– Primary literary texts (Although the course syllabus follows an order in which texts are studied, it does not mean you cannot read works ahead of time. In fact, it is advantageous if you come to class having read a few works already and if you have adopted a comparatist approach in which to think of and write papers on these works.)
- Oedipus Rex and Antigone, by Greek playwright Sophocles, 440 B.C.
- Hamlet, a drama by William Shakespeare, 1602
- Don Quixote, a novel by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, 1615
- Faust, a novel by Germany writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1808
- Red and Black, a novel by French writer Stendhal, 1831
- Crime and Punishment, a novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1866
- Kokoro, a novel by Japanese writer Natsume Soseki 1914
- The Great Gatsby, a novel by American writer Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
- The English Teacher, a novel by Indian writer R.K. Narayan, 1945
- Things Fall Apart, a novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, 1958
- To Live, a novel by Chinese writer Yu Hua, 1991
- Soul Mountain, a novel by Chinese writer Gao Xingjian (Nobel Prize, 2000)
-Secondary critical readings (blue means required texts, there is a course packet for excerpts)
– Sociological and historical approach
- Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel
- Lucien Goldmann, excerpts from Towards A Sociology of the Novel
- Homi Bhabha, excerpts from Nation and Narration
- Edward Saïd, excerpts from Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism
- Michael Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture
- V.S. Naipaul, excerpts from India: A Wounded Civilization
- Robert Young, excerpts from White Mythologies, Writing History and the West
- Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak
- Mary Louise Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone
- Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization and other works
- Harold Bloom, excerpts from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
-Psychoanalytical approach (gender study)
- Jacque Lacan, excerpts from Female Sexuality (“Meaning of the Phallus”)
- Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self and excerpts from other works
- Sigmund Freud, excerpts from Civilization and Its Discontents
-Structuralist and formalist approach
- M. Bakhtin, excerpts from The Dialogical Imagination
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies
- Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure