Senior Thesis – Reading List
Choose one of these to read with the understanding that you must use it to write
your final Thesis Paper for Quarter 4. Your Thesis must be 10 pages in length
and utilize 4 different secondary sources. Your Thesis Statement will reflect the
big question on which we’ve focused this year: “How do we know?” We will
discuss this further after the break.
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong
man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict
between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world.
The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the
destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries.
These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of
encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions
of the soul.
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
The title derives from Book XI of Homer's The Odyssey, wherein Agamemnon speaks to
Odysseus: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I
descended into Hades." The novel utilizes stream of consciousness writing technique,
multiple narrators, and the inner psychological voices of the characters. In the story, the
members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to
the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Faulkner fights out the moral problem in the
South which was repressed after the nineteenth century, but more than this, Faulkner
was actually seeking out the nature of man.
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of
storytelling. this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor
collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still
O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the
myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it.
Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man – James Joyce
a fictional re-creation of the Irish writer's own life and early environment. The experiences
of the novel's young hero, Stephen Dedalus, unfold in astonishingly vivid scenes that
seem freshly recalled from life and provide a powerful portrait of the coming of age of a
young man of unusual intelligence, sensitivity, and character.
The Fall – Albert Camus
Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study
of modern amorality. Which forces the reader to examine his/her own life.
Soon after publishing The Fall, Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in
the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. scandal lurks behind respectability. The quiet
drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played out in the complexly portrayed
central characters of the novel.
Notes From Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Represents a turning point in Dostoevsky's writing towards the more political side. In this
work we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who disillusioned by the oppression
and corruption of the society in which he lives withdraws from that society into the
underground. A sheer delight – and horror – to read.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In
the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the family, one sees all of humanity,
just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin
America.
The Iliad - Homer
Homer's great epic poem typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time.
But to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its
action and characters: Achilles, Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and
history in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy.
The Inferno - Dante Alighieri
Dante plunges to the very depths of Hell and embarks on his arduous journey towards
God. In this first part of his Divine Comedy, Dante fused satire and humor with intellect
and soaring passion to create an immortal Christian allegory of mankind's search for selfknowledge and spiritual enlightenment.