Author Archives: Christene

Tailored Humor

Sometimes I must take my own advice.

When I created my GRE reading list, I made it not just to help myself remember everything, but also as a study guide for anyone else who wishes to use it. However, my intentions were not to read, or reread, the works on the list. It took me many years to get through all of those works, including the several lists I have yet to post, so I would not think it feasible or practical to suggest someone plow through it in a few months, or even a year (unless they do nothing but read every day). My intention was towards creating an easy reference guide, a refresher to skim through.
I walked into my own trap. Sartor Resartus.
It is no secret I have a weakness for comedy. The story itself is only funny if you pick up on the allusions. Like the time my friend sent me a picture of Madonna with her newborn baby and I couldn’t stop laughing (Madonna and Child). Yeah, just like that. While the jokes in Sartor seem like literary allusions now, they were just the pop culture of the day. And still funny now.
I didn’t know this when I first read it, but another friend showed me the meaning of the names in the work years later, which made it that much more hilarious, as I reread it noting that the Professor of all things General, from the town Somewhere Over There, discusses the implications of ossified national notions through a metaphor of clothing (explained through the meaning of the title).
Nevertheless there is far more to the work than a well written comedy, drawing on the works of some of my other favorite writers and their philosophies, not to mention how it influenced many works to come. For many years the implications of Sartor can be heard through literature and criticism.
Yet it is the way in which Sartos is presented that makes it a better read than others expressing the same ideas. The message is not wryly presented through a series of essays, but rather retailored in an all too irresistible comedic form. I guess that was the point.
Tonight I only reread half of the work, but will probably stay up reading the rest. I am too giddy to put it down. For my sake there better be at least three Carlyle questions on the GRE. Then I can in good conscience say I spent the evening conducing useful “research.”

Just One Step

Life is ridiculous. I don’t say this with any negative connotations. I am not saying this sarcastically, or in any existentialist sort of way. I simply mean, life is ridiculous.

It is a dark comedy on a never ending stage, and even as the scenes change, sometimes in quick procession, the entire thing never moves past Act I, and you are left to wonder, “is this a one act play?” Unfortunately life doesn’t come with a table of contents.

Have you ever heard Jacques Brel sing? You should. I think everyone should, at least once.

Anyway, I digress.

I was looking at Courbet’s L’Atelier (top of this blog). Beautiful painting, and utterly ridiculous. What do you see? Probably not what I see. I am sure what you think is happening is quite different from my own interpretation. I think I will keep mine to myself.

I am obviously in a francophile kind of mood, so while you are at it:

Also, since we are on the topic of both the French and how ridiculous life is, read Sartre’s The Family Idiot.

Today I read a story in The Paris Review on Frida Kahlo. If you weren’t aware, she had a plethora of physical ailments, one of which required her to wear a plaster corset for most of her life. She changed them out regularly, and crafted art on each. The art was interesting, but what captivated my eye was a quote by Charles Baxter that the author felt applies to Kahlo as well. Here is the excerpt:

Charles Baxter once found what he called “the last appeal” in a scene from Sherwood Anderson, a woman running naked in the rain, begging attention from an old deaf man. “Her body,” he writes, “her last semiotic appeal, or vulnerability, or precious secret—it’s all of these things, but it will not be reduced to one meaning—carries the burden of her longing, and becomes the record of erasure.”

Every time a piece of her body failed, got amputated, or stopped performing properly, Kahlo undid the erasure through her art, decorating the very pieces that were a reminder of her suffering. She masked her pain with paint.

I thought that was interesting.

None of this really goes together, but rather bits and pieces of what I looked at today, and somehow came to the conclusion that life is ridiculous.

As Napoleon once said “du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.”

List Making

As I study for the GRE subject exam, and take numerous practice tests, it seems deceptively easy. I am suspicious and a little scared. But other than just reading and refamiliarizing myself with works of literature I am not sure what else there is to do. I am currently using the Princeton, Kaplan, and another study book. I now realize that they all kind of say the same thing, but this is good since it means I am on the right track. Aside from study techniques and whatnot, the most important piece of information that I have been able to get out of these books is a list of works I should be reading, or at the very least looking over. I have also found (if the practice tests are anything like the real test), that the test is geared towards questions on works that the GRE people feel most students have read. I haven’t noticed anything terribly obscure.

The majority of the lists out there are categorized by author and time period. I have conflated the lists, and added the major works for these authors that are most likely to be tested (because they never supply a list of works, just authors, all of them rather prolific… which I guess is the whole point). Hopefully this helps someone. I have kept them in chronological order (sort of).

Also, this list is in no way exhaustive (and still a work in progress), especially in modern authors and works. Although I am sure there several authors and/or works I am missing from this list in every time period, but my main focus is to provide the major works that are most likely to be tested, not a comprehensive lists of everything each author wrote. Also, it seems I have a major gap in knowledge in everything written after 1850, so I am unable to provide too much detail there.

The ones I am not very familiar with, I will specify so in the event I am overlooking some important work you may look further into it.

Caedmon

Beowulf

William Langland – Piers Plowman

Geoffrey Chaucer – Canterbury Tales, maybe Troilus and Criseyde

Thoman Malory – Le Morte d’Arthur

John Skelton – The Bowge of Court, maybe Colin Cloute or Phyllyp Sparowe

Thomas More – Utopia

Philip Sidney – Astrophil and Stella

Edmund Spencer – The Faerie Queene, maybe Sonnet 75 and Amoretti

John Lyly – Endymion, maybe Midas

Christopher Marlowe – Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, maybe The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (I read Malta, Tamburlaine, and parts of Faustus in a survey course, but I don’t remember which one, if any, was the most important. To be safe, I would just review all of them).

