Core List
Students enrolled in CWL 896 (Directed Reading) must select and read thirty (30) works from the core list given below. Students must provide their committee chairperson with a list of the works selected at the beginning of the semester in which students enroll in CWL 896. The list they choose must satisfy the following distribution requirements:
- Genre: at least one but no more than eight works from each of the following genres: lyric, epic (includes romance/verse narrative), drama, prose non-fiction; at least one but no more than ten works from the genre of prose fiction
- Geography: at least one but no more than eight works from each of the following regions: Near East/Middle East, Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Non-English-Speaking Americas
- Time periods: at least one but no more than eight works from each of the following periods: beginnings to 100CE [period 1], 100-1500CE [period 2], 1500-1650 CE [period 3], 1650-1800 CE [period 4], 1800-1900 CE [period 5]. At least one but no more than ten from 1900-present [period 6].
Students may petition an advisor to allow some limited substitutions for the works and authors on the list below. Abridgements of some works may be permitted by the advisor. Works that cross boundaries of genre, time or geography may count toward either of the two categories.
View the printer-friendly version of the reading list (pdf).
In order to help ensure that your Core List meets the Distribution Requirements, please fill out the Reading List Worksheet (pdf).
Specialty Area
Please refer to The Oral Examination and CWL 896 (Directed Reading) page.
| Author Work | Period | Genre | Language/Ethnic Tradition | Date | Suggestions for particular editions, translations, etc. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anon. Gilgamesh | 1 | Epic | Akkadian | Ca. 26th-16th BCE | trans. Foster (Norton) or trans. George (Penguin) |
| Anon. Tale of Sinuhe | 1 | Epic | Egyptian | Ca. 20th BCE | |
| Anon. Genesis AND Song of Songs AND Job | 1 | Mix of prose fiction/lyric | Hebrew | Ca. 11th-6th BCE | |
| Anon. 1001 Nights | 2 | Prose fiction | Arabic | 9th-14th CE | trans. Haddawy (Norton) |
| Ferdowsi Shahnameh | 2 | Epic | Persian | 10th CE | trans. Davis (Penguin) (abridged) |
| Khayyám Rubáiyát OR Hāfez Selected Poetry | 2 | Lyric | Persian | 10th/14th CE | |
| Çelebi Book of Travels | 3 | Prose non-fiction | Turkish | 17th CE | |
| Mahfouz Palace Walk OR Salih Season of Migration to the North | 6 | Prose fiction | Egyptian/ Arabophone Sudanese | 20th CE | |
| Kemal Memed, My Hawk OR Pamuk My Name is Red OR The White Castle | 6 | Prose fiction | Turkish | 20th CE |
| Author Work | Period | Genre | Language/Ethnic Tradition | Date | Suggestions for particular editions, translations, etc. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homer Iliad OR Odyssey | 1 | Epic | Greek | 8th BCE | |
| Sappho Lyrics | 1 | Lyric | Greek | 7th-6th BCE | |
| Aeschylus Oresteia OR Sophocles Antigone OR Oedipus the King OR Euripides Medea OR Bacchae | 1 | Drama | Greek | 5th BCE | |
| Aristophanes Lysistrata OR Birds | 1 | Drama | Greek | 5th BCE | |
| Plato Symposium | 1 | Prose fiction | Greek | 4th BCE | |
| Aristotle Poetics | 1 | Prose non-fiction | Greek | 4th BCE | |
| Vergil Aeneid OR Ovid Metamorphoses | 1 | Epic | Latin | 1st BCE | |
| Augustine Confessions | 2 | Prose non-fiction | Latin | 4th CE | |
| Anon. Táin Bó Cúailnge | 2 | Epic | Old and Middle Irish | 8th-14th CE | |
