Model IV: Courses Divided into Four Heterogeneous Quarters

Four quarter-length reading lists that address questions young people ask. These groupings facilitate achronological, cross-cultural matchups. If these reading lists are followed in sequence, students will bring increasingly sophisticated perspectives to bear on their reading, but even if studied in isolation, these syllabi have been organized to expand critical vocabularies and introduce a global array of literary achievements. These configurations may be especially attractive to students in community colleges with little previous exposure to literary study. Reading assignments allow for full discussion of interpretive questions that may arise.

FIRST QUARTER: GROWING UP

Old Testament: Genesis 1–4 (Vol A): 1 Week

• How do we get to be? What has it meant to replenish and subdue the earth and have dominion over all living things?
• Codes of behavior in God’s garden: expectations of men and women. Defining innocence and experience. Understanding Cain. The tragedy of brothers.

Popol Vuh (Vol C): 1 Week

• Creation in the rain forest: how is the view of all living things different from that of Genesis?
• Who are the twins? Compare them to Cain and Abel. What qualities help them succeed? What kind of adversaries do they conquer? Compare the adventures of the Edenic family. Compare the gods’ expectations of human beings here and in Eden.

Augustine. Confessions (Vol B): ½ Week

• What kind of language does Augustine use? What kind of education did he have as a child? What does the term Confessions imply?
• What patterns of behavior are associated with coming of age? How are they illustrated in Augustine’s life?

Proust. Remembrance of Things Past: 1½ Weeks

• Trying to fall asleep at night: Why begin here? Who are Marcel’s rivals? Fathers and sons.
• What kind of detail do we find in modern fiction? How do different genres offer different perspectives on human experience?  What kind of imagination does Marcel possess?  What does he see in the world around him?
• Is childhood a time of happiness?

Higuchi Ichiyo. Child’s Play (Vol F): 1 Week

• Adults and their problems: What lessons do we learn from our elders that they may not think they are teaching? 
• Daughters and sons: What difference does gender make in the way we grow up?
• What is the impact of neighborhood and social circumstances on the way we mature?

Richard Wright. The Man Who Was Almost a Man (Vol F): ½ Week

• What is the impact of neighborhood and social circumstances on the way we mature?
• How do young people learn to deal with humiliation?  Can we learn from our mistakes?

SECOND QUARTER: TRYING TO SHAPE A SELF

Walt Whitman. "Song of Myself" (Vol E): 1 Week

• Whitmanesque freedoms: What makes poetry? Relationship between form and content, a poet’s voice.
• Large issues mapped out: life and death; past and present; animal and human; body and soul.

Li Po. Selected Poems (Vol B): 1 Week.

• Cf. Whitman’s expansiveness, view of human place in the natural world, understanding of past and present. Mythological references—the six-dragon team of the carriage of the sun.
• Wine and poetry; a poet’s voice, poets’ personae. How can Li Po speak of being one of three if he is "Drinking Alone by Moonlight?"

Ovid. Metamorphoses (Vol A): 1 Week

• Another view of creation, another poetic voice. Critique of human behavior.
• Changing forms, loss of human identity: What does it mean to be Daphne?
• Psychological tensions as the agents of change: What does it mean to be Myrrha?

Pirandello. Six Characters in Search of an Author (Vol F): 1½ Weeks

• What is a play? Where is the author’s voice? Stage techniques and understanding the plot.
• Comparing the stability of real people and dramatic characters: cf. Ovid—how do we learn how to behave?

Kanze. Dōjōji (Vol B): ½ Week

• Stage techniques of Nō drama: understanding the plot. Nature of metamorphosis: Why does a woman become a serpent? Cf. Ovid’s mythological figures, Li Po’s dragon.

Kafka. "The Metamorphosis" (Vol F): 1 Week

• Narrative technique: changing voices. Trying to wake up in the morning—shifting forms in a modern apartment house.
• Changing attitudes toward Gregor—family and self. Is anyone to blame for what happens?

THIRD QUARTER: SEEKING JUSTICE FROM AUTHORITY—THE ETHICAL LIFE

The Old Testament: Job (Vol A): 1 Week

• How do the opening and closing chapters differ from the rest of this text? How can we distinguish poetry from prose here? What is the reason for Job’s sufferings?
• Characterize the arguments of Job’s "comforters." What kind of relationship does Job have with God? Why is he satisfied by the speech out of the whirlwind?

The Man’yōshū. Dialogue of the Destitute (Vol B): ½ Week

• Whose voices do we hear in these poems? What problems are they facing? Where do they fit in the social order?
• How does the nature of authority differ in these two works? How does it differ from the view of authority in Job?

