Columbia Reading List, Literature Humanities, 1991-1992

Fall Semester

• Homer. Iliad.
  Odyssey
• Homeric Hymns. "Hymn to Demeter."
• Sappho. Poems.
• Aeschylus. Oresteia.
• Herodotus. The Persian Wars.
• Sophocles. Oedipus the King.
  Antigone
• Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War (selections).
• Euripides. Electra.
  The Bacchae
• Aristophanes. The Clouds.
• Plato. Symposium.
  Apology or The Republic
• Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics
  The Poetics
• Virgil. Aeneid.
• The Bible. Old Testament: Genesis, Job.

Spring Semester

• The Bible. New Testament: The Gospels.
• Augustine. Confessions.
• Dante. Inferno.
• Boccaccio. The Decameron (selections).
• Montaigne. Essays (selections).
• Shakespeare. Play of Choice
  King Lear
• Milton. Paradise Lost (optional).
• Cervantes. Don Quixote (selections).
• Descartes. Discourse on Method.
  Meditations on the First Philosophy
• Goethe. Faust, Part 1.
• Austen. Pride and Prejudice.
• Woolf. To the Lighthouse.
  A Room of One's Own
• Instructor's Choice.

Source: Denby, David. Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. © 1996 by David Denby

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