The Comparative Literature Reading Selection List (Princeton)

Source ©

FICTION

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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)

  • 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 ManifestoDas 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 MississippiA 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-tz__ǔ (Inner Chapters) (Chinese)

FILM AND OTHER VISUAL MEDIA

  • 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 cur__é 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 tǔd__ì (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, Tōky__ō 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 citt__à 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, Moolaad__é (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)