| Anon. Iberian and Mozarabic Lyrics OR Troubadour Lyrics | 2 | Lyric | Spanish-Arabic/ Provencal | 11th-13th CE | |
| Marie de France Lais | 2 | Lyric | Old French | 12th CE | |
| Letters of Eloise and Abelard | 2 | Prose non-fiction | Latin | 12th CE | |
| Anon. Song of Roland OR Von Strassburg Tristan OR Von Eschenbach Parzival | 2 | Epic | Old French/Middle High German | 12th-13th CE | |
| Dante Inferno | 2 | Epic | Italian | 13th CE | trans. Mandelbaum |
| Anon. Prose Edda OR Anon. Poem of the Cid | 2 | Epic | Icelandic/Spanish | 13th CE | |
| De Pizan The Book of the City of the Ladies | 2 | Prose fiction/non-fiction | Middle French | 14th-15th CE | |
| Petrarch Selected Poetry | 2 | Lyric | Italian | 14th CE | Petrarch's Lyric Poetry trans. Durling (Harvard UP 1976) |
| Boccaccio Decameron OR De Navarre Heptameron OR Ariosto Orlando Furioso | 2-3 | Prose fiction/Prose fiction/ Epic | Italian/French/Italian | 14th/16th/16th CE | |
| Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel | 3 | Prose fiction | French | 16th CE | |
| Montaigne Essays OR Machiavelli The Prince | 3 | Prose non-fiction | French/Italian | 16th CE | |
| Cervantes Don Quixote (part I) | 3 | Prose fiction | Spanish | 16th-17th CE | |
| Lope de Vega Fuente Ovejuna OR Calderón de la Barca Life is a Dream OR Tirso de Molina Trickster of Seville | 3 | Drama | Spanish | 17th CE | |
| Racine Phèdre OR Molière Tartuffe OR Misanthrope | 4 | Drama | French | 17th CE | |
| Madame de La Fayette Princess of Clèves | 4 | Prose fiction | French | 17th CE | |
| Voltaire Candide | 4 | Prose fiction | French | 18th CE | |
| Rousseau Confessions | 4 | Prose non-fiction | French | 18th CE | |
| Goethe Sorrows of Young Werther OR Faust | 4-5 | Prose fiction/drama | German | 18th-19th CE | Faust: the complete work or an abridged ed. such as the translation by Kaufmann |
| Hölderlin Selected Poetry OR Heine Selected Poetry | 5 | Lyric poetry | German | 19th CE | Hölderlin Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Hamburger (Penguin 1988); Heine Heinrich Heine: Poetry and Prose (Continuum 1998) |
| Baudelaire Flowers of Evil OR Rimbaud Illuminations OR A Season in Hell | 5 | Lyric poetry | French | 19th CE | |
| Flaubert Madame Bovary OR Sand Lélia OR Balzac Père Goriot OR Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma | 5 | Prose fiction | French | 19th CE | |
| Dostoevsky Brothers Karamazov OR Notes from the Underground OR Tolstoy Anna Karenina OR The Death of Ivan Ilyich | 5 | Prose fiction | Russian | 19th CE | |
| Ibsen Peer Gynt OR A Doll's House OR Strindberg Miss Julie OR The Ghost Sonata | 5-6 | Drama | Norwegian/Swedish | 19th-20th CE | |
| Chekov The Cherry Orchard OR Uncle Vanya | 5-6 | Drama | Russian | 19th-20th CE | |
| Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author OR Ionesco Bald Soprano OR Beckett Waiting for Godot OR Sartre No Exit | 6 | Drama | Italian/Francophone Romanian/French & English/French | 20th CE | |
| Mann Magic Mountain OR Death in Venice OR Proust Swann's Way | 6 | Prose fiction | German/French | 20th CE | |
| Undset Kristen Lavransdatter OR Dinesen Winter's Tales | 6 | Prose fiction | Norwegian/Anglophone Danish | 20th CE | |
| Kafka Selected Short Fiction | 6 | Prose fiction | Germanophone Czech | 20th CE | The Transformation (Metamorphosis) and Other Stories, trans. Pasley (Penguin) |
| Akhmatova Selected Poetry OR Tsvetaeva Selected Poetry OR Mandelstam Selected Poetry | 6 | Lyric | Russian | 20th CE | |
