REQUIRED READINGS

Books available at the NYU Bookstore

  • Albahari, Davidl. Words Are Something Else.

  • Esterhazy, Peter. She Loves Me.

  • Gombrowicz, Witold.. Ferdydurke.

  • Hrabal, Bohumil. Closely Watched Trains.

  • Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories.

  • Kis, Danilo. The Encyclopedia of the Dead.

  • Kristof, Agota. The Notebook. The Proof. The Third Lie.

  • Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  • Pavic, Milorad. The Dictionary of the Khazars. (male or female edition)

  • Schulz, Bruno. The Street of Crocodiles.

  • Viewegh, Michal. Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia.

    All of the books listed above are available on reserve, occasionally in different editions (for example, The Street of Crocodiles can be found in The Collected Fiction of Bruno Schultz, while Kristof’s trilogy may be on reserve as three separate books). In addition, Danilo Kis’s essays “Homo Poeticus” and “Variations on Central European Themes,” pp. 75-79 and 95-114 in his Homo Poeticus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) are required reading, and can be found on reserve.

    There will be a short excerpt from Annie Leclerc’s Woman’s Word distributed as a supplemental handout to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. You will also be given copies of Milan Kundera’s “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” In addition, there will be handouts containing brief outlines of certain authors lives and works, handouts on postmodernism, and handouts pertaining to the Khazars and Pavic’s novel.

    Finally, you will be receiving handouts containing guidelines for writing papers for this class. You are responsible for reading this information before turning in your assignments.

    Many of these handouts will also be available on-line.