First Year Reading List - Comparative Literature
Semester 1 compulsory modules
COM4208 Brief Encounters: Around the World in Short Stories
Preparatory reading:
Valerie Shaw, The Short Story (New York: Longman, 1983), ‘Preface’ and ‘“Only Short Stories”: Estimates and Explanations’
Optional reading:
- March-Russell, Paul, The Short Story: An Introduction [PDF 179KB] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), chapter one: “Origins: From Folktale to Art-Tale.”
- Additional Readings TBC through the module’s QMPLUS page.
COM4206 Introduction to Comparison
Discussion texts will be available through QMPLUS before the start of second semester
Semester 2 compulsory modules
COM4210: Understanding Culture: Exploring the Big Questions
all texts via QM+ or the University Library. Full list will be circulated end of Sem A.
Full year compulsory modules
COM4207 The Scene of Learning
Blackwells has all the books needed for the year: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/home
Feel free to also buy e-books/second-hand copies. Some links provided below.
The books are listed in a chronological order (i.e., we will first read Tawada, then Kingston, etc.). You need to read the texts in advance and have a copy (digital or paper) with you during the seminar.
SEMESTER 1:
1. Tawada, Yoko, Where Europe Begins, transl. by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden (New Directions, New York, 2002) [first and second-hand copies available online; also in kindle version];
2. Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (London: Picador Classic, [1989] 2015) [multiple first and second-hand copies available online; couple of copies in the library]
3. Dalembert, Louis-Philippe, The other side of the sea, transl. by Robert H. McCormick (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); 1 copy in the library.
Available in paperback, via Blackwells.; https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Other-Side-of-the-Sea-by-Louis-Philippe-Dalembert-Robert-H-McCormick-Jr-translator-Edwidge-Danticat-foreword/9780813936475
Also available as an e-book from: https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Louis-Philippe-Dalembert/The-Other-Side-of-the-Sea/20694349
Also First/second-hand from Bookshop.org (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-other-side-of-the-sea-a-novel/9780813936475); Amazon;
You’re welcome to also read it in the French original version
SEMESTER 2:
Menchu, Rigoberta, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, transl. by Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984)
Barghouti, Mourid, I Saw Ramallah, transl. by Ahdaf Soueif (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; 2nd ed. edition (16 May 2005) [with introduction by Edward Said]
Plays:
Ionesco, Eugène, ‘The Lesson’ in Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson, transl. by Derek Prowse, Donald Watson (London: Penguin Classics, 2000)
Friel, Brian, Translations (Faber and Faber, London, 1981)
