Exam Reading List Example 4
I. Literary Theory and Criticism
A. History of Literary Theory and Criticism
Plato Republic (Book 10)
Aristotle Poetics
Horace The Art of
Poetry
Longinus On the Sublime
Plotinus On the Intellectual Beauty
Augustine of Hippo On Christian Teaching
John Cassian Conference XIV, “On Spiritual Knowledge”
Goeffrey of Vinsauf The New Poetics
Hugh of St. Victor The Didascalicon
Dante Alighieri Letter to Can Grande della Scala
Giovanni Boccaccio “In Defense of Poetry”
Christine de Pisan “Querrelle della Rose”
Philip Sydney Apology for Poetry
Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism
David Hume On the Standard of Taste
Leo Tolstoy “What is Art?”
Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgment (Books 2,3)
William Wordsworth Preface to Lyrical Ballads
G.W.F Hegel “Introduction”
from The Philosophy of Fine Art
Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
B.
The Twentieth Century
Post-structuralism and Deconstruction
Deleuze and Guattari “The Rhizome”
Jacques Derrida Plato’s Pharmacy”
Michel Foucault “What is an Author?”
Jean-Francois Lyotard “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”
Jean Baudrillard “Precession of Simulacra”
Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author”
Reader Response
Carl Kopf “Introduction” from Reader Entrapment in 18th Century Literature
Wolfgang Iser “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”
Lucien Dällenbach “Reflexivity and Reading”
Stanley Fish “Interpreting the Variorum”
Hans Robert Jauss From “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”
Hypertext Theory and Digital Culture
Vannevar Bush “As We May Think”
Florian Brody “The Medium is the Memory”
Robert Coover “The End of Books”
George
Landow Hypertext:
The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
“What’s
a Critic to Do?: Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext”
Jay David
Bolter Writing
Space: the Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing
James
O’Donnell Avatars
of the Word
Stokerson and Wong “Hypertext and the Art of Memory”
Illana Snyder The Electronic Labyrinth
II. Allegory
A. Primary Texts
The Song of Songs
Apulieus The Golden Ass
Mark “The Parable of the Sower” Mark 4:1-32
Prudentius Psychomachia
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy
Anonymous “The Seafarer” and “The Wanderer”
Anonymous The Phoenix
Anonymous Sawles Warde
Bernardus Silvestris Cosmographia
Allen of Lille The Plaint of Nature
Guillaume de Lorris Romance of the Rose
Jean de Meun
Brunetto Latini Il Tesoretto
Dante Aligheri Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
Geoffrey Chaucer The Book of the Duchess
The House of Fame
The Parliament of Birds
William
Langland
The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman
The
Gawain Poet Pearl; Gawain and the Green
Knight
Julian of Norwich “The Allegory of the Lord and his Servant” Showings 51
Unknown Morality Play of Everyman
Matteo Maria Boiardo Orlando Innamorato
Edmund Spencer The Faerie Queen
Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Young Goodman Brown,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Herman
Melville The Confidence Man
Edgar
Allen Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket
George
Orwell Animal Farm
Italo
Calvino If
on a winter’s night a traveler
Don
DeLillo White Noise
Erich Auerbach “Figura”
Stephen A. Barney “Allegorical Visions”
Walter
Benjamin The
Origin of German Tragic Drama
John Freccero “Introduction to Inferno”
Paul de Mann Allegories of Reading (Selections)
Michael
Murrin The Veil
of Allegory
Paul
Piehler The
Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Allegory
Maureen
Quilligan The
Language of Allegory
D.W.
Robertson Preface
to Chaucer
G.V. Smithers “The Meaning of the Seafarer and the Wanderer,”
Jon
Whitman Allegory:
The Dynamics of a an Ancient and Medieval Technique
James Wimsatt Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Medieval English Literature
III. Medieval
Literature: 400-1500
Sulpitius Severus The Life of St. Martin and Letters I-III
Gregory the Great The Dialogues (Book II)
Anonymous I Fioretti
Anonymous Judith
Cynewulf Juliana
Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English People (selections)
Cuthbert “On the Death of Bede”
Jacobus de Voragine The Golden Legend (selections)
Augustine Rule of St. Augustine
Benedict Rule of
St. Benedict
Francis Rule of
St. Francis
Clare Rule
of St. Clare
Anonymous Ancrene Riwle
Richard Rolle “The Form of Living”
Mystical
Theology and Spirituality Treatises:
Augustine On Christian Doctrine*
John Cassian Conference XIV “On Spiritual Knowledge”*
Dionysius The
Mystical Theology
Anonymous The Dream of
the Rood
Hugh of St. Victor The Didascalicon*
William
of St. Theirry Exposition
on the Song of Songs
Anonymous “The Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic”
Julian of Norwich Showings (short text)
Margery
Kemp The Book
of Margery Kemp
Richard Rolle “On Divers Friendships” from The Fire of Love
“Meditation on the Passion” (short text);
Anonymous The Cloud of
Unknowing (selections)
Nicholas
of Cusa The
Vision of God
Philosophical
Texts:
Augustine On the
Teacher
Dionysius The Divine
Names
Anselm Proslogion
Bonaventure Journey into the Mind of God*
Nicholas of Cusa On Learned Ignorance
Franco Saccheti Trecentonovelle (selections)
Anonymous Il Novellino (selections)
Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron (selections)
Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (selections)
Carolyn Bynum “The Individual in the 12th Century”
Michael Camille “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy”
Mary
Carruthers The
Craft of Thought: Mediation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400-1200
Linda Georgianna “Self and Religious Rules” From The Solitary Self
Eric Jager The Book of the Heart; “Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality?”
