Two books, one table
Compare Set two works beside each other. Suggested pairings are arguments, not assignments.
First work Choose a work The Iliad The Odyssey Oedipus Rex Antigone Lyric Fragments The Aeneid The Georgics Metamorphoses Odes The Divine Comedy La Vita Nuova The Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hamlet King Lear Sonnets Don Quixote Essays Paradise Lost Tartuffe Gulliver’s Travels Candide Confessions The History of Rasselas Lyrical Ballads The Prelude The Great Odes Frankenstein The Tell-Tale Heart Pride and Prejudice Emma Great Expectations Bleak House Anna Karenina War and Peace Middlemarch Ulysses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Trial The Metamorphosis The Waste Land Beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude Giovanni’s Room The Fire Next Time The Handmaid’s Tale Genesis The Book of Job The Psalms The Oresteia The Bacchae The Song of Roland Confessions Doctor Faustus Faust Moby-Dick Madame Bovary The Brothers Karamazov Poems Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Absalom, Absalom! Blood Meridian Second work Choose a work The Iliad The Odyssey Oedipus Rex Antigone Lyric Fragments The Aeneid The Georgics Metamorphoses Odes The Divine Comedy La Vita Nuova The Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hamlet King Lear Sonnets Don Quixote Essays Paradise Lost Tartuffe Gulliver’s Travels Candide Confessions The History of Rasselas Lyrical Ballads The Prelude The Great Odes Frankenstein The Tell-Tale Heart Pride and Prejudice Emma Great Expectations Bleak House Anna Karenina War and Peace Middlemarch Ulysses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Trial The Metamorphosis The Waste Land Beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude Giovanni’s Room The Fire Next Time The Handmaid’s Tale Genesis The Book of Job The Psalms The Oresteia The Bacchae The Song of Roland Confessions Doctor Faustus Faust Moby-Dick Madame Bovary The Brothers Karamazov Poems Heart of Darkness The Sun Also Rises Absalom, Absalom! Blood Meridian
Two men trapped in procedures they did not write. Hamlet stages a play to catch a king; Josef K. never finds the court that has already caught him. Seeming and unreachable law are cousins.
Novel · 1925
The Trial Franz Kafka
Josef K. is arrested without being told why. Courts occupy attics; procedure replaces accusation. Guilt is a climate.
Unreachable law Guilt without charge Play · c. 1601
Hamlet William Shakespeare
A Danish prince is charged by a ghost to avenge a murder and spends five acts thinking, acting, and failing to keep thought and action apart. The court becomes a stage of surveillance.
Action and thought Seeming