the Courses

GBK 101. Among Gods and Heroes

The introductory course in the Great Books Program concentrates on the ancient Greeks and includes works by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Plato.

GBK 202. Classical Cultures

Prerequisite: GBK 101 or approval of the program director.
Readings from such authors as Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and Virgil.

GBK 203. The Hebrew and Christian Traditions

Prerequisite: GBK 202 or approval of the program director.
Readings in several books of the Old and New Testaments as well as selections from Augustine and Aquinas.

GBK 304. Order and Ingenuity

Prerequisite: GBK 202 or 203, or approval of the program director.
Readings from such authors as Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Galileo, and Montaigne.

GBK 305. The Modern Worldview

Prerequisite: GBK 202 or 203, or approval of the program director.
Readings from such authors as Shakespeare, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and Milton.

GBK 306. Reason and Revolution

Prerequisite: GBK 202 or 203, or approval of the program director.
Readings from such authors as Rousseau, Goethe, Smith, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Emerson, and Darwin.

GBK 407. The Age of Ambivalence

Prerequisites: GBK 202, 203, and either GBK 304 or 305 or 306, or approval of the program director.
Readings from such authors as Dostoevsky, Yeats, Mendel, Freud, Weber, and Nietzsche.

GBK 495. Special Topics

Prerequisites: GBK 101 and at least junior status or approval of the program director.
A study of texts, themes, or authors not covered in the regular offerings or an intensive study of a major work. Topics offered recently include Victor Hugo, Henry Adams, Jane Austen, Histories, Goethe: Poet and Scientist, Faulkner and the South, Marcel Proust, Paradise Lost, Homer’s Iliad, and Great Women Authors.