English 3120: Literature Circles
The last four weeks of this course will involve students reading 19th and 20th Century literature related to course themes. This reading will take place in "literature circles" as students working in groups and in collaboration with the professor, will select reading related to course themes.
Students will need to take responsibility for finding texts in advance through libraries, bookstores, or on-line and completing them on time. Students are expected to read about 200 pages per week, probably three or four novels, depending on length.
The final project in the course will be a critical analysis paper or developed teaching unit for one or more of these novels.
NB. I have not read many of the texts on this list. They have been recommended by literary scholars as related to the themes of our course. (The list is provisional and subject to revision.)
Possible texts for literature circle reading:
Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas by Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvray (1787-1790)
Madame Bovary or Salambo by Gustave Flaubert (1856 & 1862)
The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire (1857)
The Anti-Christ by Frederick Nietzche (1886)
Fall Sonata by Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan (1902)
Josephine Mutzenbacher - The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself (1906)
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912)
The Trial by Frantz Kafka (1920)
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (1926)
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1932)
The House of Bernardo Alba by Garica Lorca (1936)
The Master and Margarita (Wikipedia, on line text) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1940)
The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela (1942)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
The Story of O by Pauline Reage (1954)
The Diary of Frida Kahlo by Frida Kahlo (1954)
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1956)
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (1959)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
Aura by Carlos Fuentes (1962)
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado (1966)
Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan (1967)
Irene's Cunt by Louis Aragon (1969)
Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo (1970)
Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille (1970)
The Motorcycle by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues (1973)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1982)
Kasandra by Christa Wolf (1983)
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1989)
Was bleibt by Christa Wolfe (1990)
The Ages of Lulu by Almudena Grandes (1994)
Aphrodite by Isabel Allende (1998)
Canon De Alcoba by Tununa Mercado (2000)
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (2003)
Embroderies by Marjane Satrapi (2006)
English and American Texts Not Included in This Course but Suggested For Future Reading Along Similar Themes
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Fanny Hill, John Cleland
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Ulysses, James Joyce
Lady Chatterlee's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
Why I am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
1984, George Orwell
Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Soft Machine, William Burroughs
The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, Nat Hentoff
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Color Purple, Alice Walker
Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden
Heather has Two Mommies by Leslea Neuman
