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The Department of Comparative Literature also publishes a suggested reading list.
I’ve compiled the films in that list to a Letterboxd list where you can track your progress

Sophomore level

Who Are You Really? Authenticity in Life, Literature & the Internet COM 200 (fa26)

  • The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

How to Read COM 231 (fa26)

  • A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
  • Phaedrus by Plato
  • Confessions by Augustine
  • Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
  • Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History & Future of Reading by Leah Price

East Asian Humanities I: The Classical Foundations COM 233 (fa26)

  • ✔️ Analects by Confucius (my highlights)
  • Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea & Japan by Addiss et al.
  • The Complete Writings by Zhuāngzï
  • The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  • A History of East Asia: From the Origins of Civilization to the 21st Century by Charles Holcombe

Revisiting Paris COM 258 (fa26)

  • Kiffe Kiffe demain by Faïza Guène
  • Cannibale by Didier Daeninckx
  • Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano

Junior level

Intro. to Comp. Lit. COM 300 (fa26)

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh by Andrew George

The Modern Period COM 318 (fa26)

  • ✔️ A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (my highlights)
  • The Fourth World by Diamela Eltit
  • The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
  • The Burrow by Franz Kafka
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig

Chinese Poetry COM 331 (fa26)

  • An Intro. to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty by Michael A. Fuller

Art, Memory & Human Rights in Latin America COM 336 (fa26)

  • Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza
  • Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh
  • Massacre in Mexico by Elena Poniatowska
  • Knitting the Fog by Claudia D. Hernández

Postwar Japanese Narrative: Modern to Postmodern COM 344 (fa26)

  • Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka
  • Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  • The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

Anarchism, Nihilism, Utopia: Art, Literature & Radical Politics COM 351 (fa26)

  • Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
  • ✔️ Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (my highlights)
  • The Princess Casamassima by Henry James
  • A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
  • The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Milton COM 371 (fa26)

  • To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust
  • The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton by Kerrigan et al.

The Bible as Literature COM 392 (fa26)

  • The Literary Guide to the Bible by Alter & Kermode
  • The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version

Senior level

Translation, Migration, Culture COM 409 (fa26)

  • Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity by Patrick Chamoiseau
  • Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
  • In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Translations by Brian Friel

Lyric Language & Form I: Renaissance to Romantic COM 421 (fa26)

  • The Complete Poetry by George Herbert
  • The Major Works: Including Songs & Sonnets & Sermons by John Donne
  • Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms by Babette Deutsch
  • The Major Works: including The Prelude by William Wordsworth
  • Keats’s Poetry and Prose
    • The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
  • Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain: With English Prose Translations by Elias L. Rivers
  • Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Stephen Booth
  • Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin

Postsocialism & World Literature COM 441 (fa26)

  • The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov
  • Europe in Sepia by Dubravka Ugresic
  • Sweetlust by Asja Bakić
  • Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic
  • The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic
  • Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
  • Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić
  • The Chukchi Bible by Yuri Rytkheu

19th-Century European Art: Painting & Literature in 19th C. France and England COM 450 (fa26)

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  • The Masterpiece by Émile Zola
  • The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac
  • Like Death by Guy de Maupassant
  • Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Justice COM 451 (fa26)

  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
  • Science of Logic by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  • Great Short Works of Herman Melville
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
  • A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
  • Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice by Cornell et al.
  • The Marquise of O and Other Stories by Heinrich Von Kleist
  • Republic by Plato
  • Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
  • Political Writings by Immanuel Kant
  • On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters by J. C. F. von Schiller

Forms of Literature: Postcolonialism COM 470 (fa26)

  • Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  • A Passage to India by E.M. Foster
  • A Tempest by Aime Cesaire
  • Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
  • Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
  • No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff

Graduate level

Comp. Lit. Graduate Pedagogy COM 500 (fa26)

  • First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching by Curzan & Damour
  • Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele
  • Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks

Intro. to Comp. Lit. COM 521 (fa26)

  • Berlin Childhood around 1900 by Walter Benjamin
  • Republic by Plato
  • Poetics by Aristotle
  • Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by Deleuze & Guattari

Contemporary Critical Theories: Marx’s Capital COM 535 (fa26)

  • Capital, v.1 by Karl Marx

Modernism: Surprised by Passion COM 567 (fa26)

  • Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann
  • A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
  • The Ambassadors by Henry James
  • The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
  • Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
  • The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
  • Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  • Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, v.1 by Marcel Proust
  • Cheri & The Last of Cheri by Colette
  • The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

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