/lit/ - Literature

In 1941–42, W. H. Auden's one-semester course at the University of Michigan, "Fate and the Individual in European Literature," required over 6,000 pages of reading.

As an alternative to the final exam, Auden's students could memorize and recite six cantos from the Divine Comedy.

Required Reading:

Dante – The Divine Comedy
Aeschylus – The Agamemnon (tr. Louis MacNeice)
Sophocles – Antigone (tr. Dudley Fitts or Fitzgerald)
Horace – Odes
Augustine – Confessions
Shakespeare – Henry IV, Pt 2
Shakespeare – Othello
Shakespeare – Hamlet
Shakespeare – The Tempest
Ben Jonson – Volpone
Pascal – Pensees
Racine – Phedre
Blake – Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Goethe – Faust, Part I
Kierkegaard – Fear and Trembling
Baudelaire – Journals
Ibsen – Peer Gynt
Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
Rimbaud – A Season in Hell
Henry Adams – Education of Henry Adams
Melville – Moby Dick
Rilke – The Journal of My Other Self
Kafka – The Castle
TS Eliot – Family Reunion

OPERA LIBRETTI:
Orpheus (Gluck)
Don Giovanni (Mozart)
The Magic Flute (Mozart)
Fidelio (Beethoven)
Flying Dutchman (Wagner)
Tristan und Isolde (Wagner)
Götterdämmerung (Wagner)
Carmen (Bizet)
Traviata (Verdi)

RECOMMENDED CRITICAL READING:
Patterns of Culture – Ruth Benedict
From the South Seas – Margaret Mead
Middletown – Robert Lynd
The Heroic Age – Hector Chadwick
Epic and Romance – W.P. Ker
Plato Today – R.H.S. Crossman
Christianity and Classical Culture – C.N. Cochrane
The Allegory of Love – C.S. Lewis