ENGLISH DEPARTMENT READING LIST English majors are responsible for choosing, reading and responding to one selection

from each of thirty-four categories presented on this Major Reading List. For more specific information see the sheet entitled: Berea College Department of English and Theatre Reading List and Portfolio: Guide for English Majors. CLASSICAL/MEDIEVAL Group OneEPIC 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Homer, The Odyssey Homer, The Iliad Vergil, The Aeneid Dante, Inferno The Song of Roland The Cid Beowulf

Group TwoCHAUCER 1. Chaucer, General Prologue and rest of the frame tale of The Canterbury Tales; The Wife of Baths Tale; The Nuns Priests Tale; Troilus and Criseyde selections Group ThreeMEDIEVAL ROMANCE 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot Sir Thomas Malory, Morte dArthur selections Marie de France, Lais Everyman York Cycle of Mystery Plays, The Passion The Second Shepherds Play The Castle of Perseverance Fernando de Rojas, The Celestina Aeschylus, The Oresteia Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Euripides, Medea Aristophanes, Lysistrata Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe selections Ancrene Riwle Julian of Norwich, selections Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Group FourMEDIEVAL DRAMA

Group FiveCLASSICAL DRAMA

Group SixRELIGIOUS WRITING

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5. The Dream of the Rood, Caedmons Hymn and selections from Bedes Eccesiastical History 6. Genesis (King James version) RENAISSANCE/17TH Century Group SevenSHAKESPEARES PLAYS (Choose two) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Othello A Midsummer Nights Dream King Lear Henry V The Merchant of Venice A Winters Tale Hamlet Richard III Antony and Cleopatra

Group Eight16th/17th CENTURY POETRY 1. ANTHOLOGY: THE SONNET Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor and Farewell, Love Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Love, That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought and The Soote Season Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnets 1 and 31 from Astrophil and Stella and Leave Me, O Love Edmund Spenser, Sonnets 54 and 64 from Amoretti; William Shakespeare, Sonnets 3, 18, 29, 73, 97, 116, 130 2. ANTHOLOGY: JOHN DONNE A Valediction Forbidding Mourning; Meditation 17; Song; Loves Alchemy; The Flea; Air and Angels; Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward; Holy Sonnets 5, 10, 14; The Good Morrow; The Undertaking; The Funeral 3. ANTHOLOGY: 17TH CENTURY POETS Robert Herrick, Upon Julias Clothes, Upon the Nipples of Julias Breasts, Delight in Disorder and To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time George Herbert, The Collar, Man, Easter Wings, Sins Round and Love (3) Richard Crashaw, On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord Henry Vaughn, The World and Silence and Stealth of Days Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress and The Garden Abraham Cowley, To Mr. Hobbes and To the Royal Society Thomas Traherne, On Leaping Over the Moon and Wonder Group NineSPENSER/MILTON/ALLEGORY 1. Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion and Mutability cantos 2. John Milton, Lycidas, LAllegro and Il Penseroso and When I consider how my light is spent 3. ANTHOLOGY: Allegory

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John Bunyan, Pilgrims Progress Edmund Spenser, Book 1 of The Faerie Queene Group TenCONTINENTAL CONTEMPORARIES 1. Miguel de Cervantes, chapters from Don Quixote, excerpted in Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces 2. Jean-Baptiste Molire, Tartuffe 3. Jean Racine, Phaedra 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, from Decameron: Introduction of frame tale; First Day, Story 2 and Ninth Day, Story 2 5. Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville 6. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Life is a Dream 7. Lazarillo de Tormes 8. Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuna 9. Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals, Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions and Of Repentance 10. Marguerite de Navarre, from The Heptameron: Story Three, Story Thirty and Story Forty 11. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz Group ElevenTUDORS and ELIZABETHANS 1. Ben Jonson, Volpone, To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and Ode to Himself 2. Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander and Dr. Faustus 3. ANTHOLOGY: Prose Writers Francis Bacon, Of Superstition and Of Studies Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici selections Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy selections 4. Sir Thomas More, Utopia selections 18TH CENTURY Group TwelveALEXANDER POPE 1. The Dunciad; An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man Group ThirteenCONTINENTAL WRITERS 1. Voltaire, Candide 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther Group FourteenJONATHAN SWIFT 1. A Modest Proposal; Gullivers Travels; PoemsA Description of the Morning, Stellas Birthday, 1721 and A Description of a City Shower Group FifteenTHE NOVEL 1. Samuel Richardson, Pamela 2. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones 3. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

