciudad de las bestias (or any other novel) (Spanish)
Anand, Mulk Raj, Untouchable (English)
Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Latin)
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale (English)
Austen, Jane (any novel) (English)
Bâ, Mariama, Une si longue lettre (French)
Babel, Isaac, Odessa Tales (Russian)
Baldwin, James, Go Tell It on the Mountain or any other fiction (English)
Balzac, Honoré de, Illusions perdues or Le Père Goriot or any other fiction (French)
Bankim, Chandra Chatterjee, Kapalkundala, Bishabriksha, or Anandamath (Bengali)
Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood (English)
Basho, Matsuo, Oku no Hosomichi (Japanese)
Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko (English)
Bernhard, Thomas, Korrektur or Wittgensteins Neffe (German)
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron (Italian)
Bolaño, Roberto, Los detectives salvajes (Spanish)
Böll, Heinrich, Billard um halb zehn or Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights (English)
Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita (Russian)
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress (English)
Burney, Frances, Evelina (English)
Butor, Michel, L'Emploi du temps or La Modification (French)
Calvino, Italo, any novel (including I sentieri dei nidi di ragno or Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore) (Italian)
Camus, Albert, La Peste or L'Etranger (French)
Canetti, Elias, Die Blendung (German)
Cao Xangin, Hónglóu mèng (Classical Chinese)
Carpentier, Alejo, Los pasos perdidos; El Reino de Este Mundo (Spanish)
Cather, Willa, O Pioneers! or My Antonia (or any other novel) (English)
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote (Spanish)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales (Middle English)
Chekhov, Anton, "Duel" and “Dama s sobachkoi” (Lady with A Dog) (or any other short story) (Russian)
Cho, Se-hūi, Small Ball Launched By a Dwarf (1978) (Korean)
Choe, In-hun, The Square (1960) (Korean)
Chughtai, Ismat, Short Stories or The Crooked Line (Urdu)
Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the Barbarians (English)
Cohen, Albert, Solal (French)
Condé, Maryse, Heremakhonon (French)
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (English)
Cooper, James Fenimore, The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, or The Pathfinder (English)
Dandin, Daśakumāracarita (What Ten Young Men Did) (Sanskrit)
Daneshvar, Simin, Suvashoon (Persian)
Dangarembga, Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions (English)
Danticat, Edwige, Breath, Eyes, Memory (English)
Dazai, Osamu, The Setting Sun (English)
de Staël, Germaine, Corinne (French)
Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana, or Moll Flanders (English)
Desai, Anita, Baumgartner’s Bombay (English)
Desani, G. V., All about H. Hatterr (English)
Devi, Mahasweta, “Pterodactyl,” “Puran Sahay,” and “Pirtha” (Bengali)
di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, Il Gattopardo (Italian)
Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (or any other novel) (English)
Diderot, Denis, La Religieuse or Le Neveu de Rameau (or any other novel) (French)
Djebar, Assia, L'Amour, la fantasia (French)
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Besy, Brat'ya Karamazovy, or Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Russian)
Duras, Marguerite, L'Amant or Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (French)
Eco, Umberto, Il nome della rosa (Italian)
Eliot, George, Middlemarch (or any other novel) (English)
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (English)
Emecheta, Buchi, The Joys of Motherhood or The Rape of Shavi (English)
Farah, Nuruddin, Gifts or Maps (English)
Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom; Faulkner The Sound and the Fury; Light in August (English)
Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones (English)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (or any other novel) (English)
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary (or any other novel) (French)
Forster, E. M., A Passage to India (English)
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (English)
Frisch, Max, Stiller (German)
Fuentes, Carlos, La región más transparente (Spanish)
Galeano, Eduardo, Memoria del fuego or Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Spanish)
