Class of 2020 Reading List
May 20, 2020 – Topics of Interest
For your enjoyment here is a reading list compiled by Savannah Pearson, Comparative Literature and Society major CC’ 20, with the help of her fellow Class of 2020. This list represents some of the novels, short stories, poems and academic texts that affected the Class of 2020 over the past four years. –Thanks Savannah and to all who contributed!
- Arundhati Roy, God of Small Things
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth
- Indra Sinha, Animal’s People
- Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories
- Stephen King, “The Life of Chuck, Act II: Buskers” from If It Bleeds.
- Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
- Steven King, Doctor Sleep
- Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
- Edouard Glissant, “Open Boat” from Poetics of Relation
- Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
- Kafka, The Castle
- Bernard Cooper, “A Thousand Drops”
- Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman
- Upanishads, Verses 6+7
- Richard Powers, The Overstory
- George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- Cornell West, “Hope and Despair” from To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr
- Ursula K LeGuin,“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” from Dancing at the Edge of the World
- Paul Kingsnorth, “The Dark Mountain Project Manifesto”
- John D’Agata, About a Mountain
- Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt
- Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
- Edward Said, Orientalism
- Aleksandr Luria. The Man with a Shattered World.
- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison
- Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
- Sander L. Gilman, “Seeing Bodies in Pain: Why do we Care about Medical Images,” The Health Humanities Reader, eds. Friedman, Jones & Wear
- Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review
- Zillah Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism
- Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin
- Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
- Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality
- Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
