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.
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)
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 or The Rape of Shavi (English)
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)
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 (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)
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, Hugo, 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)
Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote (English)
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)
Mofolo, Thomas, Chaka (Sesotho)
Morante, Elsa, La storia or L'isola di Arturo (Italian )
Morrison, Toni, Beloved (English)
Murakami, Haruki, Noruwei no mori (or any other novel) (Japanese)
Murasaki, Tale of Genji (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)
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)
Sholokhov, Mikhail, Tikhii Don (Russian)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Slave (Yiddish)
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)
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)
EPIC, SACRED TEXTS, FOLKTALES (Select 2)
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)
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)
NONFICTION (ESSAYS, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, TRAVELOGUES, AND SO ON) (Select 7)
FILM AND OTHER VISUAL MEDIA (Optional; select 5)