Close Reading With “The Great Gatsby”

• Read The Great Gatsby
• Write a short essay about what you think about the book
• Read a chapter of Critical Theory by Lois Tyson (minus the close reading)
• Apply what you learned to The Great Gatsby and write another essay
• Double check your work with the close reading section
• Repeat until done

Deconstruction Papers

Work backwards from critics. Read a paragraph and try to come up with questions that their paragraph would answer. Apply those questions to further works.

Books to Read

Fiction

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Beloved
• Frankenstein
• The Greek Tragedies
  • Iliad
  • Odyssey
• 2666 by Bolano
• Ducks Newburyport by Ellmann
• Atonement by McEwan
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• Blood Meridian by McCarthy
• Gilead by Robinson
• A Mercy by Morrison
• Citizen by Claudia Rankine
• Pynchon
• Twain -> Vonnegut
• Hawthorne -> Morrison
• Dickens -> Lamb and Eggers

Non-Fiction

• The Well Educated Mind
• Introduction to Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton
• How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor
• The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders
• The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
• Columbia History of X Literature
• Beginning Theory by Peter Barry
• Norton Anthology of English Literature
• Norton Introduction to Literature
• The Seagull Reader: Literature
• Penguin Academics: (Dram, Poetry Fiction): A Pocket Anthology
• A Longman Pocket Anthology
• Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Bressler
• The Outlaw Bible of X
• How Fiction Works
• Aspects of the Novel
• The Uses of Literature
• The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms
• How to read and why
• The Western Canon
• Clear and Simple as the Truth
• Strunk and White
• Project Muse (papers)
• The Living Handbook of Narratology
• Critical Terms by Lentricchia
• The Critical Tradition by Richter
• How to Read a Poem by Terry Eagleton
• Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications
• How to Study a Novel

Critiques

• Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
• Something to Declare by Julian Barnes
• The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney
• Anything that Zadie Smith has written

Courses

• Yale Courses
  • Paul Fry
  • American Revolution by Joanne Freeman
• The Great Courses
• Harvard Courses
• Clockworks Academy
• ModPo
• Open Courses
• Harvard courses on EdX
• OpenLearn
• Coursera
• Open Syllabus

Podcasts

• Classical Stuff You Should Now
• Hardcore Literature
• The History of Literature
• https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/people/catherine-brown
• This Is Shakespeare
• B.O.S.S.
• http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/literature-and-form

YouTube

• Dr. Octavia Cox
• Kurt Vonnegut