| Bulgakov The Master and Margarita OR Gombrowicz Ferdydurke | 6 | Prose fiction | Russian/Polish | 20th CE | |
| Brecht Mother Courage OR Good Person of Sichuan | 6 | Drama | German | 20th CE | |
| García Lorca Blood Wedding OR House of Bernarda Alba OR Selected Poetry | 6 | Drama/Lyric | Spanish | 20th CE | |
| Camus The Plague OR Sarraute The Planetarium OR Wittig Les Guérillères OR Duras Moderato Cantabile OR Hiroshima Mon Amour OR Genet Querelle de Brest | 6 | Prose fiction | French | 20th CE | |
| Nabokov Lolita OR Pale Fire OR Calvino Invisible Cities OR Sebald Austerlitz | 6 | Prose fiction | Anglophone Russian/Italian/German |
20th CE | |
| Rilke Duino Elegies OR Letters to a Young Poet OR Celan Selected Poetry OR Cavafy Selected Poetry | 6 | Lyric | Austrian/Francophone Romanian/Greek | 20th CE | Duino Elegies, trans. Snow, Letters to a Young Poet (Dover); Poems of Paul Celan trans. Hamburger; Cavafy Selected Poems, trans. Keeley and Sherrard |
| Wolf The Quest for Christa T. OR Cassandra OR Jelinek The Piano Teacher OR Children of the Dead OR Bachman Selected Short Fiction | 6 | Prose fiction | German/Austrian/Austrian | 20th CE |
| Author Work | Period | Genre | Language/Ethnic Tradition | Date | Suggestions for particular editions, translations, etc. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anon. Book of Songs | 1 | Lyric | Chinese | 10th-7th BCE | |
| Chuang Tzu Zhuangzi | 1 | Prose non-fiction | Chinese | 4th-3rd BCE | |
| Sima Qian Records of the Grand Historian | 1 | Prose non-fiction | Chinese | 2nd-1st BCE | |
| Tang Poetry: Li Po AND Du Fu AND Wang Wei | 2 | Lyric | Chinese | 8th CE | |
| Anon. The Kokinshū Lyrics | 2 | Lyric | Japanese | 10th CE |
|
| Murasaki Shikibu Tale of Genji OR Anon. Tale of the Heike | 2 | Prose fiction | Japanese | 10th-11th CE/14th CE | trans. Royal Tyler, complete edition (Penguin 2003), abriged edition (Penguin 2006) |
| Noh Drama: Kanami Sotoba Komachi AND Zeami Aoi no Ue AND Atsumori AND Tadanori | 2 | Drama | Japanese | 14th-15th CE | |
| Wu Cheng'en Journey to the West (aka Monkey) | 3 | Prose fiction | Chinese | 16th CE | Abridgement by Yu entitled The Monkey and the Monk (2006) |
| Bashō Narrow Road to the Deep North OR Saikaku The Life of an Amorous Woman | 4 | Prose fiction/Lyric/Prose fiction | Japanese | 17th CE | |
| Akinari Tales of Moonlight and Rain | 4 | Prose fiction | Japanese | 18th CE | |
| Cao Xuequin The Dream of the Red Chamber (aka Story of the Stone) | 4 | Prose fiction | Chinese | 18th CE | |
| Ōgai The Dancing Girl OR Futabatei Floating Cloud OR Ichiyō Child's Play | 5 | Prose fiction | Japanese | 19th CE | |
| Akutagawa Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories OR Sōseki Kokoro OR Kawabata Snow Country OR Mishima Confessions of a Mask OR Enchi Masks | 6 | Prose fiction | Japanese | 20th | |
| Ding Ling Miss Sophie's Diary and Other Stories OR Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) Selected Short Fiction | 6 | Prose fiction | Chinese | 20th | Zhang/Chang Love in a Fallen City (short fiction) |
| Author Work | Period | Genre | Language/Ethnic Tradition | Date | Suggestions for particular editions, translations, etc. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rāmāyaṇa OR Bhagavad-Gītā | 1 | Epic | Sanskrit | 8th-6th BCE | Ramayana, abridged ed. by Narayan |
| Anon. Tamil Anthologies | 2 | Lyric | Tamil | 2nd-3rd CE | |
| Pañcatantra | 2 | Prose fiction | Sanskrit | 2nd CE | trans. Rajan (Penguin) |
