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, after the Bible, to begin with reading the Greeks and Romans and Church Fathers.

Great Literature of World Cultures

These curricula are designed to map out the great literary cultures of the world.

While general lists will be provided for free exploration, each should contain a main curriculum that could cover a six year course of study throughout secondary school of that culture, whether in translation or (preferably) in the original language.

1. English
2. French
3. Latin
4. Greek
5. German
6. Spanish
7. Japanese
8. Russian
9. Scandinavian
10. Finnish
11. Italian
12. Persian
13. Indian
14. Arabic
15. Chinese

The Beginning of the Lore

American teenagers are swamped in bad ideas and dumb media all the time. They have a dearth of opportunities to be initiated into basically good and interesting ideas. The Lore is a single anthology of several hundred excerpts of short texts across several millennia, designed to be navigable in a year or two, that would expose them to difficult passages from primary sources and interesting ideas that they probably otherwise might never be exposed to. This is designed to be fun, quirky, and inspiring, though lacking the substance of close reading through entire works. This provides short texts as a spring board for interesting discussions about history and the nature of reality and to begin thinking in other categories than what social media typically provides.

Beyond concepts, an added benefit of this reading list being widely used in the next generation would be just the linguistic broadening - the reintroduction of vocabulary and phrasings that might otherwise be forgotten in the deluge of social media and its muddying of English speech. We need to lay down enough old stones up the river of time so that young people can find a pathway back through the centuries, and not just get swept away by its unintelligibility.

Excerpts:

1. Bible Lore
2. Ancient Myths
3. The Sublime
4. Saints
5. Patristics
6. Druids
7. Vikings
8. Anglo-Saxons
9. Crusaders
10. Mohametans
11. Monks
12. Knights
13. Romances
14. Giants
15. Reformers
16. Alchemists
17. Conquistadors
18. Jesuits
19. Seafarers
20. Christian Magic
21. Natural Philosophers
22. Samurai
23. Witches
24. Antiquarians
25. Fairies
26. Colonists
27. Empires
28. Revivalists
29. Americans
30. Romantics
31. Socialists
32. Utopians
33. Industrialists
34. Inventors
35. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
36. Aesthetes
37. George-Kreis
38. Explorers
39. Archaeologists
40. Evolutionists
41. High Society
42. Cowboys
43. Avant-Garde
44. Surrealism
45. Psychology
46. Soviets
47. Nazis
48. Atomics
49. Hippies
50. Spies & Regime Changes
51. Rockets
52. Computers
53. Civil Rights
54. White Ladies (L'Engle, Le Guin, Lamott, Dillard)
55. Gonzo (Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe)
56. Soldiers of Fortune
57. California Buddhism
58. Transhumanists
59. Preppers
60. Terrorists
61. Nothomb
62. Acceleration
63. Internet literature

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 works as great as 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. It shouldn't be hard for a reasonably literate youth to at least touch on most of these authors over the course of a few years, as introductory.

This would be a basic prelude to more serious study which should involve: choosing an era or school of thought to read through thoroughly; choosing a foreign language to study over a lifetime and the great authors of that language; and general mapping out of other canonicities.

[articles in progress]

1. The Bible
2. Homer
3. Plato
4. Aristotle
5. Aeschylus, Euripides, & Sophocles
6. Vergil
7. Ovid
8. Augustine
9. Beowulf & Anglo-Saxon Poetry
10. Aquinas
11. Arthurian romance
12. Chaucer
13. Dante
14. Machiavelli
15. Luther
16. Calvin
17. Hooker
18. Pascal
19. Shakespeare
20. Hobbes
21. Milton
22. Descartes
23. Locke
24. Hume
25. Rousseau
26. Kant
27. Goethe
28. American Founding Fathers
29. Hegel
30. Austen
31. Melville
32. Dostoevsky
33. Dumas
34. Hugo
35. Baudelaire
36. Rudyard Kipling
37. Nietzsche
38. Thomas Carlyle
39. Marx
40. Freud
41. Jung
42. Oscar Wilde
43. Henry James
44. James Joyce
45. Proust
46. Camus
47. T.S. Eliot
48. Fitzgerald
49. Steinbeck
50. C.S. Lewis
51. Solzhenitsyn
52. Pynchon
53. 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