English 287:  Great Books

Texts for the Course 

 

Here are the works we will be focusing on for our course this semester.  I have listed here the editions I have ordered at Claflin Books and Copies.  

This bookstore is located  in the little shopping mall at the southwest corner of the intersection of Denison Avenue and Claflin Road -- right across from the Marlatt Dormitory Complex (and catty-cornered from Ackert Hall, where the Biology Division is centered. 

Please note that I have not filed a textbook order with either Varney's bookstore in Aggieville or the bookstore in the KSU Student Union.  So if you go looking for them there, you will be disappointed.

These are the editions I will make page and/or line references to in the assignments you will find in the Course Schedule.  

But it is also possible, within certain limits, to use other editions.  Please check with me, however, before you use one of these.  (Please note that, if you do use a different edition, you will be responsible for locating passages in your edition that are equivalent to the ones referred to in the Course Schedule, and [of course] for keeping up with the assignments. )

 

 

1.  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle.  Dell paperback.  (Either the mass market paperback [1969] or the trade paperback [1998] will do.  The chapters are short, so we can get by with chapter references instead of page references.)

2. Friedrich Dürrenmat, The Physicists.  Translated by James Kirkup.  Grove/Atlantic, 1990.

3.  Homer, The Odyssey.  Translated by Robert Fagles, with an Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox.  Penguin papberback, 1997.

4.  Virgil, The Aeneid.  Translated by Robert Fitzgerald.  Vintage Classic paperback edition, 1990.

5.  Dante Alighieri, The Inferno.  Translated with Introduction and Notes by John Ciardi.  Signet Classic, 2001.

6.  Voltaire, Candide.  Dover Thrift Edition, 1991.

7.  Charles Dickens, Hard Times.  Dover Thrift Edition, 1990.

8.  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.  Dover Thrift Edition, 1991.

9.  J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians.  Penguin paperback, 1980.

10.   Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  Translated by Aaron Asher.  HarperCollins paperback, reprint edition 1999.

The above 10 works are the only purchases required for this course, and the only texts for which I have placed a class order at Claflin Books and Copies.  

For the items 2 through 5, above, you should be sure to obtain the editions specified.  (Otherwise we'll have terrible difficulty "being on the same page" in several senses of that phrase.)  For the remaining items, you are welcome to use any edition you can find.

  Return to the Home Page for English 287:  Great Books.

  Questions or suggestions are welcome.  Please contact the instructor at lyman@ksu.edu .

  This page last updated 25 August 2005 .