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4. Anne Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho 5. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield Group Sixteen18th CENTURY WRITERS 1. 2. 3. 4. Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas selections Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer John Dryden Mac Flecknoe and The Knights Tale ANTHOLOGY: 18TH CENTURY POETS Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard William Cowper, The Castaway James Thomas, Evening and Night from Autumn George Crabbe, Book 1 from The Village Philip Freneau, The Wild Honeysuckle Phyllis Wheatley, To S. M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works and On Being Brought from Africa to America 5. James Boswell, Life of Johnson selections 6. Thomas Paine, Common Sense

19TH CENTURY Group SeventeenROMANTIC POETRY 1. ANTHOLOGY: BRITISH ROMANTIC POETS Robert Burns, To a Mouse and To a Louse William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey and The Ruined Cottage Samuel T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel Percy B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life and Ode to the West Wind John Keats, To Autumn, Ode to a Nightingale and The Eve of St. Agnes George Gordon, Lord Byron, Canto I of Don Juan and Darkness William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Sick Rose Group EighteenVICTORIAN POETRY 1. ANTHOLOGY: VICTORIAN POETS Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Maud and Ulysses Robert Browning, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, Porphyrias Lover and Fra Lippo Lippi Matthew Arnold Dover Beach and To MargueriteContinued Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market Elizabeth B. Browning, from Sonnets from the Portuguese: Sonnet 1 and Sonnet 43 and Aurora Leigh, Book I.195-240; Book II.1240-318 and Book V Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky and Humpty Dumptys explication Gerard M. Hopkins, Carrion Comfort and No Worst, There is None from the Terrible Sonnets Group NineteenAMERICAN LITERATURE (Choose one anthology) 1. ANTHOLOGY 1: Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

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Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking The Dalliance of Eagles Passage to India The Sleepers Emily Dickinson, #130: These are the days when the Birds come back #258: Theres a certain Slant of light #341: After great pain, a formal feeling comes #465: I heard a Fly buzz when I died #508: Im cededIve stopped being Theirs #712: Because I could not stop for Death #742: Four Trees upon a solitary Acre #1400: What mystery pervades a well! 2. ANTHOLOGY 2: Ralph W. Emerson, Self-Reliance Experience Nature The Poet Henry D. Thoreau, from Walden, or Life in the Woods: Where I lived, and What I Lived For The Ponds The Conclusion Herman Melville, from Timoleon After the Pleasure Party Monody 3. ANTHOLOGY 3: Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Chapters 7 and 10 Harriet Ann Jacobs, from Incidents in the Life of a Salve Girl, The Jealous Mistress The Loophole of Retreat Group TwentyBRITISH FICTION 1. George Eliot, Silas Marner 2. Charles Dickens, Hard Times 3. William M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair 4. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 5. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights 6. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre 7. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 8. Anthony Trollope, The Warden 9. George Meredith, The Egoist 10. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the DUrbervilles Group Twenty-OneCONTINENTAL LITERATURE 1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

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2. 3. 4. 5.

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground Honor de Balzac, Pre Goriot FRENCH SYMBOLISM: ANTHOLOGY Charles Baudelaire, To the Reader, Correspondence, and Spleen (IV) Stphane Mallarm, Autumn Complaint, The Old Saxony Clock Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat and The Lice-Hunters/The Lice-Finders (two translations) Jules LaForgue, Lightning of the Abyss and Winter Sunset Paul Verlaine, Claire de Lune and The Art of Poetry 6. Benito Perez Galdos, Mercy 7. Emile Zola, LAssomoir Group Twenty-TwoAMERICAN FICTION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener and Billy Budd Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage Charlotte P. Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Kate Chopin, The Awakening Harriet B. Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance Henry James, Portrait of a Lady Mary Wilkins Freeman, A New England Nun; Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron; Harriet Adams Wilson, from Our Nig, Frados Childhood 10. Willa Cather, My Antona Group Twenty-ThreeDRAMA 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Henrik Ibsen, A Dolls House Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard George Buchner, Woyzeck August Strindberg, The Father

20TH CENTURY Group Twenty-Four20TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY 1. ANTHOLOGY: 20th Century American Poets (Older, born before 1900) E. R. Robinson, Luke Havergal, How Annandale Went Out and The Mill Robert Frost, After Apple Picking and Home Burial Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and The Idea of Order at Key West Hart Crane, At Melvilles Tomb and Chaplinesque William C. Williams, Spring and All, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and The Widows Lament in Springtime Marianne Morre, The Fish and Poetry Ezra Pound, In a Station in the Metro, The River Merchants Wife: A Letter; from The Cantos: And then went down to the ship

