On this page you can find the entire reading list for both Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, the two most prominent courses in Columbia College's reknowned Core Curriculum as taught in the 2004-2005 academic year. The listed works almost all belong to the Western canon, as perhaps best listed in Great Books of the Western World.
Where I have tracked down the articles, there are links to information on Wikipedia about the authors and the books, poems, etc. I have also included links to other useful websites, including standard summaries on SparkNotes and CliffsNotes. Please feel free to improve on my listings - leaving a note in the Edit summary: field would be helpful for me to be able to easily see what you changed. Enjoy!
Literature Humanities
This list represents and will forevermore continue to represent the 2004-2005 reading list.
Fall 2004
1st half
A fresco from the north wall of the
Tomb of the Diver featuring an image of a
symposium.
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Homer
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Homer (see above)
- a Homeric Hymn involving Demeter and Persephone
- author unknown, traditionally attributed to Homer (see above)
- Herodotus (484 - c.425 BC)
- Aeschylus (525 - 456 BC)
- 1. Agamemnon SparkNotes
- 2. The Libation Bearers SparkNotes
- 3. The Eumenides
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Sophocles (5th century - 406 BC)
- SparkNotes
- Euripides (c.480 - 406 BC)
2nd half
- Thucydides
- SparkNotes
- Aristophanes
- SparkNotes
- Plato
- SparkNotes
- the first book of the Old Testament
- SparkNotes
- a book of the Old Testament
- a didactic poem set in a prose framing device
- SparkNotes
- the third of the four canonical gospels of the New Testament
- SparkNotes
- the last of the four canonical gospels of the New Testament
Spring 2005
1st half
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Virgil (70-19 BC)
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- the first cantica of The Divine Comedy
- Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
- Decameron Web
- Boccaccio (1313-1375)
- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
2nd half
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Jane Austen (1775-1817)
- SparkNotes, CliffsNotes
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
- The Return of the Soldier (1918)
- optional text, read by section 15
- Rebecca West (1892-1983)
- SparkNotes
- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Contemporary Civilization
This list represents the 2004-2005 reading list. It will be updated to represent the 2005-2006 reading list. The 1st and 2nd halves are currently arbitrary - they do not follow the 1st and 2nd halves of the semester.
Fall 2004
1st half
- Plato (c.427 – c.347 BC)
- Aristotle (384–322 BC)
- Aristotle (see above)
- Exodus, the second book
- Deuteronomy, the fifth book
- also known as De Officiis or On Obligations
- Cicero (106-43 BC)
- The Gospel of Matthew, the first of the four canonical gospels
- The Epistle to the Romans, a letter written by Paul
- The Epistle to Galatians, a letter from Paul to the Christians of Galatia
- Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
- On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (selections)
- Averroes (1126-1198)
- Thomas Aquinas (1258-1264)
- Maimonides (1135-1204)
2nd half
- also known as Il Principe
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Democrates Alter or On The Just Causes for War Against the Indians (selections)
- Juan Gines de Sepulveda
- Apologetic History of the Indies and Thirty Very Juridical Propositions (selections)
- Bartolomé de Las Casas
-
- Galileo Galilei
- René Descartes
- Isaac Newton
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- John Locke
Assignment over break: What Is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant
Spring 2005
1st half
John Stuart Mill, philosopher and political economist.
- An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
- David Hume (1711-1776; Scotland)
- one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment
- the third and most radical of the British Empiricists
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778; France)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see above)
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804; Germany)
- Adam Smith (1723-1790; Scotland)
-
- Sieyès
- Olympe de Gouges
-
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797; Britain)
- Anarchical Fallacies (selections)
- Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832; Britain)
- Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797; Britain)
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873; Britain)
2nd half
- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
- The Marx-Engels Reader (selections)
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
- see also Marxism
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
- The Souls of Black Folk and The Souls of White Folk
- W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963)
- Sigmund Freud
- Virginia Woolf
- Modern issues; two of the following:
-
- Hannah Arendt (1906-1875)
- Frantz Fanon
- Michel Foucault
- Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
- Catharine MacKinnon
- John Rawls (1921-2002)
Art Humanities
1st half
- 1. The Parthenon
- 2. Notre Dame de Paris, Amiens Cathedral
- 3. Raffaello Santi
- 4. Michelangelo Buonarroti
- 5. Pieter Brueghel the Elder
- 6. Gian Lorenzo Bernini
2nd half
- 7. Rembrandt
- 8. Francisco Goya
- 9. Claude Monet
- 10. Pablo Picasso
- 11. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier
- 12. Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol
Music Humanities
1st half
- 1. Josquin Des Prez
- 2. Claudio Monteverdi
- 3. Johann Sebastian Bach
- 4. George Frideric Handel
- 5. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- 6. Joseph Haydn
2nd half
- 7. Ludwig van Beethoven
- 8. Giuseppe Verdi
- 9. Richard Wagner
- 10. Arnold Schoenberg
- 11. Igor Stravinsky
Languages
Akkadian, Arabic textbook , Aramaic, Armenian, Bengali, Chinese textbook , Czech, Dutch textbook , Finnish textbook , French textbook , German textbook , Greek textbook , Hebrew textbook , Hindi textbook , Hungarian textbook , Italian textbook , Japanese textbook , Korean textbook , Latin textbook , Lithuanian, Persian, Polish textbook , Portuguese textbook , Punjabi, Romanian textbook , Russian textbook , Sanskrit textbook , Serbo-Croatian textbook , Spanish textbook , Swahili, Swedish textbook , Tagalog, Tamil textbook , Tibetan, Turkish textbook , Ukrainian textbook , Urdu textbook , Yiddish
Frontiers of Science
- 1. dinosaurs
- 2. african climate change, human evolution
- 3. global warming
- 4. quantum mechanics
- 5. nanotechnology
- 6. brownian motion
- 7. neuroscience
- 8. evolutionary linguistics
- 9. vocalization
Miscellaneous