William Shakespeare – This one is tricky. Which Shakespeare plays are the most important? How do you even answer that? Reading all of his plays in a short period of time is not advisable, but here is a list of plays that are more or less considered fair game (no one is going to ask you about Coriolanus). Othello, Lear, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Richard III, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Henry IV (Part I and Part II), Taming of the Shrew, and Antony and Cleopatra. Here is a list of some that *might* be on the test: As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, King John, Henry V and Troilus and Cressida. The rest probably won’t be on the test. And if they are, you will miss no more than a point.

As for Shakespeare’s sonnets? There are 154 of them, but they are short, so just read them.

Ben Johnson – I have only ever read the Alchemist and Volpone, which were very briefly discussed in one of my classes, so your guess is as good as mine.

John Donne – The Canonization, The Flea, The Sun Rising, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, The Elegies, and Meditation XVII

John Webster – The Duchess of Malfi

John Milton – Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Sonnets, and maybe Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes

Robert Herrick – Corinna’s Going A-Maying, Delight in Disorder, To the Virgins to Make Much of Time, and The Vine

Andrew Marvell – To His Coy Mistress, A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body, and maybe On A Drop of Dew

William Congreve – The Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas, and The Way of the World

George Etherege – The Man of Mode, and maybe The Comical Revenge

John Bunyan – Pilgrim’s Progress

John Dryden – Absalom and Achitophel, The Hind and the Panther, and maybe the Medal, Mac Flecknoe, and The Duke of Guise

Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe, and maybe True Born Englishman

Alexander Pope – Rape of the Lock, Dunciad, and Essay on Moral Criticism

Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels, and Essays on the Death of Dr. Swift

Henry Fielding – The Covent Garden Tragedy. This is another one I am not terribly familiar with.

Thomas Gray – Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Samuel Johnson – Rasselas, and The Vanity of Human Wishes. He also wrote a lot of criticism. I would suggest to leaf through that.

Lawrence Sterne – Tristram Shandy

Horace Walpole – The Castle of Otranto, and maybe Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III

Thomas Chatterton – Elinor and Juga, and An Excelente Balade of Charitie

Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and maybe Thoughts on the Education of Daughters

William Cowper – Olney Hymns

Anne Radcliffe – The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, A Sicilian Romance, and The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne

William Blake – Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The First Book of Urizen

William Wordsworth – Lyrical Ballads (both of them), and Poems (both of them).

Samuel Coleridge – Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and maybe Christabel and Bibliographia Literaria

Percy Bysshe Shelley – Ozymandius, Prometheus Unbound, Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, and A Defence of Poetry

Lord Byron – Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

John Keats – All of the Odes, To Autumn, On Fame and maybe The Eve of St. Agnes

Charles Lamb – The Old Familiar Faces

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey

Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus, and maybe some of his Latter-Day Pamphlets

Alfred Tennyson – Ulysses, In Memoriam, and The Lotos Eaters,

Washington Irving – Sleepy Hollow, and maybe Tales of the Alhambra

Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven, The Cask of Amantillado, Tell Tale Heart, and maybe Annabel Lee and The Purloined Letter

Thomas Macaulay – The Armada

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

Charles Dickens – Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and maybe Oliver Twist, and a Christmas Carol

Robert Browning – Pauline, Porphyria’s Lover, and Dramatis Personae

Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter, and Young Goodman Brown

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature, Concord Hymn, Uriel, Representative Men, and maybe The Poet

Henry David Thoreau – Walden and Civil Disobedience

Herman Melville – Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and Bartleby the Scrivener

Matthew Arnold – Dover Beach, The Scholar Gipsy, Culture and Anarchy, Essays in Criticism

John Ruskin – The Stones of Venice. This is another one I am not very familiar with. I have only read excerpts of this one, and none of his other work.

George Meredith – Diana of the Crossways, and maybe The House on the Beach and Lucifer in Starlight

Charles Swinburne – Rosamond, and Songs Before Sunrise

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass

George Eliot – Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda

G. Manley Hopkins – The Wreck of the Deutschland, Spring, The Sea and the Skylark, and Felix Randal

Thomas Hardy – Far from the Maddening Crowd, Tess of the d’Ubbervilles, and Jude the Obscure

Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and maybe The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Ambassadors, and maybe The Golden Bowl

William Butler Yeats – The Second Coming and The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and maybe Nostromo

D. H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and maybe The Rocking Horse Winner

W. H. Auden – The Age of Anxiety, and maybe The Dyer’s Hand

James Joyce – Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegan’s Wake

Virginia Woolf – Orlando, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and maybe Mrs. Dalloway

Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and maybe The Garden of Eden

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby

Gertrude Stein – I have only read her poetry, and not a great deal. I was taught these poems were important: Tender Buttons, A Long Dress, A Mounted Umbrella, and Stanzas in Meditation.

T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and maybe Portrait of a Lady and Gerontion

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury, and maybe As I Lay Dying

Ezra Pound – Umbra is the only one I have been formally taught, so I don’t know if it is his most important. I have read a few others on my own, but they were random, thus not of any necessary consequence. So you might want to look into this.

E. M. Forster – A Passage to India

George Orwell – 1984, and Animal Farm

I will make a list of more authors and works in a few days (or maybe just update this one and repost it). Next, the Classics, and then the Russians.