Required Reading*

This is the reading list and journal for my Graduate Liberal Studies Program at SFU. Fall semester readings are below, Winter/Spring semester at the top.

• Bible, Book of Job
  • The Book of Job: A blow by blow
  • Job and the problem of evil.
  • Supplemental Reading: Frye, Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture
• Voltaire, Candide
  • A few notes on Candide
• Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
  • Life (and Dostoevsky): Not as simple as a sum.
• Aristotle, Politics
  • Aristotle and the demise of philosophy
• Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
  • The Machiavel?
• Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry
  • Sublimity and Mountaintops
    
  • Supplemental Reading: Eco, History of Beauty and On Ugliness
• Wollstonecraft, Letters on Sweden, Norway and Denmark
  • Travels with Mary
• Shelley, Frankenstein
  • The monster in us
• Kierkegaard, The Present Age
  • Individual suffering for the common (but not lowest common denominator) good
  • A manifesto, an action, a radical moment
• Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  • The perils of passion
• Nietzsche, Human All Too Human
  • The little I have to say about Nietzche
• Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
  • Meaning and death
• Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Leaving a less-than-beautiful corpse.
• Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
• James, Varieties of Religious Experience
• Weber, The Vocation Lectures
  • The Gradual Road to Nowhere
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  • Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark
• Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
• Huxley, Brave New World
  • Supplemental Reading: Fukuyama, Our Post-Human Future
• Camus, The Stranger
  • Mersault’s meaning
• Isherwood, The Berlin Stories
• Roy, The Tin Flute
• Beckett, Waiting for Godot
  • Of course there is a point!
• Nabokov, Lolita
• Dinesen, Babette’s Feast
• King, Letter from Birmingham Jail
• Spiegelman, Maus
• Coetzee, Lives of Animals
• Taylor, My Stroke of Insight

Reading List and Journal – Fall 2011 semester

• Bhagavad Gita (5th-2nd century BCE)
• Bible, Genesis (2nd century BCE) 
  • Stories of civilization (1)
    
  • Founding mythologies (2)
• Plato, The Symposium (385-80 BCE)
  • Love in the time of Socrates
• Sappho, Poetry (630-570 BCE) 
  • Sunday morning Sappho (1)
  • Laundry, love and the lyre (2)
• Euripides, Medea (480-406 BCE)
  • Some initial thoughts (1)
  • Place in Euripides’ Medea (2)
• Aristophanes, Lysistrata (446-386 BCE)
  • Not clad in diaphanous garments, nor shod in dainty slippers
    
• Sophocles, Antigone (497-406 BCE)
  • What cruelty without wisdom
• Mencius (372 – 289 BCE)
  • Mencius by the sea 
  • Long struggle in the dark – Part 2
• Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (99 – 55 BCE)
  • One long struggle in the dark
  • Long struggle in the dark – Part 2
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (161-180 BCE)
• Augustine, Enchiridion (421)
• Letters of Abelard and Heloise 
  • The one-sided letters of love
  • Astralabe (a poem, a fragment)
• Rumi, Love is a Stranger
  • Scattered Notes on Rumi
  • Empty the Glass of Your Desire – Poetry Analysis
• Dante, Inferno
  • The many punishments
• Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
  • Revealing possibility
• Machiavelli, The Prince
  • Lions and Foxes – Lessons in Power
• Shakespeare, King Lear
  • Which society? Through the lens of King Lear
• Descartes, Discourse on Method
  • Irreducible existence
• John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
  • Ohhh…. the morality!
• Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
  • Two-faced folly
• Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
  • Hume and Kant with Video Backup
• Kant, “What Is Enlightenment”
  • Hume and Kant with Video Backup
• Rousseau, Julie, Or the New Heloise (1761)
  • Julie, a novel
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women
• Kate Choopin, Awakening
• Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

* These are the required readings for my university program

Supplemental Texts

In the Beginning, Karen Armstrong
Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama
Memories and Visions of Paradise, Richard Heinberg
The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell w/ Bill Moyers