Andrew Peynetsa. The Boy and the Deer (Vol F): ½ Week

• What is the view of human justice here?  What is the role of the Kachinas in helping the deer?  What do the Kachinas stand for?
• How would you judge the behavior of the boy’s human mother?  How does she suffer from the structure of authority in her society?
• What are the best features of the society depicted here?  How do young people speak to their elders? 
• What happens to the boy at the end of the story?  How conscious do you think his decision is?  How do you judge his actions?

Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Vol E): 1 Week

• "The Little Black Boy," "Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper," "London." Where does Blake get the idea for calling these "Songs of Innocence" and "of Experience"? Whose voices do we hear in these poems? How do they differ from the speakers of the earlier poems? Compare the children here with the boy in Peynetsa’s version of The Boy and the Deer: in what way are they victimized by their societies?

Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground (Vol E): 1½ Weeks

• I. What kind of person is speaking? How does he define civilization? Would only an underground man view it in these terms?
• II. Why does the underground man tell us stories from his past? Compare his memory of youthful experience with the visions of childhood presented by Peynetsa and Blake. What problems of justice does each one raise?
• Who is Liza? Why does she respond positively to the underground man at first? What changes her view of him? How does he view women?

Tagore. "I Won’t Let You Go" (Vol F): ½ Week

• What is the dramatic situation in this complex poem?  Who is the speaker?  Why is he leaving?  What challenge does the little girl voice?  How does the poem expand so that a simple family event becomes a vehicle for exploring the nature of justice in the universe?

FOURTH QUARTER: REACHING HAPPY ENDINGS—VARIETIES OF ROMANCE

Dario, Selected Poems (Vol F): ½ Week

• "Sonatina":  What is the Princess waiting for? Defining romance.

Genesis: "The Story of Joseph" (Vol A): 1 Week

• Compare Cain and Abel—why are family relationships so important in ancient stories?
• How does Joseph change in the course of this narrative? In what sorts of situations do we see him? How does his mind work? Why does he succeed?

The Koran: Sura 12, Joseph (Vol B): ½ Week

• How is the emphasis different here? Why are we told what the city women say? What makes Joseph succeed?

Kālidāsa, Śākuntala (Vol A): 1 Week

• Where are we? Distinguish between the different settings and the kinds of behavior they require. What happens between acts III and IV?
• How and why does Dusyanta change? Of what is Śakuntalā guilty? How is the conclusion engineered? How does the Hindu view of time function here? What is the future of the miraculous child of Dusyanta and Śakuntalā?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Vol B): 1½ Weeks

• Part I. Where are we? What time of year is it? What is the nature of the game here?
• Parts II and III. Describe Gawain’s journey. What view of women do we see in the castle? What kind of games does he engage in now?
• Parts IV. Final reckonings: Of what is Gawain guilty? Compare him to Joseph. How do the changes in color and season promise a happy ending?

Premchand. The Road to Salvation (Vol F): ½ Week

• What is the source of conflict?  How is it resolved?  How accurately does the title describe the arc of action in this story?

Boccaccio.  Selections from The Decameron Vol B 1 Week

• The frame: How does telling stories help?
• The First Story of the First Day: God’s mysterious ways.
• The Eighth Story of the Fifth Day: Is this a happy ending?
• The Sixth Story of the Ninth Day: Old jokes. Why do we enjoy them?
• The Tenth Story of the Tenth Day: Is this a happy ending? 
• Compare the view of nature here with that in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Śakuntalā.

Mature students may be asked to consider the impact of culture and time on these wildly divergent selections. But beginning readers should probably just be allowed to grapple with the minutiae of each text, since many challenging genres are examined here. Although they may occasionally complain, students who have the chance to read "hard books" slowly enough so that they really understand their content are transformed by the process. Accordingly, the suggested number of weeks proposed for these assignments is even more tentative than usual; if it seems necessary to jettison a whole text to allow students time to absorb others, these syllabi make no pretense to providing systematic "coverage" and little will be lost if student confidence is gained.

Frequent short papers might invite readers to identify sequentially with the problems the protagonists of the week’s readings face. Along with ample general discussion and oral presentations by individual members of the class, these should prepare students to attempt a synthetic view of the central topic proposed in each quarter’s selections in a series of cumulative final exams.

Introductory Interdisciplinary Surveys

Though many users of the second edition of The Norton Anthology of World Literature will be teachers and students engaged in broad overall literary surveys of the sort outlined above, its potential to serve other constituencies should be recognized. Curriculum committees will find in it material for a variety of interdisciplinary surveys. Without presuming to propose precise reading lists for these uses, here are two more models that indicate a few attractive configurations and some possible topics and literary readings to be supplemented from other disciplines.