Liberal Studies 801: Reading List

The director of the Liberal Studies program has just emailed us the reading list for the second semester of our first year. It's pretty exciting. And challenging.

Throughout my undergrad I've sampled work by Dostoevsky, John Stewart Mill, and Nietzsche before, but I don't think I've read these texts.  I have read Jane Eyre, of course, perhaps more than once, but it has been years and anything gleaned from reading it has been replaced by watching multiple film versions. 

I've read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  I've read it relatively recently, for a class, and I have looked at it at some depth.  I don't love To the Lighthouse, in fact, I don't really like To the Lighthouse. I prefer Mrs. Dalloway, not only because it has a more linear time line, but because the internal dialogue is more interesting and attractive to me. Perhaps upon a second reading it will be more appealing.

I've also read is Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. This is one of my favourite texts.  I've gone back to it over and over again since I first read it, using it as a resource and a lens to look at many different twentieth century texts.  Freud's arrogance is hilarious, and it's interesting how pervasive his ideas have been in shaping modern thought.

I'm excited to read Frankenstein, The Communist Manifesto, The Stranger, and Lady Chatterly's Lover.  I'm kind of amazed that I managed to get my undergrad without ever reading these texts.  How is it possible that I have a BA in English without ever reading DH Lawrence? Tell me again why I had to read V for Vendetta?

I'm a little worried about the pace of the class.  How are we going to tackle The Communist Manifesto in an hour and a half?  Still, having these books on the reading list will at least introduce them to us... even if we can't chat about them for six hours, we'll still be ahead of where we are now.

Here's the list:

• Martin McCory, The French Revolution for Beginners
• Anatole France, The Gods Will have Blood
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
• Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
• Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
• Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
• Henrik Ibsen, Enemy of the People
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
• Albert Camus, The Stranger
• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just
• Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error
• Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station
• DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover
• Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought
• Shierry Nicholson, The Love of Nature and the End of the World