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Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy and We Wear the Mask 2. ANTHOLOGY: 20th Century American Poets (Younger, born after 1900 and before World War II) Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish, The Man-Moth and In the Waiting Room Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour and The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers and The Weary Blues Stephen Spender, The Funeral and Pylons Theodore Roethke, My Papas Waltz and Root Cellar Delmore Schwartz, Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are Strangers and The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital John Berryman, from The Dream Songs: #14 Life, friends is boring and #76: Henrys Confession Gwendolyn Brooks, We real cool and A Song in the Front Yard William Stafford, At the Bomb Testing Site and Traveling through the Dark Ishmael Reed, beware: do not read this poem 3. T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Murder in the Cathedral Group Twenty-FiveAMERICAN FICTION 1. Two stories by William Faulkner, Dat Evenin Sun and A Rose for Emily 2. Three stories by Ernest Hemingway, In Another Country, Hills Like White Elephants and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place 3. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye 4. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 5. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain 6. Two stories by Alice Walker, To Hell with Dying and Everyday Use 7. Two stories by Edith Wharton, Roman Fever and Afterward 8. Two stories by Eudora Welty, Why I Live at the P. O. and Livvie 9. Two stories by Zora N. Hurston, Sweat and The Gilded Six-Bits 10. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio 11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 12. Two stories by Katharine Anne Porter, The Downward Path to Wisdom and The Grave 13. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 14. Flannery OConnor, Revelation and A Good Man is Hard to Find Group Twenty-SixBRITISH FICTION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Two stories by James Joyce, Araby and The Dead Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Two stories by Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Bliss

Group Twenty-SevenCONTINENTAL LITERATURE 1. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis 2. Albert Camus, The Plague 3. Thomas Mann, Disorder and Early Sorrow and Mario and the Magician

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Rainer M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Isaak Dinesen, Babettes Feast and The Blank Sheet Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Voyage to the Edge of Night Gunther Grass, Local Anaesthetic Heinrich Boll, Billiards at Half Past Nine Miguel de Unamuno, Mist

Group Twenty-Eight20TH CENURY DRAMA 1. Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author 2. George B. Shaw, Pygmalion 3. Eugene ONeil, Long Days Journey Into Night 4. Tennessee Williams, Glass Menagerie 5. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot 6. August Wilson, Fences 7. Federico Garcia Lorca, Blood Wedding 8. Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit 9. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage 10. Edward Albee, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 11. Christopher Fry, The Ladys Not for Burning 12. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun 13. Athol Fugard, The Road to Mecca 14. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman 15. Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine Group Twenty-NineINTERNATIONAL 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Two stories by Nadine Gordimer, The Catch and Happy Event Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, The Aleph and Borges and me Yukio Mishima, Patriotism and Swaddling Clothes Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude Juan Rulfo, We are very poor and Talpa ANTHOLOGY: Latin American Poets Cesar Vallejo, Black Stone on a White Stone and The Wretched of the Earth Pablo Neruda, The Widowers Tango and Entrance to the Woods Gabriela Mistral, The Liana and The Prayer Octavio Paz, Blanco 9. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaids Tale 10. Anita Desai, Games at Twilight and Pigeons at Daybreak 1. ANTHOLOGY: 20TH Century British Poets Thomas Hardy, Hap, He Never Expected Much and The Darkling Thrush W. B. Yeats, When You are Old, The Second Coming, Leda and the Swan, Sailing to Byzantium and Lake Isle of Innisfree Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night and Fern Hill W. H. Auden, Muse de Beaux Artes and Lullaby

Group Thirty20th CENTURY BRITISH POETRY

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A. E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees, To an Athlete Dying Young and Terence, this is Stupid Stuff Group Thirty-One20th CENTURY CRITICISM
(MODERN)

1. 2. 3. 4.

