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Great Texts Courses

Possible text lists for core Great Texts Courses.
Most courses will read 10-12 books.

    Intellectual Tradition of the Ancient World(GTX 2301)

      The Bible (selections)
      Confucius, The Analects
      Bhagavad-Gita
      Homer, Iliad or Odyssey
      Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone
      Aeschylus, Oresteia
      Euripides, Trojan Women, The Bacchae
      Virgil, The Aeneid
      Plato, The Republic, Symposium, or Last Socratic Dialogues
      Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
      St. Augustine, The Confessions
      Cicero, De Republica, De Officiis
      Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
      Ovid, Metamorphoses

    Medieval Intellectual Tradition (GTX 2302)

      St. Anselm, Proslogion, Why God Became Man
      Julian of Norwich, Showings
      St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Selections)
      Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
      Dante, The Divine Comedy
      Cervantes, Don Quixote
      Qur'an (selections)
      The Lais of Marie de France
      Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (selections)
      Averroes, Decisive Treatise
      Luther, The Freedom of the Christian
      John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (selections)
      William Shakespeare, Plays and Sonnets
      John Milton, Paradise Lost (selections)

    Middle Ages (GTX 3320):

      Benedict of Nursia, Rule of St. Benedict
      Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons
      Anselm, Proslogion, On Freedom of the Will
      Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God
      Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (selections)
      Qur'an
      Al-Ghazali, On the Incoherence of the Philosophers
      Averroes, Decisive Treatise
      Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed (selections)
      Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (selections)
      Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vita Nuova
      Boccaccio, Life of Dante
      Petrarch, My Secret Book
      The Lais of Marie de France
      Julian of Norwich, Showings of Divine Love
      Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (selections)

    Early Modern Age (GTX 3321):

      Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man
      Machiavelli, The Prince
      Erasmus, In Praise of Folly and On Free Will
      Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian
      Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises
      John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (selections)
      Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
      Cervantes, Don Quixote
      William Shakespeare, selections from Plays and Sonnets
      George Herbert, The Temple
      René Descartes, The Meditations
      Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (selections)
      John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
      Blaise Pascal, Pensées
      John Milton, Paradise Lost
      John Locke, On Toleration, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (selections)
      Giambattista Vico, The New Science
      Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience

    Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (GTX 4320):

      Voltaire, Candide
      Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
      Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Confessions
      Declaration of Independence and The Constitution
      Federalist Papers (selections)
      Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (selections)
      Goethe, Faust (selections)
      Jane Austen, Emma
      William Wordsworth, Poems
      Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit
      Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and The Present Age
      Henry David Thoreau, Walden
      Herman Melville, Moby Dick
      Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
      Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (selections)
      John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
      Charles Dickens, Bleak House
      Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems
      Emily Dickinson, Poems
      Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (selections)
      Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
      George Eliot, Middlemarch
      Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto
      John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua
      Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
      Robert Browning, Poems
      Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
      Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
      Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
      Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris
      Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
      Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

    Twentieth Century (GTX 4321):

      W. B. Yeats, Poems (selections)
      William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
      Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
      Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
      Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (selections)
      James Joyce, Ulysses
      Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse,
      William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
      Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus
      Flannery O'Connor, Short Stories
      C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
      T. S. Eliot, Poems and Plays (selections)
      Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship
      The Barmen Declaration
      Elie Wiesel, Night
      Albert Camus, The Stranger
      Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
      Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
      Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
      Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
      Toni Morrison, Beloved
      Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
      Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country
      Richard Wright, Native Son
      Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
      John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae




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