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, Cien años de soledad (Spanish)
Ghosh, Amitav, Shadow Lines (English)
Gide, André, Les Faux-monnayeurs (French)
Ginzberg, Natalia, Caro Michele or Le piccole virtù (Italian)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (German)
Gogol, Nikolai, Collected Tales (Russian)
Gordimer, Nadine, July’s People (English, South Africa)
Grass, Günter, Die Blechtrommel or Katz und Maus (German)
Grossman, David, See Under: Love or The Book of Intimate Grammar (Hebrew)
Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate (Russian)
Gurnah, Abudlrazak, Paradise, Desertion, or By the Sea (English)
Kang, Han, The Vegetarian (Korean)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Scarlet Letter or House of Seven Gables (English)
Haywood, Eliza, Love in Excess or Fantomina (English)
Head, Bessie, A Question of Power (English)
Hedayat, Sadegh, Boof-e Koor (Persian)
Heliodorus, Aethiopica (Greek)
Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea (or any other novel) (English)
Hoffmann, E.T.A., The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (novella) (German)
Hua, Yu Huozhe (Chinese)
Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables or Notre-Dame de Paris (French)
Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God (English)
Hwang, Sōk-yōng, Guest (2002) (Korean)
Isaacs, Jorge, Maria (Spanish)
Ishiguro, Kazuo, Remains of the Day, The Buried Giant (or any other novel) (English)
James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady (or any other novel) (English)
Jelloun, Tahar Ben, L'Enfant de sable or Hospitalité française (French)
Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas (English)
Joyce, James, Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (English)
Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis (German)
Kane, Cheikh Hamidou, L'aventure ambiguë (French)
Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country (Japanese)
Kazantzakis, Nikos, Odyssey, a modern sequel (Modern Greek)
Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior (English)
Kyokutei Bakin, Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (Tale of the Eight Dogs) (Japanese)
La Fayette, Madame de, La Princesse de Clèves (French)
La Guma, Alex, In the Fog of the Season’s End (English)
Lamming, George, The Emigrants (English)
Laye, Camara, L’Enfant Noir (French)
Lee, Min Jin, Pachinko (English)
Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote (English)
Lermontov, Mikhail, A Hero of Our Time (Russian)
Lessing, Doris, The Golden Notebook (English)
Levi, Primo, Se questo è un uomo (Italian)
Lispector, Clarice, A hora da estrela (or any other novel) (Portuguese)
Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, Dom Casmurro (Portuguese)
Mahfouz, Naguib, Cairo Trilogy (any of the three) or Midaq Alley (Arabic)
Malraux, André, La Condition humaine (French)
Mann, Thomas, Der Zauberberg, Doktor Faustus, Tod in Venedig (German)
Manto, Sadaat Hasan, Short Stories (Urdu)
Manzoni, Alessandro, I promessi sposi (Italian)
Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (English)
Mishima, Yukio, Confessions of a Mask (English)
Mofolo, Thomas, Chaka (Sesotho)
Morante, Elsa, La storia or L'isola di Arturo (Italian )
Morrison, Toni, Beloved (English)
Moyan, any fiction or poetry (Chinese)
Murakami, Haruki, Noruwei no mori (or any other novel) (Japanese)
Murasaki, Tale of Genji (Japanese) Murata, Sayaka, Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Woman) (Japanese)
Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body (English)
Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire or Lolita (English)
Naipaul, V. S., A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, or Mimic Men (English)
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer (English)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood or Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (English and Gikuyu)
Ōe, Kenzaburō, Warera no kyōki wo ikinobiru michi wo oshieyo (or any other novel) (Japanese)
Okri, Ben, The Famished Road (English)
Ondaatje, Michael, Coming Through Slaughter (or any other novel) (English)
Oyono, Ferdinand, Une vie de boy (French)
Oz, Amos, My Michael (or any other novel) (Hebrew)
Pak, Wan-sō, Mother’s Stake 1 and 2 (1980, 1981) (Korean)
Pavese, Cesare, Paesi tuoi (Italian)
