MAPH is an intense year, and reading time quickly becomes a scarce 
resource—so we here at MAPHtastic polled some of our current students, staff, and alums to see what books they wish they had read before doing the program. See below the jump to see what might be a good beach book for the summer before, or what theory people wish they had read before the MAPH Core class in fall!
1) Sarah Smith (MAPH ’11, Program Coordinator): Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Captain Ahab, master of whale facts.
My undergraduate background was in Comparative Literature, primarily Korean and Japanese literatures in translation (I only took one class in the English department in undergrad!), so when I came to MAPH and switched my focus to American literature I had a LOT to catch up on. During winter quarter I took a class on Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne that really opened up my interests and introduced me to Melville who has since become one of my favorite authors. I wish I’d read Moby-Dick beforehand for two reasons. For one, it’s a hell of a good book—one of those rare ones that nourishes the soul and makes you not only smarter but also just a better person. And two, the breakneck pace of the quarter meant that I didn’t get to spend as long as I’d have liked with all the cetology chapters. Um, more encyclopedic details about whales, please!
2) Clancey D’Isa (Current MAPH Student): Only Words by Catherine MacKinnon
While many feminist critics including Wendy Brown and Joan Scott have pushed back against Catherine MacKinnon’s 1993 work Only Words, I’ve found the work extraordinarily helpful in trying to locate a particular set of feminist politics concerning the First Amendment’s regulation of speech, equal protection, and pornography. In the first section of her work “Defamation and Discrimination,” MacKinnon argues that the treatment of pornography as defamation, rather than discrimination, relies heavily on the reconfiguring of real abuse as an abstracted idea of abuse. For MacKinnon, this reconfiguration is based on the unequal conditions of sex—which appear reproduced in pornography through explicit form. The ultimate goal of MacKinnon’s work is to claim that pornography, represented in both image and words, has subordinated women. Though MacKinnon’s argument is based on a potentially problematic understanding of power (as a system of subordination and domination), her claim about the power of speech to construct the social realities in which people live has had great impact on reframing the debate surrounding the legal regulation of obscene materials. I’d highly recommend this work for anyone interested in the history of obscenity, the anti-pornography movement, or legal theory.
3) Lucy Bryan (MAPH ’14, Program Mentor): The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I had friends and classes that recommended the novel, but I never picked it up. Especially after college, my taste really favored contemporary literature. However, once I came to MAPH, The Picture of Dorian Gray came up in most of my classes. From my Victorian literature course, to a course on madness, to a class on art and distraction, Dorian Gray was frequently mentioned.
Beautiful Dorian and ugly Dorian.
This fall, I finally read it! And it was great—I was surprised how much I liked the novel. Not only did I understand why the novel popped up in my classes, but I also enjoyed reading it for the sake of reading it. Dorian Gray falls into both categories of academic and pleasure reading. It is an important work that applies to various academic interests. It is also a fun, weird novel.
4) A-J Aronstein (MAPH ’10, Associate Director of Career Development at UChicago Graduate Student Affairs): So What are you Going to Do with That by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius
If you’re entering into a humanities graduate program, you should definitely take a look at this classic book by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius. Conversations about the “usefulness” of humanistic work often don’t get the seriousness they deserve, collapsing too often into chicken-without-head shouts about the demise of literature, philosophy, music, linguistics, the study of languages, and everything in between. Before embarking on graduate study, it’s critical to understand both (a) how these rhetorics of crisis have evolved over time and (b) what you want to get out of a humanities program. MAPH is a great place to continue these conversations with a foundation of realistic insight into the real benefits and challenges of graduate study in these fields.
5) Evan Stoner (MAPH ’14): If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
My undergraduate career started in biochemistry before I switched to an English major, so even when I left college I felt woefully under-read. It wasn’t until after MAPH that I picked up Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and massive chunks of my humanities education clicked together to form a larger whole. If on a winter’s night a traveler Is absolutely one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read, because it contains the beginnings of ten different novels, but doesn’t finish any of them. Meanwhile, there’s the story of You, the reader, trying to piece everything together. I doubt it was intended as an allegory for a humanities degree, but it certainly functions that way. Perhaps most importantly, the novel offers a beautiful examination of the acts of reading and writing, and how they inform who we are.
6) Maren Robinson (MAPH ’03, Associate Director of MAPH): Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
I am not going to go with a literary classic or key piece of theory or even any of my favorite books. Instead, I suggest you read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. It is a classic satire of academia. There is much that is paternalistic and annoying about the novel. There is also much that is funny. It is good to have a sense of humor about the enterprise of the academy and a sense of humor will serve you well during graduate school. If you can’t bring yourself to enjoy satire then branch out into an area that is not your specialization. I wish I had found Halldór Laxness, Stevie Smith, Naguib Mafouz and Tove Jansson earlier in my life.
7) Alena Jones (Current MAPH Student): Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
Ruefle is a brilliant poet and writes brilliantly about poetry, but to limit her subject to mere verse would be doing her a great disservice. She turns her patient and incisive eye on fear, uncertainty, memory, and the pressing need to communicate with others and with ourselves. As a student, I have opened this book again and again for a reminder that no matter how isolating or pretentious grad school may feel at times, writing with compassion and curiosity need not be either of those things. A collection of nearly two decades worth of lectures to graduate students, Madness helps combat a little of the gnawing anxiety and self-doubt that often plagues us here. It reminds us why we write, why we read, and why we must share these efforts with others.
8) Megan Tusler (MAPH Preceptor): Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
I wish I had read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, because it’s so established in the field of 20th 
century American literature that all my peers and I were presumed to have already read it. It’s not even the most embarrassing “hole” in my pre-PhD archive—that would be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—but it was probably the most glaring from the outset. The overarching lesson, I suppose, is that having read THE novel in your field will give you something to talk about with your peers, as well as a bit of confidence. So, I suggest spending some time with a long, famous novel—Invisible Man, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, Ulysses—before you’re called to account for it. I learned that I did have an impressive archive from college, but that it wasn’t as specialized as some people’s, which is why I ended up with some major field-specific gaps. And of course, Invisible Man is an amazing novel that you should read anyway.
9) Emily Nordling (MAPH ’14): Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert was a game changer for me during MAPH, but I didn’t read his most seminal work until after I graduated. If I’d known how beautiful and maddening 19th century French literature could be, I’d have converted from English to Comparative Literature much sooner than I did. Not to mention, gorgeous prose and bizarre side characters make for a much more refreshing brand of cynicism than I’m used to. And since you can feel the care and scrutiny Flaubert put into each word, I have to recommend the amazing translation by Lydia Davis in tandem with the work itself.
Spoiler alert.
10) Anna Mirzayan (Current MAPH Student): Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci’s dense, brilliantly written Prison Notebooks are a collection of Marxist writings the author completed while in prison in Italy between 1929-1935. This work is a crucial hinge between classical Marxist theory, which focuses on the economic base of society, and modern Marxist analysis of the superstructure. Gramsci’s notions of cultural hegemony and the distinction between state and civil society have influenced such thinkers as Althusser, Lukacs, Fanon and Hardt and Negri. It’s a seminal text for literary scholarship, philosophy, and Marxist studies.
Ed. note: Gramsci is also a staple of the MAPH Core syllabus!