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own and Modern Fiction

(POSTMODERN)

5. Roland Barthes, Images, Music, Text 6. Barbara Christian, The Race for Theory; Florence Howe, Feminism and Literature; Paul Lauter, Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties 7. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction 8. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory 9. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation 10. Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory 11. David H. Richler, Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature Group Thirty-TwoCRITICISM AND LITERARY THEORY Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Posey, excerpted in Norton Anth. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads Percy B. Shelley, A Defense of Poetry Edgar A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism and The Three Voices of Poetry 8. John Milton, Areopagitica selections 9. John Keats, selections from his letters Group Thirty-ThreeCOMMUNICATION AND MEDIA 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4. Plato, Gorgias Aristotle, Rhetoric Kenneth Boulding, The Image Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death The General The Wind Singin in the Rain Citizen Kane 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Group Thirty-FourFILM

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5. The Seven Samurai 6. Persona 7. Two Daughters 8. Thelma and Louise 9. My Brilliant Career 10. Boyz N the Hood Group Thirty-FiveTHEORIES OF WRITING 1. Anthology: Three essays by any three of the following writers: James Berlin, Carol Berkenkotter, Ann Berthoff, Wayne Booth, Robert Connors, Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, Richard Larson, Sondra Perl, Mike Rose, Nancy Sommers, Harvey Wiener, & W. Ross Winterowd 2. Anthology: Ann Ruggles Gere, Teaching Writing: the Major Theories plus two other essays on teaching writing by two of the following: Peter Elbow, Janet Emig, Toby Fulwiler, Andrea Lunsford, Donald Murray, & Mina Shaughnessy 3. Anthology: Gary Tate and Edward Corbett, The Writing Teachers Sourcebook: any three essays 4. David Crystal, Language and the Internet Group Thirty-SixRHETORIC AND ARGUMENTATION 1. Sharon Crowley, Ancient Rhetoric for Modern Students 2. Stephen Toulmin, Uses of Argument Group Thirty-SevenSTYLE 1. Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist 2. Joseph Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Understanding Style, Elegance, & The Ethics of Prose. 3. Richard Lanham, Revising Prose Group Thirty-EightTHEORIES/PROCESS OF DRAMA 1. Aristotle, Poetics 2. Anthology: August Strindberg, Preface to Miss Julie Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man Bertolt Brecht, Theater for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction Group Thirty-NineTHEORIES/PROCESS OF FICTION 1. Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies 2. Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead : a Writer on Writing 3. W. Dale Brown, Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about their Vision and Work. 4. May Sarton, Writings on Writing Group FortyTHEORIES/PROCESS OF POETRY 1. Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 2. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within 3. Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

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4. Bill Moyers, Fooling with Words : A Celebration of Poets and their Craft or The Language of Life [Interviews] 5. Robert Morgan, Good Measure : Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry 6. Charles R. Duke & Sally A. Jacobsen, eds., Poets' Perspectives : Reading, Writing, and Teaching Poetry Group Forty-OneWRITERS ON WRITING 1. Arthur Miller, Timebends 2. Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center 3. Eudora Welty, One Writers Beginnings 4. Galway Kinnell, Writing the Australian Crawl 5. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life 6. Bell Hooks, Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work 7. Joyce Carol Oates, Compiler. First Person Singular: Writers on their Craft. 8. Julia Cameron, The Right to Write : an Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life Group Forty-TwoSOCIAL PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING: GENDER, RACE, AND CLASS 1. 2. 3. 5. 6. Bell Hooks, Acquiring Language Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Womans Life Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Womens Writing Tillie Olsen, Silences Rita Mae Brown, Starting from Scratch : A Different Kind of Writer's Manual

Group Forty-ThreeBIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson 2. Janet Malcolm, Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 3. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary 4. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 5. Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, or Scoundrel Time 6. Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X 7. Sylvia Plath, Bell Jar 8. Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior 9. Arnold Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes 10. Mary Brave Bird, Lakota Woman Group Forty-FourSCIENCE & NATURE WRITING 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Loren Eiseley, Night Country Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek John McPhee, The Control of Nature Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams or Rediscovery of North America Wendell Berry, Continuous Harmony, Gift of Good Land, or Home Economics Rick Bass, Platte River Rachel Carson, Edge of the Sea or Under the Sea Wind

Group Forty-FiveTRAVEL WRITING 1. John McPhee, Coming into the Country

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2. 3. 4. 5.

Beryl Markham, West with the Night Isabella Bird, A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains Peter Mathissen, Snow Leopard Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Group Forty-SixLETTERS John and Abigail Adams Emily Dickinson John Keats D. H. Lawrence John Ruskin, Letters from Venice Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader Mark Twain Group Forty-SevenJOURNALS AND DIARIES Samuel Pepys Dorothy Wordsworth Henry David Thoreau Katherine Mansfield Virginia Woolf May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude Sheila Bender, 40 Contemporary Writers and their Journals
Revised Fall 2003