Investigations of Intertextuality

To convert any of the thematic groupings suggested above to an intensive senior seminar for literature majors, one would want to add challenging secondary readings to frame the issues in terms of contemporary critical discourse.
Here are two courses that, like the study of aesthetics, capitalize on the comparative possibilities inherent in the The Norton Anthology of World Literature, second edition.

CRITICAL AND THEORETICAL ISSUES

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973).
T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Essays (1951).
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Leon S. Roudiez, ed.; Alice Jardine and Thomas Gora, trans. (1980).
Alan H. Pasco, Allusion: A Literary Graft (1994).

The Norton editors’ headnotes and footnotes underscore the literary relations among texts, within and across cultures. Collected below are several combinations of such readings that would raise particularly interesting examples of the links between texts.

1. Intertextual Groupings within Cultures

   Japanese Literature
   The Kokinshu
   Murasaki, The Tale of Genji (see too Chapter 25 for its discussion of literary romance)
   Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
   The Tale of the Heike, "The Death of Atsumori"
   Zeami, Atsumori
   Kanze, Dōjōji
   Ueda Akinari, Bewitched
   Indian Literature
   The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki
   The Mahābhārata
   Kālidāsa, Śakuntalā
   Tagore, "Hide and Seek"; "Flute Music"
   Mahasweta, Breast-Giver
   Desai, The Rooftop Dwellers
   English Literature
   Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I
   Pope, An Essay on Man
   Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
   Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode"
   Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals

2. Tracing Intertextual Strands across Cultures 

China and Japan
Po Chü-i, selected poems
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
Zeami, Haku Rakuten
Intertextuality in the Western Epic
Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey
Virgil, The Aeneid
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Petronius, The Satyricon
Dante, The Divine Comedy
Milton, Paradise Lost
Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Tennyson, Ulysses
Walcott, Omeros
England and the Americas
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Faulkner, Go Down Moses: "The Bear"
Walcott, Ruins of a Great House
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (The Columbian Orator)
Whitman, Song of Myself
Dario, To Roosevelt
Influence of the Western classics on writers of the Renaissance
Petrarch
Erasmus
Machiavelli
Ariosto
Castiglione
Montaigne
Cervantes
Shakespeare
Modernists and Postmodernists Contemplating Their Cultural Heritage
Yeats, "The Second Coming"; "Leda and the Swan"
Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman; Upstairs in a Wineshop
Mann, Death in Venice
Eliot, The Waste Land
Beckett, Endgame
Amichai, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
Mahasweta, Breast-Giver
Marquez, Death Constant Beyond Love