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.
Literature Curricula
English
French
German
Spanish
Japanese
Russian
Scandinavian
Finnish
Italian
Persian
Indian
Arabic
Chinese
Core Ideas
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]
- 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
Global 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