Perec, Georges, any novel (including La Vie mode d'emploi) (French)
Petronius, Satyricon (Latin)
Pezeshkzad, Iraj, My Uncle Napoleon (Persian)
Proust, Marcel, Du côté de chez Swann (or any other novel) (French)
Puig, Manuel, La traición de Rita Hayworth or El beso de la mujer araña (Spanish)
Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin (Russian)
Pynchon, Thomas, Mason & Dixon or Gravity’s Rainbow (English)
Rabelais, François, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (any of five novels) (French)
Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front (German)
Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea (English)
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela or Clarissa (English)
Roidis, Emmanuel, I Papissa Ioanna (Modern Greek)
Rojas, Fernando de La Celestina (Spanish)
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children or Satanic Verses or Shame (English)
Ruswa, Mirza Hadi, Umrao Jaan Ada (Urdu)
Sabato, Ernesto El túnel (Spanish)
Salih, Al-Tayyib, Season of Migration to the North (Arabic)
Sand, George, Indiana (French)
Saro-Wiwa, Ken, Sozaboy (English)
Sartre, Jean Paul, La Nausée (French)
Sebald, W. G., Die Ausgewanderten or Austerlitz (German)
Sembene, Ousmane, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (French)
Shabtai, Yaakov, Past Continuous (Hebrew)
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (English)
Shohei Ooka, Fires on the Plain (English)
Sholokhov, Mikhail, Tikhii Don (Russian)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Slave (Yiddish)
Soltanzadeh, Assef, Dar Guraiz Gum Mishavim (Persian)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian)
Steinbeck, John, Grapes of Wrath (English)
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir or La Chartreuse de Parme (French)
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (English)
Stoker, Bram, Dracula (English)
Svevo, Italo, La coscienza di Zeno or Senilità (Italian)
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels (English)
Tagore, Rabindranath, Gora (or any other novel) (Bengali)
Tanizaki, Jun'ichiro, Makioka Sisters (Japanese)
Tawada, Yōko, Inu mukoiri (The Bridegroom was a Dog) (Japanese)
Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair (or any other novel) (English)
Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina or Voyná i mir (Russian)
Toomer, Jane, Cane (English)
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, Otcy i Deti (Russian)
Tutuola, Amos, The Palm Wine Drinkard (English)
Twain, Mark, Huck Finn (or any other novel)
Vargas Llosa, Mario, La fiesta del chivo, La casa verde or La guerra del fin del mundo (or any other novel) (Spanish)
Verga, Giovanni, I Malavoglia (Italian)
Voltaire, Candide (French)
Wharton, Edith, Age of Innocence (English)
Wolf, Christa, Nachdenken über Christa T. (German)
Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts or Mrs Dalloway (or any other novel) (English)
Yehoshua, Abraham B., Mar Mani or The Lover or A Journey to the End of the Millenium (Hebrew)
Yi, Kwang-su, Heartlessness (1917) (Korean)
Yōm, Sang-sōp, Three Generations (1931) (Korean)
Yourcenar, Marguerite, Mémoires d'Hadrien (French)
Zola, Emile, Germinal (or any other novel) (French)
POETRY (Select 12)
Abani, Chris (English)
Abū Nuwās (classical Arabic)
Ahmed Faiz, Faiz Ghazaliyat (Ghazals by Faiz) (Urdu)
Ahmed Faiz, Faiz Nazmain (Modern Urdu Poems by Faiz) (Urdu)
Akhmatova, Anna (especially Requiem) (Russian)
al-Mutanabbi (classical Arabic)
Amichai, Yehuda (Hebrew)
An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry (Urdu)
Arnaut Daniel (Occitan)
Auden, W. H. (English)
Baudelaire, Charles (especially Les Fleurs du mal) (French)
Behbahani, Simin (Persian)
Bennet, Louise (Creole)
Bernart de Ventadorn (Occitan)
Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, “The Pool,” “City of Slaughter” or “Desert Dead” (Hebrew)
Bishop, Elizabeth (English)
Brodsky, Joseph (Russian)
Brutus, Dennis (English)
Catullus (Latin)
Carson, Anne (English)
Cavafy, Constantine (modern Greek)
Césaire, Aimé (especially Cahier d'un retour au pays natal) (French)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (English)
Crane, Hart (English)
D'Annunzio, Gabriele (especially Il Trionfo della Morte) (Italian)
Dario, Rubén (especially Azul) (Spanish)
Darwesh, Mahmood (Modern Standard Arabic)
