Literature Humanities: Texts 1937-2020

The list includes texts designated as optional but not texts read in individual sections during free reading periods (or offered as choice earlier). The sequence of years indicated is always that of academic years regardless of the semester in which the text was read.

Of the texts below, the following were and are customarily read in excerpts: Herodotus, The Persian Wars; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars; Plato, The Republic; Aristotle, Ethics; Old Testament; New Testament; Augustine, Confessions; Dante, Divine Comedy; Boccaccio, Decameron; Rabelais, Gargantua & Pantagruel; Montaigne, Essays; Cervantes, Don Quixote; Spinoza, Ethics; Fielding, Tom Jones; Rousseau, Confessions; and Goethe, Faust.     

During the free choice period at the end of the year, when instructors may choose a nineteenth- or twentieth-century text, and earlier when some room is left in the syllabus for additional choices, the following titles suggest the range of selections made, including the texts listed above and not read during a particular year: Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Morrison, Beloved; Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Borges, Labyrinths; Walcott, Omeros; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; The Epic of Gilgamesh; Sappho, Poems; Mme De Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves; Voltaire, Candide; Aristophanes; the Lais of Marie de France; and Christine de Pisan's The Book of the City of Ladies.     

Note that Humanities A is also known, thanks to student usage, as Literature Humanities or, more often, "Lit Hum."

Note:  The record is not clear on this but, since some veterans insist Lycidas was read as a required text, it is included here.