Brave New World (Huxley): genre: dystopian novel, themes: genetic engineering, predictions about future
1984 (George Orwell): genre: dystopian novel (Big Brother: central controller/government: Ministry of Plenty, Peace, Peace, Love, Truth: concepts of doublethink/blackwhite)
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger): themes: youth, innocence, growing up, characters: Holden Caulfield, Phoebe) significance of title: to think of himself as a catcher/protector of Phoebe from the phoniness of the world, from falling off the cliff in the rye
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee): characters: Atticus, Scout, Jem, themes: about race, class, youth, growing up, main conflict: Atticus, a white attorney defends a black man for a crime he is accused for but has not committed, and the conflicts that evolve in Maycomb County due to this trial in court
Lord of the Flies (William Golding): characters: Ralph (democratic ideals), Piggy (intellectual one), Jack (dictatorial ideals) themes: power, societal organization plot: how the story unravels as plane crashes in an island middle of nowhere/ocean and teenage boys have to organize society amongst themselves in the absence of adults symbols: fire (civilization), eyeglasses (science, technology, education), cone (seashell) used to bring boys together: democratic ideals significance of title: at the end of the novel, we encounter a gory scene where the pig’s head is stuck on the top of a stick and there are flies hovering over the boar’s head/ the head is supposed to symbolize the evil in human nature (as members of the boys end up killing and hurting one another during the power struggle and competition for food and resources)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway): descriptions of catching fish in the sea (lengthy descriptions of catching the fish seem to be realistic depictions of the rigor and reality of catching the fish in the sea, parallels to Moby Dick could be found
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) themes: class, marriage/ marriage based on class, behavior, compatibility (conflicts, misunderstandings, resolution)
Animal Farm (George Orwell): social commentary/ animal characters to represent various Russian leaders in the Russian Revolution
The Metamorphosis (Kafka) psychological/symbolic plot: main character wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect/ responses of the family members: father: financial burden of having to work extra hours, mother: maternal instinct and sympathy vs. appall and disgust of finding his own son turned in to a bug: younger sister: mainly disgust
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) Victor Frankenstein, a scientist creates a new creation mimicking features of a human being/ but his own creation though externally resembling features of a human being, fails to integrate into human society, yearns human contact and sense of belonging, returns to his creator for revenge of having created him (commentary about human cloning?)
Number the Stars (Lois Lowry): escape of jewish family during WWII. avoid being relocated to concentration camps. The title being reference to Old Testament reference of numbering the stars (Jewish tradition)
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen): stranded in wilderness with a hatchet (plane crashing, survival story, making tools, fire, beginning of civilization) similar to Lord of the Flies in main driving plot
The Giver (Lois Lowry): dystopian (lacking emotional concepts/depth) can’t tell difference between what is inherently good and evil (cannot have one without the other)
Dead Poets Society (Robin Williams) John Keating, the English teacher inspiring students of love for poetry
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) social commentary about the American Dream; Jay Gatsby – collected great wealth to win Daisy only to discover her married to someone else. twist in ending.
Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) Lennie and George: two migrant workers; Lennie strong but mentally disabled; need George to accompany him
White Tiger (Aravind Adiga) issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption, poverty in India
A Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid) Nonfiction: experiences of growing up in Australia; criticism of Antinguan government: tourism as an industry/ British colonial legacy
Perfume (Patrick Suskind) the story of a murderer: sense of smell: relationship to emotions/ Grenouille: master of scents: commit murder to extract their scents: born in 18th century France (significance of the ending: people consuming Grenouille “out of love”)
The Odyssey (Homer) epic poems. Ancient Greek literature; ten year journey of Odyssey, king of Ithaca after the fall of Troy (Illiad: fight between king Agamemnon and warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of Trojan war)
The Republic (Plato) Socratic dialogue, written by Plato, around 375 B.C concerning justice (justice=power of the stronger?) characteristics of the just city (the order of society/state, a just city drawn parallel to a just man: law/conscience) work of philosophy political theory
The Stranger (Albert Camus) Mersault: citizen of France dismissed in North, yet hardly partakes in Mediterranean Africa: lack of emotions in mother’s funeral
Death and the Maiden (Ariel Dorfman) Schubert’s String Quartet: subtitled Death and the Maiden, played by the sadistic doctor during the act of murder: kills an Arab man and sentence to death. 1st personal narrative before and after the death: aftereffects of psychology/ damage of people in a country emerging from totalitarian dictatorship (end of the play/ unclear of who is innocent) Roberto’s guilt/ Paulina’s paranoia
Hamlet (Shakespeare) set in Denmark: Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius who has murdered Hamlet’s father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet’s mother (Freudian interpretation of Oedipus complex) (famous line “to be or not to be” that is the question)
King Lear (Shakespeare) take of a king who bequeaths his power tale of a king who bequeaths his power and to two of his three daughters after they declare their love for him in an obsequious manner. His daughter gets nothing because she will not flatter as her sisters have: later in the plot: tragedy falls on both of them/ when disrespected by both of the daughters who now have his wealth, reconciled to his third daughter
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) dystopian novel: themes of subjugated women in a patriarchal society – attempt to gain individuality and independence
Macbeth (Shakespeare): tragedy/ damaging physical + psychological effects of political ambition at its extreme (seeking power for its own sake) Macbeth (gets prophecy from two of the witches that he will become King of Scotland, consumed by ambition/spurred on by his wife, Lady Macbeth, commits murders. takes Scottish throne for himself. wrecked with guilt and paranoia, commits additional murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion) bloodbath + civil war drive Mabeth and Lady Macbeth to death + madness (the famous: life nothing but sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot) inspired Faulker to write Sound and the Fury
Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) stream of consciousness, four sections/perspectives: From Benjy’s perspective/ Quentin/ Jason/ omniscient point of view / the notion of time highlighted throughout the book (clock/watch, passing of time) loud cry of Benjy signifying the pulsation of the universe (mentally disadvantaged, yet providing significant perspective to the perception of reality and of the world in Faulkner’s narratives)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) young adult coming of age (Asking poignant questions)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
Walden (Henry David Thoreau) reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings (independence, social experiment, self-reliance)
Othello (Shakespeare) tragedy, tragic hero: Othello a Middle Eastern general in the army; Iago, the antagonist, themes: racism, love, jealousy, betrayal, revenge, repentance (manipulates his action to perform wicked deeds) Iago: highlights the excessive time Cassio and Othello’s wife, Desdemona are spending tougher (Othello, filled with rage murder one he loves)
A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen): fate of a married woman/ lack of opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world/ Nora and Torvald (their relationship dynamics/ significance of the title) genre as a play, set: emblematic representation/ resemblance of the Doll’s House itself)
The Idiot (Dostoevsky): ironic reference to the protagonist Myshkin, a young man whose goodness/ open-hearted simplicity and guilelessness led many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight (Russian church/Christianity/atheism/ conversion: to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) Raskolnikov, the main character of the novel ends up murdering his house lord, the landlady when he encounters her giving a hard time to one of the people living in the building who is struggling to pay his rent; enraged with a sense of justice, he ends up committing the murder which ends up haunting him through his conscience; the book deals with not just legal but moral repercussions of crime and punishment /relationship with Sonya (conscience, legal system) id/ego/superego (Freudian concept) superego: the conscience/ legal system
Love in the Time of Cholera: (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) theme: love as an emotional and physical disease: depiction of cholera as both as a disease and passion; two men contrasted as having too much/too little passion – what is more (lack or plethora of emotion) conducive contributive to love and happiness
The Road (Cormac McCarthy): post apocalyptic novel: journey of a father and his young son. across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that destroyed most of civilization over several months
Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Yukio Mishima) Ryuji, Fusako, Noboru, Japanese concepts of glory and honor (heroic death/ the sea) Paper 2: “glory is bitter stuff” Post WWII Western influence
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys): feminist and anti-colonial response to Charlotte Bronte novel Jane Eyre – describing background to Mr. Rochester’s marriage from the point of view of his mad wife Antionette (Creole heiress) (hidden/locked up in the dungeon: inspired from the scene/character in Jane Eyre)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte): Mr. Rochester and Jane: Jane’s moral and spiritual development through 1st person narrative (psychological identity) first historian of the private consciousness. topics of class, sexuality, religion, femininity
Season of Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih): postcolonial Arabic novel by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih: impact of British colonialism and European modernity on wisdom of ancestors/ rural African societies and Sudanese culture and identity (counter-narrative to Heart of Darkness)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) voyage up the Congo River: into Congo Free State in the Heart of Africa. Marlow (narrator) narrates the story (themes: imperialism, racism) his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz (has native wife, complete assimilation) repeated phrase: “fascination of abomination” Kurtz’s last words: “The Horror, The Horror” (narrative significance)
Moby Dick (Herman Melville): themes on class, social status, good and evil, existence of God, race, references of Shakespeare, philosophers and the Bible) Ishamael’s narrative of the obsessive, monomaniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick – the giant white sperm wheel that bit off Ahab’s leg at the knee in the ship’s previous voyage
Beloved (Toni Morrison) inspired by true story (Margaret Garner, the African American who escaped slavery – killed her child rather than have them taken back into slavery) Sethe – likewise killed her children, the ghost of which comes to haunt her/ the house (relationship with Paul D. process o healing (romanticism of pain of finding beauty in African American blues/ Christian tradition) (scene of sitting on the steps – foundation of working class of America) consoling Sethe (definition of manhood redefined)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller) dramatized/ fictionalized story of “Salem Witch Trials in MA” allegory for McCarthyism = when the US government persecuted people accused of being communists/ witch hunting
Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett): two characters what for the arrival of someone named Godot, who never arrives and while waiting – the characters engage in variety of conversations/ controversy on whether Godot was intended by Beckett to represent God
Piano Tuner (Daniel Mason) protagonist commissioned to British War office to repair a grand piano, set in British India and Burma, piano slipped to him to bring union and peace amongst princes in Burma
Notes from Underground and the Double (Dostoevsky): underground man’s diary, emblematic of political climate in Russian during the time.
the Double: the human will in search for total freedom challenging ideologies of nihilism and rational egoism
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) wealth, money, crime, social class, social alienation, imperialism, conscience, climbing up the ladder, gentility moral regeneration,
Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) before and during French Revolution; conditions that led up to the Revolution: themes of resurrection, recalled to life, light and darkness (Good and evil) John Bunyan pilgrimage redeemed, progress/ suffering by one sacrifices, source of wealth (earned vs. efforts of others) potential repercussions champion for the poor
Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky): ethical debacle of God, free will, morality, influence on Einstein, Heidegger, Virginia Wolf, McCarthy, Murukami
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy): Tolstory’s nonviolent resistance (along with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) spiritual awakening (Christian/anarchism) themes of hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, family, marriage, society, progress, carnal desire and passion, (agrarian connection to land) no one may build their happiness on another’s pain recurring message through characters’ conflict
Bud, not Buddy (Christopher Paul Curtis) Great Depression era, jazz, social issues like violence, racism. Bud’s journey to find his father: experience of many people during the Great Depression as they had to move around looking for work and new homes
Holes (Louis Sachar) Camp Green Lake, labor, serving in the camp for the crime of stealing shoes of a famous baseball player (juvenile Camp)
Maus I, II (Art Spiegelman) graphic novel by American cartoonist, interviewing his own father (Vladek) about his own experiences as a Polish Jew, and Holocaust survivor: postmodernist techniques: Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, mix of genres (Auschwitz, Nazi concentraion camps) minimalist drawing style (innovation in its pacing, structure, page layouts/ self-reflective of the process of writing, interviewing, researching for the novel
Anne Franke (The Diary of a Young Girl)
Eat, Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) Pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy, the power of prayer in India, the inner peace and balance of true love in Indonesia
The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison): Pecola, black girlhood, white lifestyle/standards, internalized racism, religion, media and culture, shame, breakage and separation (extended essay for extended discussion)
About a Boy (Nick Hornby) Marcus (schoolboy) Fiona (suicidal mother) Will Freeman; the budding love relationship between Fiona and Will, and the transformations Marcus goes through with aging and also between their growing relationship
The Ego and the Id (Sigmund Freud) Id (natural drive, instinct) Ego (balance between Id and superego) Superego (conscience) gatekeepers of society, parents, teachers, police, law
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