Dickinson, Emily (English)
Dryden, John (English)
Du Fu (Chinese)
Eliot, T. S. (English)
Elytis, Odysseas (Modern Greek)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (English)
Foscolo, Niccolò (especially I sepolcri and/or Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis) (Italian)
Frost, Robert (English)
Ghalib Ghazaliyat (Urdu and Persian)
Ha-Levi, Judah and Shmuel ha-Nagid (Hebrew)
Han, Yong-un, The Silence of Love (1926) (Korean)
Herbert, George (English)
The Hindi Classical Tradition (Snell’s edition) (Hindi)
Hölderlin, Friedrich (German)
Ibn Gabirol, Shlomo (Hebrew)
Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (ed. Earl Miner) (Japanese)
Itō, Hiromi, Imi no gyakutai (The Maltreatment of Meaning) (Japanese)
Jayadeva, Gita Govinda (Sanskrit)
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Spanish)
Kabir (especially The Weaver's Songs) (Hindi)
Kalidasa (especially Meghaduta or Sakuntala) (Sanskrit)
Kaminsky, Ilya, Deaf Republic (English)
Keats, John (English)
Kim, Su-yōng (Korean)
Kokinshu poems (Japanese)
Kunene, Mazisi (especially Emperor Shaka the Great) (Zulu)
Laforgue, Jules (French)
Leopardi, Giacomo (especially I canti) (Italian)
LiPo and TuFu (from Arthur Cooper’s Penguin edition) (Chinese)
Lorca, Federico Garcia (Spanish)
Lucretius (Latin)
Mallarmé, Stéphane (French)
Muhammad, Allama Iqbal Bang e Dara (Urdu)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Latin)
Michelangelo (especially Sonnets) (Italian)
Milton, John (English)
Montale, Eugenio (especially Ossi di seppia) (Italian)
Moore, Marianne (English)
Mu'allaqat (Hanging Poems) (classical Arabic)
Neruda, Pablo (Spanish)
Paz, Octavio (Spanish)
Petrarca, Francesco (especially Il canzoniere) (Italian)
Poe, Edgar Allen (English)
Pope, Alexander (English)
Pound, Ezra (English)
Propertius (Latin)
Pushkin, Alexander (especially The Bronze Horseman, Eugene Onegin, Mozart and Salieri) (Russian)
Qabbani, Nizar (Arabic)
Rilke, Rainer Maria (German)
Rimbaud, Arthur (French)
Ruiz, Juan (especially Libro del Buen Amor) (Spanish)
Sa'di, Muslih ud Din Bostan, especially Golestan (Persian)
Sappho (Greek)
Seferis, Giorgios (Greek)
Senghor, Léopold Sédar (French)
Sepehri, Sohrab, Hasht Behesht (Persian)
Shakespeare, William (English)
Shelley, Percy Bisshe (English)
Spenser, Edmund (especially The Fairie Queen) (English)
Spicer, Jack After Lorca (English, and translations from Spanish)
Stein, Gertrude (English)
Stevens, Wallace (English)
Tagore, Rabindranath (Bengali)
Tchernikhovsky, Saul (Hebrew)
Trakl, Georg (German)
Treasury (Vidyakara’s edition) (Sanskrit)
Vallejo, César (espeically Los Heraldos Negros) (Spanish)
Vuong, Ocean. (English)
Walcott, Derek (English)
Whitman, Walt (English)
Williams, William Carlos (English)
Wordsworth, William (English)
Yeats, William Butler (English)
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny (Russian)
EPIC, SACRED TEXTS, FOLKTALES (Select 2)
African Folktales (ed. Roger Abrahams) (various)
New Testament (especially Matthew, Acts, and Epistle to the Romans) (Greek)
The Thousand and One Nights (Arabic)
Ariosto, Ludovico, L'Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando) (Italian)
Beowulf (Old English)
Qur’an (Arabic)
Camões, Luís Vaz de, Os Lusíadas ( The Lusiads) (Portuguese)
Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval or Lancelot or Cligès (French)
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (Italian)
Ferdowsi, Abolqasem, Shahnameh (Persian)
Gälawdewos, The Life of Walatta-Petros (Gəˁəz)
Gilgamesh (Sumerian)
Kalila wa-Dimna (Arabic, Persian, and Hindi)
Hebrew Bible (especially Genesis and Exodus) (Hebrew)
Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike) (Japanese)
Hesiod, Erga kaí Hēmérai (Works and Days) or Theogony (Greek)
Homer, Iliad, Odyssey (Greek)
Kim, Man-jung, Nine Cloud Dream (Late 17th century) (Korean)
Milton, John, Paradise Lost (English)
Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings) (Ethiopic)
La Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) (French)
Mahabharata (Sanskrit)
Datta, Michael Madhusuda, Meghnad-badh kabya (The Slaying of Meghanada) (Bengali)
Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) (Maya)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Son-Jara or Sundiata (Maninka or Bamana)
Strassburg, Gottfried von, Tristan und Isolde (Middle High German)
Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (Italian)
Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley or The Tain) (Old Irish)
Utendi wa Tambuka (The Story of Tambuka) (Swahili)
Valmiki, Ramayana (Sanskrit)
Vergil, Aeneid (Latin)
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival (German)
DRAMA (Select 7)
Aeschylus, Oresteia (or any other drama) (Greek)
Al-Hakim, Tawfiq, Fate of a Cockroach and Other Plays (Arabic)
Aristophanes, Lysistrata (or any other drama) (Greek)
Babel, Isaac, Sunset (Russian)
Barca, Pedro Calderón de la, La vida es sueño (Spanish)
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot or Endgame (English)
Brecht, Bertolt, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage) (or any other drama) (German)
Büchner, Georg, Woyzeck (German)
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, La Vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) (Spanish)
Chekhov, Anton, Vishniovy sad (The Cherry Orchard) (or any other drama) (Russian)
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Shinjūten no Amijima (Love Suicides of Amijima) (Japanese)
Churchill, Caryl, Cloud Nine (English)
De Filippo, Eduardo, Filumena Marturano (Italian)
Dryden, John, All for Love (English)
Dutt, Utpal, Three Plays (Bengali)
Euripides, Bacchae (or any other drama) (Greek)
Everyman (Old English)
Fo, Dario, Mistero buffo (Comic Mysteries) or Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist) (Italian)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust (German)
Hwang, David Henry, M. Butterfly (English)
Ibsen, Henrick, Hedda Gabler (Norwegian)
Ionesco, Eugène, Le roi se meurt (Exit the King) (French)
Fornés, María Irene, Fefu and Her Friends (English)
Kushner, Tony, Angels in America (English)
Lillo, George, London Merchant (English)
Molière, Misanthrope (French)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) (Gikuyu)
Pirandello, Luigi, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) or Enrico IV (Italian)
Racine, Jean, Phèdre (French)
Schiller, Friedrich von, Maria Stuart or Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) (German)
Shakespeare (any drama) (English)
Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion (or any other drama) (English)
Sheridan, R. B., School for Scandal (English)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (or any other drama) (Greek)
Soyinka, Wole, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite or Death and the King’s Horseman (English)
Stoppard, Tom, Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Taj, Imtiaz, Ali Anarkali (Urdu)
Tang Hsien-tsu, Mudan ting (Peony Pavilion) (Chinese)
Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest (English)
Wilson, August, The Piano Lesson (or any other drama) (English)
Xun, Lu, Guoke (Chinese)
Zeami, Hagoromo (The Feather Mantle ) or any Noh play (Japanese)
NONFICTION (ESSAYS, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, TRAVELOGUES, AND SO ON) (Select 7)
Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory (or any essay) (German)
Ale Ahmad, Jalal, Gharb-zadegi (Persian)
Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera (English and Spanish)
Aristotle, Poetics (Greek)
Auerbach, Eric, Mimesis or “Figura” (German)
Augustine, Confessiones (Confessions) (Latin)
Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son (English)
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, or S/Z, or The Pleasure of the Text, or Writing Degree Zero (French)
Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator," "The Storyteller," or Theses on the Philosophy of History; On Some Motifs in Baudelaire; The Arcades Project (German)
Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus, "Surface Reading: An Introduction" (English)
Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones (Spanish)
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble or Excitable Speech
de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex (French)
de Man, Paul, any essay (French and English)
de Pizan, Christine Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) (French)
Derrida, Jacques, Voice and Phenomenon; Writing and Difference; Dissemination (French)
Diderot, Denis, Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville or Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets (or any other text) (French)
Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente, Kant e l'ornitorinco or other work (Italian)
Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative (English)
Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge, or The History of Sexuality, or Discipline and Punish, or Power/Knowledge (French)
Fanon, Frantz, Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) (French)
Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography (English)
Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism, or Totem and Taboo, or The Interpretation of Dreams, or "The Uncanny"
Gandhi, Mahatma, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) (Gujarati)
Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas) (Spanish)
Gorky, Maxim, Autobiographical Trilogy (Russian)
Harman, Graham, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (English)
Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit (German)
Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time (German)
Hoffman, Eva, Lost in Translation
Horace, Ars Poetica (Latin)
Khosrow, Naser, Safarnameh (Persian)
Lady Hyegyōng, Memoirs (Records Written in Silence) (1795-1805) (Korean)
Lessing, Doris, Under My Skin, Walking in the Shade or other (English)
Longinus, On Sublimity (Greek)
Lorde, Audre, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (English)
Lukacs, Gyorgy, Theory of the Novel (German)
Machiavelli, Niccolò, La Mandragola or Il Principe (Italian)
Mailer, Norman, The Naked and the Dead or The Armies of the Night (English)
Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom (English)
Marcuse, Herbert, The Aesthetic Dimension (German)
Marx, Karl, 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital (German)
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, Turkish Embassy Letters (English)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy (German)
Oz, Amos, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Hebrew)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile or Confessions (French)
Rowlandson, Mary, Captivity (English)
Said, Edward. "Secular Criticsm," "Representations of the Intellectual," "Reflections on Exile," Orientalism
Sarraute, Nathalie, Tropismes or Enfance (French)
Plato, Symposium, Phaedrus, or Republic (Greek)
Sei Shōnagon, Pillow Book (Japanese)
Sima Qian, Records of the Historian (Chinese)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Arkhipelag GULAG (1973) (Russian)
Twain, Mark, The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad
Weil, Simone, L'Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain (French)
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (English)
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (English)
Wordsworth, “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (English)
Xun, Lu, Nahan (Chinese)
Zhuangzi, Chuang-tzǔ (Inner Chapters) (Chinese)
FILM AND OTHER VISUAL MEDIA (Optional; select 5)
Akerman, Chantal, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (French)
Almodóvar, Pedro, Todo sobre mi madre (or any other film) (Spanish)
Antonioni, Michelangelo, L'avventura or L'eclisse (Italian)
Axel, Gabriel, Babettes gaetebud (Danish)
Bergman, Ingmar, Persona (or any other film) (English)
Bertolucci, Bernardo, Ultimo tango a Parigi, Il conformista, or L'ultimo imperatore (or any other film) (Italian)
Brakhage, Stan, Anticipation of the Night (English)
Bresson, Robert, Pickpocket, Le journal d'un curé de compagne, or Au hasard Balthazar (or any other film) (French)
Luis Buñuel, Viridiana, Los Olvidados, or Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Spanish)
Buñuel, Luis and Salvador Dalí, Un chien andalou or L’age d'or (French)
Campion, Jane, The Piano (English)
Cavani, Liliana, Il Portiere di notte (Italian)
Chaplin, Charlie, Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Kid, or City Lights (English)
Cisse, Souleymane, Yeelen (Bambara)
Cocteau, Jean, La belle et la bete (Beauty and the Beast) (French)
Coppola, Francis Ford, Apocalypse Now (English)
Dash, Julie, Daughters of the Dust (English)
De Sica, Vittorio, Ladri di biciclette (Italian)
Deren, Maya, Meshes of the Afternoon or At Land (English)
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, La passion de Jeanne d'arc, Vredens Dag, Ordet, or Vampyr (French, Danish)
Dulac, Germaine, La coquille et le clergyman or La souriante Madame Beudet (French)
