Great Writers: The Great Books, David Denby, Second Semester

SPRING SEMESTER
LITERATURE HUMANITIES

Bible The New Testament: The Gospels (Meridian; King James or Revised Standard Version)
Augustine Confessions (Penguin; Pine-Coffin, trans.)
Dante Inferno (Bantam; Mandelbaum, trans.)
Boccaccio The Decameron; selections (Penguin; G. H. McWilliam, trans.)
Montaigne Essays; selections (Penguin; Screech, trans.)
Shakespeare Play of choice King Lear (Penguin)
Milton Paradise Lost (optional) (Macmillan)
Cervantes Don Quixote; selections (Penguin; Cohen, trans.)
Descartes Discourse on Method (Hackett; Cress, trans.)
Meditations on the First Philosophy (Hackett; Cress, trans.)
Goethe Faust (Part One) (Bantam; Salm, trans.)
Austen Pride and Prejudice (Penguin)
Woolf To the Lighthouse (Harbrace)
A Room of One’s Own (optional) (Harbrace)
Instructor’s Choice

CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION

SECTION I: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Rousseau Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett; Cress, trans.)
The Social Contract (Hackett; Cress, trans.)
Hume An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hackett)
Kant Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Macmillan; Beck, trans.) “What Is Enlightenment?” (Macmillan; Beck, trans.)
Madison et al. Federalist Papers; selections (optional)

SECTION II: ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND THE STATE

Smith The Wealth of Nations; selections (University of Chicago)
Hegel Introduction to The Philosophy of History (Hackett; Rauch, trans.) Appendix to The Philosophy of Right (optional) (Hackett; Rauch, trans.) “Lordship and Bondage” from The Phenomenology of Mind (optional) (Harper & Row; Baillie, trans.)
Marx The Marx-Engels Reader; selections (Norton; Tucker, ed.)
Mill On Liberty (Hackett) Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin)

SECTION III: DARWIN, NIETZSCHE, FREUD
Darwin Darwin; selections (Norton)
Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage; Kaufmann, trans.)
Freud The Freud Reader; selections (Norton; Gay, ed.)

SECTION IV: MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
(Instructor Chooses at Least One Book from Both A and B)

A. Science and Revolution in the Twentieth Century

Weber From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford; Gerth and Mills, trans.) Gramsci the Modern Prince and Other Writings (International; Marx, trans.) Arendt on Violence (HBJ)
The Origins of Totalitarianism; selections (HBJ)
Lenin Imperialism (International)
State and Revolution (International)
Habermas Transformation of the Public Sphere (Beacon; Burger and Lawrence, trans.)
B. The Ambiguities of Integration: Class, Race, and Gender

Beauvoir The Second Sex; selections (Vintage; Parshley, trans.)
MacKinnon Feminism Unmodified (Harvard) Jagger & Strahl, eds. Feminist Frameworks (McGraw-Hill)
Rawls A Theory of Justice (Harvard)
Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (Grove; Farrington, trans.)
Malcolm X Autobiography (Grove)
West Prophesy Deliverance! (Westminster)
Foucault Discipline and Punish (Vintage, Sheridan, trans.)
Supreme Court Decisions

105 pages, 40,648 words, many visuals