In response to student requests for suggestions on some books to read over the summer that will also augment their literary preparation, I developed the following list. It is an idiosyncratic list in that these suggestions are only mine, and do not represent the recommendations of the English/Communications Dept. or even a consensus opinion among professors of literature or media. My choices have also been made with an eye on texts with relevance to the courses I teach. The sequence is a rough ordering for importance -- that is, if you are pressed for time, the books nearer the top of the list are my top recommendations.
If you proceed further down this page, you will find other lists as well. While the first list identifies books that I think students will enjoy reading -- engrossing books for summer afternoons at the lake or the shore -- the additional lists are here for handy reference if you are curious about where to begin reading in related areas of literary study. To pursue your reading in depth, of course, you should see your advisor about taking courses in this material or signing up for an Independent Study that will allow you to develop a more systematic and scholarly knowledge of these texts.
Important books of fiction that are also fun to read:
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
100 Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Maquez
Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Violent Bear It Away
or A Good Man Is Hard To Find (short stories) by Flannery O'connor
Native Son by Richard Wright
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Ulysses by James Joyce
Man's Fate by André Malraux
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
Light In August by William Faulkner
Passage To India by E. M. Forster
The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
Petals Of Blood by Ngugi Wa Thiongo (James Ngugi)
Angle Of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Two Years Before The Mast by Richard H. Dana
Writing for Writers: important texts, not all of which are fun to read (most are),
with implications and resonance for modern literature:
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Education Of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levy
Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Bridge Of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
V by Thomas Pynchon
Franny And Zooey by J. D. Salinger
The House Of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Miami and the Siege Of Chicago by Norman Mailer
The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
A sampling of books of poetry that are vital for understanding modern literature
(see the "classic texts list" below for additional books of poems) :
The Poems of John Keats (ed. Stillinger) by John Keats
North of Boston by Robert Frost
The Waste-Land by T. S. Eliot
Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Collected Poems by William Carlos Williams
Personae by Ezra Pound
Selected Poems by Marianne Moore
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
Poems by W. H. Auden
Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
. . . more to come
Important classic texts that will round out your understanding of literature (this list is partial, and it will be augmented from time to time when opportunity knocks):
The Bible -- esp. Genesis, Exodus, Kings 2, Isaiah, Psalms, the Synoptic Gospels, Revelation
The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Poems and Plays of William Shakespeare
Poems - John Donne
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
The Prelude - William Wordsworth
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Final Harvest - Emily Dickinson
Les Fleurs du Mal - Charles Baudelaire
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Important theoretical works with longstanding impact on how we understand the human phenomenon of making art :
The Poetics: - Aristotle
Apology for Poetry: Philip Sydney
The Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting & Poetry: Gotthold Lessing
Critique of Judgment: Immanuel Kant
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man: Friedrich Schiller
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man: Friedrich Schiller
Preface to Lyrical Ballads , 2nd ed.: Williams Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge
Biographia Literaria (Ch. 12-17): Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Tradition the the Individual Talent": T. S. Eliot
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin
The Dialogic Imagination: Mikhail Bakhtin
What is Literature?: Jean-Paul Sartre
The Metamorphoses of the Circle: Georges Poulet
Language as Symbolic Action: Kenneth Burke
The Implied Reader: Wolfgang Iser
Keywords / Marxism and Literature: Raymond Williams
Image, Music, Text / Mythologies / S/Z: Roland Barthes
"The Little Man at Chehaw Station" in Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Ralph Ellison
The World, The Text, and the Critic / Beginnings: Edward Said
Writing and Difference (esp. Ch. 10): Jacques Derrida
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: Fredric Jameson
This above list is my own very idiosyncratic rendering of touchstones in critical theory. For a more comprehensive list of important texts for criticism, consult the following:
"Table of Contents" of the The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
"Table of Contents" of Critical Theory Since Plato
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