The M.A. Exam Reading List (Revised Spring 2001)

  1. Plato, The Republic (7 and 10), The Phaedrus
  2. Aristotle, Poetics
  3. Horace, Ars Poetica
  4. Longinus, On the Sublime
  5. Augustine, Confessions (Book 10), On Christian Doctrine (Book 2)
  6. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio
  7. Dante, "Epistola a Cangrande"
  8. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (first three meditations)
  9. Leibniz, Monadology
  10. Schiller, Letters
  11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (preface and intro), Critique of Judgment (selections)
  12. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (intro), Phenomenology of Spirit (preface, intro, Lordship and Bondage)
  13. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
  14. Marx, "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," The German Ideology (Part 1 on Feuerbach), Capital Vol. 1 (sections on commodities, alienated labor, and accumulation of capital)
  15. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (chapters 1-18 including preface and intro), On the Genealogy of Morals, "On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense"
  16. Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"
  17. Wilde, Preface to Dorian Gray
  18. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Avon version of text: 128-253, 311-319, 340-344, 374-388), "Fetishism," "The Uncanny," "On Narcissism," "Negations"
  19. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
  20. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (parts 1 and 2)
  21. Lévi-Strauss, "The Science of the Concrete" in The Savage Mind, "The Structural Study of Myth"
  22. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
  23. Brecht, "The Modern Theater is an Epic Theater"
  24. Benveniste, "Nature of the Linguistic Sign"
  25. Lukács, "Narrate and Describe"
  26. Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles"
  27. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"
  28. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," Introduction to Rabelais and His World
  29. Gramsci, "Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc" (189-221) and "Popular Culture" (363-379) in Gramsci Reader
  30. Adorno and Horkheimer, "Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment" from The Dialectic of Enlightenment
  31. Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," "The Mirror Stage," "The Signification of the Phallus"
  32. Fanon, Black Skins/White Masks (excerpts), "On National Consciousness" from The Wretched of the Earth
  33. Barthes, "The Death of the Author," "The Structuralist Activity"
  34. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
  35. Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," "Differance"
  36. De Man, "The Resistance to Theory"
  37. Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, "What is an Author?," "What is Enlightenment?"
  38. Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production"
  39. Jameson, The Political Unconscious (9-57)
  40. Lyotard, "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?"
  41. Deleuze, "Nomad Thought" in The New Nietzsche
  42. Anderson, Imagined Communities (chapters 1 and 3)
  43. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 3)
  44. Kristeva, "Abjection"
  45. Irigaray, "Sexual Difference" from An Ethics
  46. Butler, Gender Trouble (intro, chapter 1, conclusion)
  47. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
  48. Bhabha, "Dissemination"
  49. Ngugi, "The Language of African Literature"
  50. Said, Orientalism (intro)
 

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Last modified November 8, 2005
Maintained by Peter Gaffney
Program in Comparative Literature
School of Arts & Sciences
University of Pennsylvania