The PhD Oral Examination in
Autobiography
The texts below represent key autobiographical works in various national traditions. For additional and alternative works, as well as for recommended secondary sources, see the designated faculty member in this area. All lists must include forty primary and six secondary texts.
Continental
- St. Augustine, Confessions
- Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
- Abelard, Historia Calamitatum
- Dante, La Vita Nuova
- Cellini, Autobiography
- St. Theresa, Autobiography
- Montaigne, Essays
- Pascal, Pensées
- Rousseau, Confessions
- Goethe
- Design and Truth
- The Sorrows of Young Werther
- Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
- Sartre, The Words
English
- Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
- Browne, Religio Medici
- Bunyan, Grace Abounding
- Cowper, Memoir
- Hume, Life
- Gibbon, Memoirs
- Wordsworth, The Prelude
- Coleridge, Biographia Litteraria
- Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
- De Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
- Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
- Mill, Autobiography
- Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua
- Eliot, Four Quartets
- Yeats, Autobiography
- Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
- Orwell
- "Such, Such Were the Joys"
- Down and Out in London and Paris
- Homage to Catalonia
American
- Edwards, Personal Narrative
- Franklin, Autobiography
- Thoreau, Walden
- Whitman, "Song of Myself"
- Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
- Nabokov, Speak, Memory