Edits

I’ve continually edited this list as I’ve tried to make it more practical. For example, War and Peace is a remarkable book, but at over 1000 pages it’s enormous and thus difficult to include on any syllabus when you’re trying to cover a lot of literary ground in (relatively) limited space. Originally I had an entire course dedicated to Tolstoy, but I combined it with the Dostoevsky course to create space for other authors. That meant I had to make some difficult choices. Here is a list of what has been removed:

Nonfiction

Eliot. T.S. — On Poetry and Poets
Forster, E.M. — Aspects of the Novel
Hobbes, Thomas — Leviathan
Hume, David — An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Kierkegaard, Soren — The Concept of Irony
Kierkegaard, Soren — The Concept of Anxiety
Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Maimonides, Moses — The Guide for the Perplexed
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich — The Communist Manifesto
Paine, Thomas — Common Sense
Pascal, Blaise — Pensees
Plotinus — Enneads
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques — The Confessions
Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Theognis — Elegies