The Experience of Love

1. Erotic Lyrics

   Ancient Egyptian Poetry, Love Songs
   The Song of Songs
   Sappho
   Classic of Poetry
   The Tamil Anthologies
   Catullus
   Amaru, Amaruśataka
   Medieval Lyrics:  A Selection
   Beatrice, Countess of Dia, "A Lover’s Prize"
   Heinrich von Morungen, "The Wound of Love"
   Arnaut Daniel, "The Art of Love"
   Anonymous, "Aubade"
   Petrarch, Sonnets
   Keats, Bright Star
   Mallarmé, The Afternoon of a Faun
   Yeats

   Dada-Surrealist Poetry:  A Selection

   Schwitters, "Anna Blume"
   Andre Breton, "Free Union"
   Aimé Césaire, "Sun Serpent"

   Joyce Mansour, "Men’s Vices"
   Senghor, Night In Sine; Black Woman
   Yehuda Amichai, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; North of San Francisco

2. The Dangers of Passion

   Virgil, The Aeneid, Books I, II, IV, and VI
   Augustine, Confessions
   Yüan Chen, The Story of Ying-ying
   The Koran, 12. Joseph
   Dante, Inferno, Canto 5
   Kanze, Dōjōji
   Cao Xuequin, The Story of the Stone
   Racine, Phaedra
   Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci
   Flaubert, Madame Bovary
   Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
   Freud, Dora
   Mann, Death in Venice
   Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
   Marquez, Death Constant Beyond Love
   Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

3. Investigating Romantic Love

   Marie de France, Lanval; Laüstic
   Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
   Shakespeare, Othello
   Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna
   Cervantes, Don Quixote
   Milton, Paradise Lost
   K’ung Shang-Jen, The Peach Blossom Fan
   Goethe, Faust
   De Lamartine, "The Lake"
   Heine, A Pine Is Standing Lonely; A Young Man Loves a Maiden
   Flaubert, Madame Bovary
   Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
   Dario, Sonatina
   Joyce, The Dead
   Storni, You Want Me White
   Kawabata, Snow Country
   Goodison, Guinea Woman
   Zhang, Love In a Fallen City

4. The Comedy of Sex

   Egyptian Love Lyrics, "I think I’ll go home and lie very still"
   Aristophanes, Lysistrata
   Ovid, Metamorphoses
   Boccaccio, The Decameron
   Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale
   Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron
   Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
   Ihara Saikaku, The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love
   Pope, The Rape of the Lock
   Voltaire, Candide
   Storni, Little-Bitty Man

Literary Explorations of Selfhood

1. Creating and Mastering the Self

   Gilgamesh
   The Bible: The Old Testament, Genesis; The Story of Joseph
   Homer, The Odyssey, especially Books I–IV, VIII–XIII
   Sophocles, Oedipus the King
   Augustine, Confessions
   Bhartrhari, Śatakatrayam
   T‘ang Poetry
   Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue
   The Epic of Son-Jara
   Ch‘eng-en, Monkey
   Sor Juana, Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz
   Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"
   Douglass, Narrative of the Life
   Whitman, Song of Myself
   Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
   Inuit Songs
   Rilke, Spanish Dancer
   Faulkner, Go Down Moses: "The Bear"
   Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan
   Wright, The Man Who Was Almost a Man
   Walcott, "As John to Patmos"; "Crusoe’s Journal"

2. The Construction of Cultural Identity

   Genesis, Chapter 11 (The Origins of Languages)
   Aeschylus, The Oresteia
   Confucius, Analects
   The Bhagavad-Gītā
   Ibn Ishaq, The Biography of the Prophet
   Rabbi Ephraim ben Jacob, The Sacrifice of Isaac
   Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
   Montaigne, Essays
   Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
   Yeats, "Easter 1916"
   Dario, To Roosevelt
   Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman
   James Joyce, The Dead
   Diop, Mother Crocodile
   Cèsaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
   Neruda, General Song: "The Heights of Macchu Pichu"
   Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
   Walcott, "The Almond Trees"; "Elegy"; "The Sea Is History"

3. Alienation from the World and the Self

   The Bible: The Old Testament, Genesis 4; Job; Psalm 137; Jonah
   Homer, The Iliad
   Aeschylus, The Eumenides
   Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Antigone
   Euripides, Medea
   Ssu-ma Ch’ien, from Biographies of the Assassins: Nieh Cheng
   Tu Fu, Moonlit Night
   Walahfrid Strabo, Elegy on Reichenau
   Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I
   Shakespeare, Othello; Hamlet
   Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
   Ueda Akinari, Bewitched
   Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode"
   Shelley, "Stanzas Written in Dejection"

   Continental Romantic Lyrics: A Selection

   Hölderlin
   Leopardi, "The Infinite"; "To Himself"
   De Castro, "Candescent Lies the Air"; "The Ailing Woman Felt Her Forces Ebb"

   Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
   Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
   Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
   Dario, Fatality
   Mann, Death in Venice
   Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman
   Kafka, The Metamorphosis
   Borowski, Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber
   Clarice Lispector, The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman
   Ingeborg Bachmann, The Barking
   Achebe, Things Fall Apart
   Nawal El Saadawi, In Camera
   Yehoshua, Facing the Forests

   Purely literary explorations of themes like love and selfhood appeal to students in basic courses. They also have enormous potential for more advanced seminar courses taught by faculty from departments of psychology and literature. The similarities between the following sets of suggestions and the previous lists will be apparent. By changing rubrics and including readings assigned by the psychologist, however, you and your colleagues expand your students’ appreciation of the uses of literature from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.