This is a list of the books that I read between Summer 2009 and Fall 2010 in preparation for my Ph.D. exam. Some of these were books I’d already read. This is a dump from Excel, so not the prettiest list.
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
Divine Comedy (Inferno) by Dante Aligheieri
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Dialogic Imagination (Selects) by Mikhail Bakhtin
Crash by JG Ballard
The System of Dante’s Hell by Amiri Baraka
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
Literature of Exhaustion (essay) by John Barth
Snow White by Donald Barthelme
Barthes by Barthes, Myth Today, Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
Visions of Excess by Georges Bataille
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
Unnameable + Fizzles by Samuel Beckett
Berlin Childhood around 1900 by Walter Benjamin
Is the Rectum a Grave? (essay) by Leo Bersani
The Desert by Jen Bervin
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Nadja + The Magnetic Fields by Andre Breton
Surrealist Manifesto (essay) by Andre Breton
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Myth of Sysiphus (essay) by Albert Camus
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Heavy Industries (select) – Bust Down the Doors, Traveling to Utopia by Young-Hae Chang
Canterbury Tales (Wife’s Tale, Knight’s Tale) by Geoffrey Chaucer
Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
Ascension by John Coltrane
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Universal Baseball Assocation by Robert Coover
Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Davinci’s Bicycle by Guy Davenport
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze
White Noise by Don Dellilo
Structure, Sign, and Play, “Differance”, “Dangerous Supplement” Jacques Derrida
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Doestevsky
North China Lover by Marguerite Duras
No Future by Lee Edelman
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Hundred Headless Women by Max Ernst
Last Days by Brian Evenson
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
Voice in the Closet by Raymond Federman
Critifictions – Imagination is Plagiarism (essay) by Raymond Federman
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert
Compulsive Beauty by Hal Foster
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
“What is An Author”, Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
On Femininity by Sigmund Freud
Civ and Discontents (1930) by Sigmund Freud
Intepretation of Dreams (select) by Sigmund Freud
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife by William Gass
Querelle by Jean Genet
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Mimesis and Theory by Rene Girard
The Weather by Kenneth Goldsmith
Paracriticisms by Ihab Hassan
Electronic Literature by Katherine Hayles
Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice by Ajay Heble
My Life by Lyn Hejinian
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
The Odyssey by Homer
This Sex Which is Not One, “La Mysterique”, “The Blindspot of an Old Dream of Symmetry” Luce Irigaray
The Pupil by Henry James
Ulysses + Finnegans Wake (geometry lesson) by James Joyce
Afternoon by Michael Joyce
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Worldview by Emma Kay
The Powers of Horror (Ch1 and Ch 3) by Julia Kristeva
The Signification of the Phallus, The Mirror Stage (essays) by Jacque Lacan
Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Pamela: A Novel by Pamela Lu
Theory of the Novel by George Lukacs
Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
The Art Lover by Carole Maso
Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti
Disidentifications by Jose Munoz
The Man Without Qualities – Vol 1 by Robert Musil
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche
At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien
A Void by Georges Perec
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Time and Narrative (Vol. 1) by Paul Ricoeur
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet
For a new novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet
How I Wrote Certain of My Books (essay) by Raymond Roussel
Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussell
Portrait of a Man Unknown by Nathalie Sarraute
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Introduction: Axiomatic from Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgewick
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
The Acoustic Mirror, also Mulvey (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema†) by Kaja Silverman
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
Gold Fools by Gilbert Sorrentino
Can the Subaltern Speak (essay)? by Gayatri Spivak
Autobiography of Alice B Toklas + Stanzas in Meditation by Gertrude Stein
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
TOC by Steve Tomasula
Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf