Literature Curricula

This page is intended to provide resources for secondary and undergraduate level studies in literature. While nothing can substitute for close reading, the most efficient way to make students generally confident and adept at textual interpretation is by providing context -- that is, as broad a survey of world literature and history as possible so that they can notice parallels and themes spanning all times and places, while also foregrounding idiosyncrasies. That's not to suggest that all literary scenes, schools, and eras are interchangeable in importance. It really is most important to begin with reading the Greeks and Romans and Church Fathers.

A Basic Great Books Curriculum

It's probably a bad idea to teach people that there is a simple list of 50 authors whose books are the most important to work through, to make a chore out of reading the best writers of all time. But in our illiterate age if we can get a student to pick up just a few of these, I count it as victory. And is true that a passing familiarity with these great texts provides a core vocabulary for launching off into the interpretation all other literature and history you might come across. So, I think it's worth promoting a basic Western Canon if only to open better doors of thought for young people to walk through, better doors than most of what discord and youtube and instagram and 4chan and reddit currently provide...

The goal, then, is for students to have a basic introduction to all of these individuals -- not to put them up on pedestals of pretentious unthinking reverence. In doing so schools have discovered a diabolical aptitude for turning Shakespeare into a burden for so many souls.

I would argue that in depth analysis and memorization is only necessary for sacred scripture. Everything else should be treated more lightly and playfully.

The Bible

Homer

Plato

Aristotle

Aeschylus, Euripides, & Sophocles

Vergil

Ovid

Augustine

Beowulf & Anglo-Saxon Poetry

Aquinas

Arthurian romance

Chaucer

Dante

Machiavelli

Luther

Calvin

Hooker

Pascal

Shakespeare

Hobbes

Milton

Descartes

Locke

Hume

Rousseau

Kant

Goethe

American Founding Fathers

Hegel

Austen

Melville

Dostoevsky

Dumas

Hugo

Baudelaire

Rudyard Kipling

Nietzsche

Thomas Carlyle

Marx

Freud

Jung

Oscar Wilde

Henry James

James Joyce

Proust

Camus

T.S. Eliot

Fitzgerald

Steinbeck

C.S. Lewis

Solzhenitsyn

Pynchon

Tom Wolfe

Canonicities

In draft:

ancient egypt & egyptologists

mesopotamian canon

chinese classics

greek canon

romans

persian canon

pagan myth

church fathers

islamic jurists and golden age philosophers

Arab-Byzantine Wars

Reconquista

buddhist philosophers

germanic texts

medieval rabbis

medieval romances, medieval poetry, allegories,

hagiographies

schoolmen

medieval chronicles

Courtly love, troubadours

Crusader literature

renaissance humanists and reformers

counter reformation literature

western hermeticism

new world explorers

the ottoman canon

English renaissance, metaphysical poets

reformed orthodox, remonstrants

dutch golden age authors

Anglo-Dutch-Spanish War Era

spanish golden age

1700s satirists

1700s Anglo-French Global Wars

Lumieres, enlightenment philosophers, 1700s french literature

explorer naturalists

Napoleonic era literature, Revolutionary era

Romanticism, Gothic

19th century academics, historiography, the German university

19th century socialists, anarchists, and marxists

Colonial literature

Mission literature

the victorians, literature of the industrial revolution

Victorian Explorer Anthropologist (esoteric imperial racism) / Scramble for Africa / Orientalists

New England authors, transcendentalists

French symbolists

literary realists

Post Napoleonic Literature

Post Civil War Era Literature

Russian canon

The Great Game: empires' perspectives and from the locals' perspectives

Siberia, Alaska, and Arctic Extremes

theosophists

Utopians

New York New Religions

Third Republic Literature

fin de siecle and the edwardians, decadents

Missionaries and Anglo-American Empire, Old China Hands

American expansions

Jewish diaspora, Zionists, and their influence

austrian literature near the end

modernists, paris scene

surrealists

socialist and labor movements reaching climax in depression and world wars

Wartime and Interwar German Literature, Nazi and Non-Nazi Literature

Southern agrarians, Southern American canon

modern Japanese canon

founding psychologists

early sociologists

early science fiction

Early Soviets - russian cosmists, radicals

Postcolonial literature and theorists

continental theorists

glamor photographers

Cold War literature, American controlled Europe,

Later Soviets

esoteric central european art scenes, film, animation 1900-1990

underground comix

Midcentury Anthropologists

beats, hippie canon

60s Sci-Fi

transhumanist canon

magical realists, exoticist bobocore

art pop for christian schools

indie cinema

short films