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Model VI: Encounters with the Other
A team-taught one-semester course: political science, area
studies, psychology, and literature.
- Travel and Self-Recognition in the Face of the Other
Gilgamesh (Vol A)
Homer, The Odyssey (Vol A)
Dante, The Divine Comedy (Vol B)
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals," "Of Coaches" (Vol
C)
Shakespeare, Othello (Vol C)
Wu Cheng’en, Monkey
(Vol D)
Celebi’s Book of Travels (Vol D)
Voltaire, Candide (Vol D)
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Vol D)
Bashō, The Narrow Road of the Interior (Vol
D)
Tennyson, "Ulysses" (Vol E)
Baudelaire, "Invitation to the Voyage" (Vol
E)
Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium," "Byzantium" (Vol F)
Mann, Death in Venice (Vol F)
Derek Walcott, "North
and South," Omeros, "Granada" (Vol
F)
- The Encounter with Supernatural and Spirit Worlds
Euripides, Medea (Vol A)
Chuang Chou, Chuang Tzu (Vol A)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Vol A)
The Thousand and One Nights (Vol B)
Murasaki, The Tale of Genji (Vol B)
The Tale of the Heike (Vol B)
Kanze, Dōjōji (Vol B)
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Vol C)
Ueda, Bewitched (Vol D)
Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (Vol
E)
Yeats, Leda and the Swan (Vol F)
Kafka, "The Metamorphosis" (Vol
F)
Andrew Peynetsa, The Boy and the Deer (Vol F)
Mahfouz, "Zaabalawi" (Vol
F)
Silko, Yellow Woman (Vol F)
- Home Invaded by the Other
The Bible: The Old Testament, Psalm 137 (Vol A)
Tu Fu, "Song of P‘eng-ya" (Vol A)
The Song of Roland (Vol B)
Boccaccio, The Decameron (Vol B)
Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna (Vol C)
Milton, Paradise Lost (Vol C)
Neruda, "I’m Explaining a Few Things" (Vol F)
Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Vol
F)
Camus, The Guest (Vol F)
Kojima, The American School (Vol F)
Doris Lessing, The Old Chief Mshlanga (Vol F)
Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Vol F)
Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (Vol F)
Amichai, Poems (Vol F)
Yehoshua, Facing the Forests (Vol F)
- Trying to Discern the Thought of the Other
The Bible: The Old Testament, Job (Vol A)
Plato, The Apology of Socrates (Vol A)
Chaucer, The Wife of Bath, The Pardoner (Vol
B)
Shakespeare, Othello, Hamlet (Vol C)
Blake, "The Tyger"(Vol E))
Victor Hugo, "Et Nox Facta Est"(Vol E)
Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (Vol
E)
Melville, Billy Budd (Vol E)
Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog (Vol E)
Freud, Dora (Vol F)
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Vol
F)
Rilke, "The Panther" (Vol F)
Joyce, The Dead (Vol F)
Yehoshua, Facing the Forests (F)
A Note on Canons
The standard syllabus for Western Great Books courses
has tended to be chronologically organized to show the
formation
of the traditions underlying the civilization they describe
and inform. Since it was to be understood that only the
most enduring texts could find their way onto such a list,
inevitably
these courses look backward. Moreover, because the tradition
they embodied was presumed to be self-evident, little
effort was spent in justifying the texts themselves or
delineating
some kind of rationale for linking them—thematic, generic,
or otherwise.
Two of the best-known such compilations, the Great Books
List that constitutes the entire four-year undergraduate
curriculum of St. John’s College at Annapolis and the Literature
Humanities course required of all freshmen at Columbia College,
in combination with a social-science course called Contemporary
Civilization, date from 1937. While some traditionalists
contend that the items read in these courses constitute some
immutable essence of Western culture, the courses have evolved
in telling ways over the last sixty years. If modern works
have been omitted, by and large—by definition they have not
stood the test of time—today’s modern is different from 1937’s.
Thus in 1987, when a great deal of publicity hailed Columbia’s
continuing faith in Literature Humanities, the reading list
concluded with one optional text to be selected by the instructor, "preferably
19th- or 20th-century novel." The last-named item on Columbia’s
spring list that year, however, was Pride and Prejudice,
published in 1813, and clearly a concession to the presence
of women in the college.
Great Books lists change, then: traditions are perceived
differently from one era to the next and each generation
of instructors brings a new set of literary expectations
and philosophical assumptions to bear on what, and how,
they teach.
To gain some historical perspective on the form that has
developed into the World Literature survey that is
our main concern, here is the 1937–38 Freshman Book List assigned
as required reading in the humanities at Columbia College.