Eisenstein, Sergei, October, Battleship Potemkin, or Ivan Grozniy (Russian)
Epstein, Jean, La chute de la maison d’Usher (French)
Farhadi, Asghar, A Separation (Persian)
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Angst essen Seele auf (or any other film) (German)
Fellini, Federico, La Dolce Vita or Amarcord (or any other film) (Italian)
Frampton, Hollis, Hapax legomena (or any of the seven in this series) (English)
Godard, Jean Luc, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle or Pierrot le fou (French)
Griffith, D. W., Intolerance (English)
Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, Memorias des subdesarrollo (Spanish)
Hawks, Howard, Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday (English)
Herzog, Werner, Nosferatu or Aguirre (or any other film) (German)
Hitchcock, Alfred, Vertigo (or any other film) (English)
Holland, Agnieszka, Europa Europa (German)
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Xi meng ren sheng (Chinese)
Itami, Juzo, Tampopo (Japanese)
Jackson, Peter, The Lord of the Rings (English)
Jennings, Humphrey, Listen to Britain (English)
Joon-ho, Bong, 기생충 (Parasite) (Korean)
Kaige, Chen, Huáng tǔdì (Chinese)
Kassovitz, Mathieu La haine (French)
Keaton, Buster, The General or Sherlock, Jr. (English)
Kiarostami, Abbas, Where is the Friend's House ( Persian)
Kim, Ki-yōng, The Housemaid (1960) (Korean)
Kinugasa, Teinosuke, Kurutta Ippeiji (Japanese)
Kirsanoff, Dimitri, Ménilmontant (French / Russian)
Kore-eda, Hirokazu, Manbiki kazoku (Shoplifters) (Japanese)
Kurosawa, Akira, Rashomon or Ran (Japanese)
L'Herbier, Marcel, L'Argent (French)
Lang, Fritz, Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder or Metropolis (German)
Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah (English, German, Hebrew)
Lee, Ang, Xi yan (Chinese)
Lee, Spike, Do the Right Thing (or any other film) (English)
Lucas, George, Star Wars (original trilogy) (English)
Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, Selected Short Films
Man Ray, L’Etoile de mer (French)
Marker, Chris, La jetée (French)
Mehrjui, Dariush, The Cow (Persian)
Méliès, Georges, Voyage dans la lune or Voyage à travers l'impossible (French)
Micheaux, Oscar, Body and Soul (or any other film) (English)
Miyazaki, Hayao, Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) (Japanese)
Mizoguchi, Kenji, Ugetsu Monogatari (Japanese)
Murnau, F. W., Der Letze Mann or Nosferatu (German)
Nolan, Christopher, The Dark Knight (English)
Ozu, Yasujiro, Tōkyō Monogatari (Japanese)
Park, Chan-wook, Oldboy (2003) (Korean)
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Uccellacci, uccellini or Teorema (Italian)
Pontecorvo, Gillo, La battaglia di Algeri (French)
Potter, Sally, Orlando (English)
Ray, Satyajit, The Apu Trilogy (Bengali)
Renoir, Jean, La règle du jeu or La grande illusion (French)
Resnais, Alain, L'année dernière à Marienbad (French)
Riefenstahl, Leni, Triumph des Willens (German)
Riggs, Marlon, Tongues Untied (English)
Rocha, Glauber, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Portuguese)
Rohmer, Eric, Ma nuit chez Maud (or any other film) (French)
Rossellini, Roberto, Roma città aperta or Paisan (Italian)
Ruttmann, Walter, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (German)
Sanjines, Jorge, Sangre de Condor (Spanish)
Scorsese, Martin, Mean Streets or Raging Bull (English)
Sembene, Ousmane, Ceddo, Faat Kiné, Moolaadé (French, Wolof, Bambara)
Snow, Michael, Wavelength (English)
Straub, Jean Marie, Nicht Versöhnt or Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (German)
Stroheim, Erich von, Greed (English)
Sturges, Preston, The Lady Eve (English)
Tarkovsky, Andrei, Nostalghia (Russian)
Tati, Jacques, Les vacances de M. Hulot (French)
Truffaut, François, Jules et Jim (or any other film) (French)
Varda, Agnès, Cléo de 5 à 7 or Sans toit ni loi (French)
Vertov, Dziga, Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Russian)
Visconti, Luchino, Il Gattopardo or Morte a Venezia (Italian)
Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane (or any other film) (English)
Wen, Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep (Chinese)
Wertmuller, Lina, Pasqualino Settebellezze (Italian)
Wiene, Robert, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (German)
Wai, Wong Kar, Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love (or any film) (Chinese)