The Core recently did a survey of syllabi in programs at other schools offering courses that are like Core in method and structure: primary texts, organized chronologically, giving students a working knowledge of the foundational works and ideas of our shared cultural heritage. While many of the books we saw on those other syllabi were familiar to us — Gilgamesh! The Aeneid! The Confessions! Pride & Prejudice! — we were intrigued by the range of readings that aren’t studied in our own classes, but which we could imagine falling into place on our reading list if there were only room enough.
Below, we’ve compiled a list of some of the major works students in other Core programs are reading. Some of them you’ll likely have heard of; others are less commonly encountered, inside the classroom or outside of it. In any case, we here in the Core office think a case could be made for including any or all of these books in a Core-type course. But then, we here in the Core office also think a case could be made for establishing Core-type courses for students in the third year, and the fourth year, and, why not, as continuing education courses that alumni can take on campus or via some kind of online connection. Ὁ βίος βραχύς! If there is an emblem for our bookworm affliction, it would have to be poor tragic Henry Bemis from that old episode of The Twilight Zone….
So, what do you think? What Core-type texts — essential works of lasting cultural relevance, artistic greatness, or societal value — would YOU add to the reading list, if we could double our time in the classroom?
- Aeschylus: Agamemnon
- anonynous: Lazarillo do Tormes
- Arendt: On Violence
- Aristophanes: The Clouds
- Augustine: Confessions
- Beckett: Waiting for Godot
- Berlin: Many Thousands Gone – The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
- Brecht: The Threepenny Opera
- Calvino: Invisible Cities
- Cather: A Lost Lady
- Conrad: Heart of Darkness and Selections from the Congo Diary
- Cook, trans.: Njal’s Saga
- Das: The Difficulty of Being Good
- Dostoyevsky: Underground Man
- Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings
- DuBois: Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil
- Euridipes: Hippolytus
- Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth
- Freud: An Outline of Psychoanalysis
- Gates: Classic Slave Narratives
- Hemingway: Natural History of the Dead
- Ibsen: Hedda Gabler
- Kafka: Metamorphosis
- King: Letter from Birmingham Jail
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Luther: Concerning Christian Liberty
- Mead: Coming to Age in Samoa
- Plato: Apology
- Plato: Gorgias
- Rousseau: The Origin of Civil Society
- Sandel: Justice – What’s the Right Thing to Do?
- Shakespeare: Henry V
- Shakespeare: Richard II
- Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice
- Shakespeare: The Tempest
- Singh: The Train to Pakistan
- Sophocles: Antigone
- Sophocles: Oedipus the King
- Soyinka: Death and the King’s Horseman
- Varisco: Chimpanzee Politics
- Warhol and Doctorow: Book of Daniel
- Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
- Woolf: To the Lighthouse
