Reading List for Majors

Plato:

• Ion
• Republic (Books III and X)

Aristotle:

• Poetics

Sidney:

• An Apology for Poetry

Dryden:

• An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

Pope:

• An Essay on Criticism

Johnson:

• "Preface to Shakespeare"

Wordsworth:

• "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads"

Coleridge:

• Biographia Literaria sections of Chapters XII, XIII and XIV

Shelley:

• A Defense of Poetry

Arnold:

• The Study of Poetry

Taine:

• "Introduction to History of English Literature"

Freud:

• "Creative Writers and Daydreaming"

Hulme:

• "Romanticism and Classicism"

Eliot:

• "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
• "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"

Auerbach:

• Mimesis

Wimsatt and Berdsley:

• "The Intentional Fallacy"

Brooks:

• "The Heresy of Paraphrase" from The Well Wrought Urn

Frye:

• The Anatomy of Criticism

Eagleton:

• Marxism and Literary Criticism

Hirsch:

• Validity in Interpretation

Todorov:

• Mikhail Bakhtin: Dialogical Principle

Barthes:

• "The Structuralist Activity"

Showalter:

• "Toward a Feminist Poetics”

Kolodny:

• "Dancing through the Minefield"

Derrida:

• "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Kristeva:

• "The Bounded Text"

Christian:

• Race for Theory

Booth:

• The Rhetoric of Fiction
• The Company We Keep