| Kālidāsa Śakuntalā | 2 | Drama | Sanskrit | 4th CE | |
| Ghalib Selected Poetry | 5 | Lyric | Urduphone Persian | 19th CE | The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib trans. Bly and Dutta (Borchardt 1999) |
| Premchand The Gift of a Cow | 6 | Prose fiction | Hindiphone Indian | 20th CE | |
| Tagore Selected Poems OR Nazrul Selected Poems | 5-6 | Lyric | Bengaliphone Indian | 19th-20th CE | A Tagore Reader, ed. Chakravarty |
| (also in Africa) Gordimer Burger's Daughter OR Desai Clear Light of Day OR (also in Africa) Lessing The Golden Notebook | 6 | Prose fiction | (Colonial Women) Anglophone South African/Indian/Zimbabwean | 20th CE | |
| Narayan The English Teacher OR Rushdie Midnight's Children | 6 | Prose fiction | Anglophone Indian | 20th CE |
| Author Work | Period | Genre | Language/Ethnic Tradition | Date | Suggestions for particular editions, translations, etc. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anon. Epic of Son Jara | 2+ | Epic | Mali | 13th-20th CE | |
| Gordimer Burger's Daughter OR (also in South Asia) Desai Clear Light of Day OR Lessing The Golden Notebook | 6 | Prose fiction | (Colonial Women) Anglophone South African/Indian/Zimbabwean | 20th CE | |
| Achebe, Things Fall Apart OR Aidoo No Sweetness Here | 6 | Prose fiction | (West Africa) Anglophone Nigerian/ Ghanaian | 20th CE | |
| Farah Maps OR Ngũgĩ Wizard of the Crow | 6 | Prose fiction | (East African) Anglophone Somali/Kikuyu (Kenya) | 20th CE | |
| Soyinka Kongi's Harvest OR The Road OR Bacchae of Euripides | 6 | Drama | Anglophone Nigerian | 20th CE | |
| Mofolo Chaka | 6 | Prose fiction | (Southern African) Sotho | 20th CE | |
| (also in Non-English-Speaking Americas) Chamoiseau Texaco, OR Bâ So Long a Letter OR (also in Non-English-Speaking Americas) Césaire Selected Poems | 6 | Prose fiction/Prose fiction/Lyric | (Poetry: Carrib.+Africa) Francophone Martiniquais/Senegalese/Martiniquais | 20th CE | Césaire Return to My Native Land |
| Author Work | Period | Genre | Language/Ethnic Tradition | Date | Suggestions for particular editions, translations, etc. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anon. Popol Vuh | 3 | Epic | Quiche Mayan | 16th CE | |
| Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Selection | 4 | Lyric/prose non-fiction | Mexican | 17th CE | |
| Machado de Assis Dom Casmurro | 5-6 | Prose fiction | Brazilian | 19th-20th CE | |
| Rubén Darío Azul | 5-6 | Lyric/Prose fiction | Nicaraguan | 19th-20th CE | |
| Borges Labyrinths | 6 | Prose fiction/non-fiction | Argentinian | 20th CE | |
| Paz Selcted Poems OR Neruda Selected Poems OR Mistral Selected Poems | 6 | Lyric | Mexican/Chilean/Chilean | 20th CE | Mistral Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral trans. U. LeGuin |
| García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude OR Lispector The Hour of the Star | 6 | Prose fiction | Colombian/Brazilian | 20th CE | |
| Fuentes Death of Artemio Cruz OR Cortázar Hopscotch OR Vargas Llosa Conversation in the Cathedral OR Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter | 6 | Prose fiction | Mexican/Argentinian/Peruvian | 20th CE | |
| Walcott Omeros | 6 | Epic | Anglophone West Indian | 20th CE | |
| Chamoiseau Texaco OR (also in Africa) Bâ So Long a Letter OR Césaire Selected Poems | 6 | Prose fiction/Prose fiction/Lyric | Francophone Martiniquais/ Senegalese/Martiniquais | 20th CE | Césaire Return to My Native Land |