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