Theory comp update #1 - The First List

[onefixedstar]

I began making progress on my theory comp today by getting the first of three reading lists.



Rousseau
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
The Social Contract

Saint-Simon
Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (F.M.H. Markham, ed.)

Tocqueville
Democracy in America

Marx
The German Ideology
Capital (vol. 1)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Engels
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State

Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
From Max Weber (H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds.)
The Methodology of the Social Sciences

Durkheim
The Rules of Sociological Method
The Division of Labour in Society
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Simmel
Georg Simmel (D. Levine, ed.)

Michels
Political Parties

Mannheim
Ideology and Utopia

Mead
Mind, Self and Society

Polanyi
The Great Transformation

De Beauvoir
The Second Sex

Merton
Social Theory and Social Structure

Habermas
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Foucault
Discipline and Punish

Bourdieu
Outline of a Theory of Practice

Wallerstein
The Modern World System

Giddens
The Constitution of Society

Hechter
Principles of Group Solidarity



Wheee! Off to the used bookstore for me!

Comments

[semiotic-trader.livejournal.com]

Looks like fun. Of course, much of it would be more fun in the original French or German.

(I'm kidding. There's no way I could read Marx in the original German, though I have read some Foucault in the original French. Frankly, it would take me about three years to work through this list alone, even in English!)

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try to get through this--and the other two lists--in four months.

Yeah.

Wish me luck.

[semiotic-trader.livejournal.com]

Luck!

I guess you'll learn to skim :)

Or you could ask a_just_society for advice; he managed it.

[a-just-society.livejournal.com]

Three comp lists in four months? Not gonna happen, I'm afraid. Especially if the other two are as weighty in terms of theory as this one is. These are not "skimming" books.

Sorry to be a downer, but I don't see three lists of that type of books being read in any useful way in four months. Although I suppose it all depends on what you need to be able to do with them for your comps. At my peak, I was reading 1 1/2 books per weekday for my comps, but those were history books that only really required me to know the main thesis and a couple of key supplementary points. It strikes me that you'd need a more nuanced understanding of these ones.

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

We've been told, in no uncertain terms, that we only need four to six months to prepare for a comp. And since we have to be ABD by the end of our third year, that really does mean aiming for four-five months per comp if I want recovery time in between. But yeah, I'm not sure how it's going to happen either. I guess I skim 'em, find out what the questions are likely to focus on, and then go back and reread the important stuff.

[semiotic-trader.livejournal.com]

But, hey, any excuse to buy books, right?