Texts

Term One

  • Genesis (NRSV; in course pack, handed out at first seminar meeting)
  • Homer, Odyssey (Penguin)
  • Euripides, Medea (trans. Collier and Machemer; Oxford UP)
  • Plato, Republic (Hackett, revised edition)
  • Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Penguin)
  • Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney; Norton)
  • Christopher Columbus, selections from The Four Voyages
  • Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince (Hackett)
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Oxford UP)
  • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hackett)
  • Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Term Two

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (Penguin)
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin)
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage)
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton)
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
  • Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Oxford UP)
  • T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (Norton)
  • Roberto Arlt, “The Cooked Cat”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (Penguin)
  • Felisberto Hernández, “The Daisy Dolls”
  • Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone / Simon & Schuster)
  • J. M. Coetzee, Foe (Vintage)
  • Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (DC Comics)

Recommended Texts

Recommended Secondary Texts

  • Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the first chapter compares The Odyssey and Genesis

Other

2 thoughts on “Texts

  1. I may have hallucinated, but wasn’t Albert Camus’ translation of “The Outsider” once on this reading list? If so we should really bring it back. One of the best stories I have ever read.

  2. Hiya, it may be that The Outsider was on the syllabus last year; I’m not entirely sure. I think one reason it might no longer be taught is that we feel that many of you have already read it–as indeed you have!

    And now, if you like that book, you might like this song.

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