Derek Krueger “Hagiography as an Ascetic Practice in the Early Christian East”
Michael Lapidge “The Saint’s Life in Anglo-Saxon England”
Gillian R. Overing “Some Aspects of Metonymy in Old English Poetry”
Lee Patterson “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies”
Brian Stock “The Self and Literary Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages”
Robert S. Sturges “Indeterminacy of Literary Meaning and Medieval Culture, 1100-1500”
Denys
Turner The
Darkness of God
“To open a book is to enter a labyrinth. To read is to pass through one.”
Jacques Attali The Labyrinth in Culture and Society (67)
A number of post-modern texts draw upon the conventions of detective fiction in narratives that seem to make signs and interpretation salient thematic concerns. They encourage questions such as the following: What roles do chance and reason play in detection? What is the status of evidence? How can it guide a detective to a proper identification of the criminal, be ambiguous or misdirect a detective? Can the crime be solved, brought to closure through the discovery of a determinate and accurate resolution? Within a number of these same works, labyrinths, both metaphorical and structural, are featured in the narratives. These paths are often multicursal sites of disorientation, but they also evoke a sense of impenetrable genius and design. Their appearances in these works of detective fiction prompt me to two sets of questions.
First, how do these labyrinths contribute to a characterization of detection and the status of the sign? What are the various ways in which contemporary authors make use of the labyrinth to comment on an interpretive analysis of signs? How is the process of decoding a crime similar to the process of labyrinthine penetration or escape?
Secondly, do these narratives then bring this association of the sign and labyrinth to bear on the signs of their texts? Are there particular narrative structures that effect or suggest such self-reflexivity? If so, what is the result of a contemporary text’s self-formulation as a labyrinthine passage? What is the relationship between such texts and the rhizomatic tissue of textuality identified by contemporary literary theory?
Similarly, centuries prior to this appearance of the labyrinth in contemporary detective fiction, its form held a prominent place within a body of Christian literature that treated reading and the sign as points of thematic focus. In this collection of works, the characterization of the sign and reading is informed not by narratives of detection, but by ones of conversion or contemplative ascent. Within such a narrative, how are theological doctrines, such as those concerning the Fall of Adam and Eve and the Incarnation, contribute to the text’s commentary on engagement with signs. If these narratives regularly characterize the sign in relation to a theologically driven drama of the soul’s turn toward or away from God, how are labyrinthine forms employed in this formulation? Are multicursal labyrinths and the resulting experience of disorientation persistently aligned with wayward sinfulness and failure to “read” the signs of one’s life and the Biblical texts correctly? Or does the path to contemplative union ever depart from a linear course? By asking such questions of these texts, I hope to draw from their theology of textuality in relation to ideas such as linearity, and non-linearity, ambiguity and polysemy, and the origin. Then, assessing their own deployment of narrative structures, I want to examine whether these texts situate their own signs and a reader’s analysis of them in the context of that theology. If these texts do employ narrative strategies so as to situate themselves within the conceptual order that they represent, then how might we understand the labyrinthine character of their passages?
By exploring how both contemporary detective fiction and Christian conversion narratives employ the labyrinth in characterizations of the sign and reading, I hope to formulate a greater understanding of how texts might induct readers into particular conceptions of the text and the reading process. In doing so, the similarities and differences of contemporary theoretical and Christian theological notions of textuality may be clarified. On that basis, some insights may emerge concerning whether texts that align themselves with particular conceptions of textuality deploy particular narrative strategies to convey that conception to an audience.
Contemporary Detective
Fiction
Jorge Luis Borges “The Garden of Forking Paths”; “The Library of Babel”; “Death and the Compass”
Thomas
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Michael Ondaatje The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Umberto
Eco The Name of the Rose
Paul Auster The City of Glass (graphic novel edition)
Georges
Perec “Notes on
What I’m Looking For”; “The Page”; Avoid
Alain
Robbe-Grillet The
Erasers
Augustine The Confessions; On Christian Teaching*
Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy*
Hugh of St. Victor The Didiscalicon*
Bonaventure The Journey into the Mind of God*; “The Retraction of the Arts to Theology”
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy*
Petrarch “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux”
Jacques
Attali The Labyrinth in Culture and Society
Penelope
R. Doob The Idea of the Labyrinth: from Classical
Antiquity through the Middle Ages
Wendy B. Faris Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Language and Narrative Design in
Modern Fiction (Selections)
Donald Gutierrez “The Labyrinth in Myth, Reality, Modern Fiction.” From The Maze in the Mind and the World: Labyrinths in Modern Literature
Herman Kern Through
the Labyrinth (Selections)
J. Hillis Miller “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line”
Mark
Taylor “Mazing
Grace” From Erring: A Postmodern
A/Theology
John Barth “The Literature of Exhaustion”
Roland Barthes “From Work to Text”
Marcia
Colish “Dante:
Poet of Rectitude”; From The Mirror of
Language: a Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge
Ralph Flores “Reading and Speech in St. Augustine’s Confessions”
Jesse Gellrich The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages
Deleuze and Guattari “The Rhizome”*
Martin Hernández Readers and Labyrinths:
Detective Fiction in Borges, Bustos Domecq and Eco
Peter Hühn “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction.”
Eric Jager “The Garden of Eloquence” and “The Genesis of Hermeneutics” From The Tempter’s Voice
Paul Kuntz “Augustine: From Homo Erro to Homo Viator”
Jean-Francois Lyotard “Humor in Semiotheology” and “False Flights in Literature”
Eileen Sweeny “Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading Revisited”
Denys Turner “The God within Augustine’s Confessions” and “Hierarchy Interiorized: Bonaventure’s Itinerarium” From The Darkness of God*
(List for Stephen Szolosi. Approved Spring 2003)