I found this photo from my sophomore year dorm room at Columbia.

Take a look at the authors we read in my English classes: Fanon, Derrida, Said, Foucault, Hegel, Baudrillard, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Barthes, Zizek, Heidegger, Lacan, Benjamin. Then you have your the giant-ass Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and Penguin’s Literary Terms & Literary Theory handbooks. And the DSM-5 for some reason.

The only novels we studied that year are more contemporary (Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, JM Coetzee). Paradise Lost, The Sound and Fury, and The Waste Land, which all appear in the photo, weren’t for a class—just some of my favorites I’d brought along. The Norton Anthology of Poetry also wasn’t for a class. I was just trying to read some actual literature, ffs.