English 287:  Great Books (Fall 2003)

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Our course in Fall 2003 is designed to enable students to get practice in thinking through, privately and in group discussion, sophisticated literature from a variety of times and places, and at the same time to acquaint themselves with some of the acknowledged masterpieces of literature in the Western Tradition.  

Please consult the more detailed discussion of the Goals of the Course in order to get clear on the implications of this apparently simple statement.

Readings

In the course of the semester, we will read through and discuss 8 works of various kinds from different subcultures within the larger Western Tradition.

Author/work Period (first appearance) Type (one set of classifications)
Homer, The Odyssey  Dark Age/Archaic Greece (around 800-750 BCE) Heroic Epic Poem
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Classical Greece Greek Tragic Drama
Shakespeare, Othello Renaissance England (1604) Elizabethan-Jacobean Tragic Drama
Molière, Tartuffe Baroque/Enlightenment France (1664) Comic Drama
Voltaire, Candide Enlightenment France (1759) Philosophical Tale
Goethe, Faust (Part I) Romantic Period Germany (1808) Theatre of the Mind ("Closet Drama"")
Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (1963) Postmodern Satiric Novel
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) Novel as "Chautauqua monologue"

For information on which editions to acquire, and where to get them, see Texts for the Course.

Although we will primarily be taking up these works individually, we will also see how a number of the later ones are (among other things) "carrying on a conversation with" some of their predecessors, and that this contributes in an important way to their overall meaning.

The table above gives you a chronological picture of the order in which our works emerged in history. In our course, however, we will begin with Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, then proceed from The Odyssey through Faust, and wind up with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

For the reading assignments by date, see the Course Schedule.

Evaluation

The course grade will be based on a series of quizzes, regular participation in discussions on the course message boards, two out-of-class essays, and a final exam.

For important details, see Grades.

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   Contents copyright © 2003 by Lyman A. Baker. 

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  This page last updated 20 August 2003.