the Books
While not an exhaustive list, these works are required in their respective Great Books (GBK) courses.
GBK 101: Among Gods and Heroes
Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey
Sappho (selections)
Herodotus or Thucydides (selections)
Aeschylus (one play)
Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus
Plato: Apology of Socrates
GBK 202: Classical Cultures
Plato: Meno and Republic
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
Euclid: Elements (Book 1)
Virgil: Aeneid
Josephus: The Jewish War
Sulpicia (selected poems)
GBK 203: The Hebrew and Christian Traditions
Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1-22, Exodus 1-24, Amos, Isaiah 40-55, Job 1-13, 38-42, Song of Songs, Ruth
New Testament: One Synoptic Gospel, John, Acts 1-11, 15-17, Romans
The Martyrdom of Perpetual and Felicity
Qu’ran (selections)
Augustine: Confessions (Books 1-8)
Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias (selections)
Aquinas: Summa Theologica (selections)
GBK 304: Order and Ingenuity
1001 Arabian Nights (selections)
Dante: The Divine Comedy (selections)
Machiavelli: The Prince
Calvin: The Institutes of Christian Religion (selections)
Christine de Pizan: Book of the City of Ladies (selections)
Montaigne: Essays (selections)
Cervantes: Don Quixote (selections)
Galileo: The Starry Messenger
GBK 305: The Modern Worldview
Shakespeare: Hamlet or King Lear
Francis Bacon: Novum Organum, Essays or Great Instauration (selections)
Descartes: Discourse on the Method or Pascal: Pensees (selections)
Hobbes: Leviathan (selections)
Locke: Second Treatise of Government
Cavendish: Blazing World (selections)
Milton: Paradise Lost (selections)
Montagu: Turkish Embassy Letters (selections)
Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (selections)
Voltaire: Candide
Equiano: Interesting Narrative (selections)
GBK 306: Reason and Revolution
Jane Austen: Persuasion
Charles Darwin: On the Origin of the Species
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Haitan Revolution Documents
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay: The Federalist Papers
Thomas Jefferson et al: The Declaration of Independence and The United States Constitution
Immanuel Kant: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto or Karl Marx: Capital: Volume 3: A Critique of Political Economy
Romantic Poetry: Selections (including Phillis Wheatley, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein: 1818
Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations
Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman
GBK 407: The Age of Ambivalence
Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols
Weber:The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (selections)
DuBois: The Souls of Black Folks
Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Selected texts from the 19th or 20th century feminist tradition
Psychology text: (e.g., William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B. F. Skinner, Mamie Phipps Clark, Anna Freud)