First Semester
Homer, The Iliad *
Aeschylus, The Oresteia *
Sophocles, Oedipus the King *
Euripides, Electra
Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris
Euripides, Medea *
Aristophanes, The Frogs
Plato, The Apology *
Aristotle, Ethics
Aristotle, Poetics *
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Virgil, The Aeneid *
SECOND SEMESTER
Augustine, Confessions *
Dante, Inferno *
Machiavelli, The Prince *
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Montaigne, Essays *
Shakespeare, Henry IV, Parts I and II
Shakespeare, Hamlet *
Shakespeare, King Lear
Cervantes, Don Quixote *
Milton, Paradise Lost *
Spinoza, Ethics
Molière, Tartuffe *
Molière, Le Misanthrope
Molière, The Physician in Spite of Himself
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels *
Fielding, Tom Jones
Rousseau, Confessions *
Voltaire, Candide *
Goethe, Faust *
No one would question the excellence of the individual
selections, nor be surprised by the omission of writers
like Sappho and
Chaucer and Austen, who have all occasionally been added
and then sometimes again abandoned in the course of the
last half century and more. What emerges most clearly,
however,
is the absence of the Hebraic foundation of Western thought.
Today’s Western courses begin with Genesis and Homer; in
1937, St. Augustine and Dante bravely started the second
semester without any biblical context having been established.
By 1956, with the first edition of The Norton Anthology
of World Masterpieces, this had clearly changed. Those
of us who have taught world (Western) surveys for the last
couple of decades learned to show the fusion of classical
traditions with the Judaic in the formation of the Christian
sensibility that would then be the central focus of the medieval
period as constructed in the traditional anthologies.
This was clearly not always and still is not everywhere
the case. On the current St. John’s List of Great Books,
not until the sophomore year do students encounter the Bible.
The ratio of classical and secular to theological is quite
one sided, especially since one cannot judge how much of
the Bible, and whose Bible, is actually read. Saints Augustine,
Anselm, and Aquinas appear in the middle of the sophomore
list, leading into Dante; Luther and Calvin appear later
in the year. But the Judeo-Christian tradition, which critics
of today’s world literature courses tend to invoke as a
central ingredient of the civilization they claim was upheld
by the
old Western syllabus, has not counted for much over the
years.
Our sense of an Asian canon is evolving in the same way.
What we consider canonical differs markedly from the
texts studied by today’s learners in China, for example, where
a Communist state finds Confucius to be anathema. For a contemporary
American view of the Asian canon, here is the 1994 List of
Great Books chosen for the recently created graduate program
in Eastern Classics at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
All Semester
Vālmīki, Rāmāyana (Buck edition,
entire) *
Rig Veda (selections)
Katha Upanisad
Svetasvatara Upanisad
Kautilya, Arthastra (selections)
Institutes of Manu (selections)
Kālidāsa, The Birth of the War God
Kālidāsa, Śākuntala *
Charvaka (selected readings)
Patanjali, Yoga Sutra
Vaisesika Sutra
Isvarakrsna, Samkhya Karikas
Jayadeva, Gitagovinda
The Mahābhārata (selections) *
The Mahābhārata: The Bhagavad-Gītā *
Confucius, Analects *
Lao-tzu, Tao-te Ching
Chuang Chou, Chuang Tzu (inner chapters) *
Chinese Lyric (T‘ang) Poetry *
SPRING SEMESTER
Ssu-Ma Ch‘ien, Records of the Historian *
Mencius (selected readings)
Asvaghosa, Acts of the Buddha
Dhamapada
Mahaparinibanna Sutra
Questions of King Milinda
Journey to the West (Monkey) *
Vimalakirti Sutra
Diamond Sutra; Heart Sutra
Murasaki, The Tale of Genji *
Nagarjuna, Vigrahavyavartani
Badarayana, Vedanta Sutras (with Sankara’s commentary)
Ta-hsueh, The Great Learning
Chung-yun, Doctrine of the Mean
Want Yang-Ming (Instructions for Practical Living)
Lie-tsu T‘an Ching, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
Dogen, Shobo-Genzo (sermons)
Miyamoto, A Book of Five Rings
Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (The Narrow Road of the Interior) *
Nō drama (selected plays) *
Humbling as it is to contemplate a list containing so many
unfamiliar items, when one realizes that many of those texts
are treatises on mathematics and logic, which the Norton
anthology does not include, the percentage of the St. John’s
choices represented in an anthology for undergraduates is
impressive indeed. Of the thirty-nine items included in a
philosophically oriented graduate program, readers of the The
Northon Anthology of World Literature will encounter
all those that have significant relevance for an undergraduate
liberal arts education.
*Item is included, in whole or
in part, in the The Northon
Anthology of World Literature.
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