Lists of Possible Texts

Possible text lists for core Great Texts Courses.

Actual courses typically read a portion of these works (about 6 to 10 books per course)

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, Medea, Iphigenia at Aulis
  Virgil, The Aeneid
  Plato, The Republic, Symposium, Gorgias or Last Socratic Dialogues
  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
  Cicero, De Republica, De Officiis
  Seneca, Moral Letters, Moral Essays
  Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
  Ovid, Metamorphoses
  Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho
  St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection
  St. Augustine, The Confessions

Medieval Intellectual Tradition (GTX 2302)

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

Middle Ages(GTX 3320):

• St. Benedict of Nursia, Rule of St. Benedict
  Qur'an
  Al-Ghazali, On the Incoherence of the Philosophers
  Averroes, Decisive Treatise
  Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed (selections)
  St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons
  St. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, On Freedom of the Will
  St. Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God
  Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (selections)
  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (selections), De Malo
  Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Vita Nuova
  Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante
  Petrarch, My Secret Book
  William Langland, Piers Plowman
  The Lais of Marie de France
  Julian of Norwich, Showings of Divine Love
  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales(selections)
  Catherine of Siena, Dialogue
  Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance
  François Villon, Poems

Early Modern Age(GTX 3321):

• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man
  Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
  Desiderius 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
  Miguel de 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)
  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
  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, Untimely Meditations
  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
  Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris 
  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment
  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
  Honoréde Balzac, Père Goriot

Twentieth Century(GTX 4321):

• William Butler Yeats, Poems(selections)
  William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
  Max Weber, The 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, Fides et Ratio