Lists of Possible Texts

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
• 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
• Federalist Papers (selections)

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