Summary:
In this survey of World Literature, students will explore older classics like Shakespeare and Cervantes as well as more contemporary figures like Chinaua Achebe, Loung Ung, and Suzanne Collins. They will analyze and critique literary works from a Christian Worldview. They will concentrate on key quotations and major themes of these literary classics. They will focus especially on the shifting philosophies and historical context associated with the development of the literary canon and will become acquainted with famous world authors, their classic works, and how these world classics illuminate the human experience all the way up to the present day.
Reading List
(Found online or at the library or in the book store.)
Hamlet – Shakespeare
Don Quixote – Cervantes
1984 – George Orwell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Harvard Commencement – Solzhenitsyn
The Book of Job – Bible
First they Killed My Father – Loung Ung (Cambodia)
Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution – Moying Li
The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Faust – Goethe
The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoyevsky
The Man Who Would Be King – Rudyard Kipling
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Fountain Head – Ayn Rand
Le Morte d’Arthur – Thomas Malory
The Second Coming – William Butler Yeats and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
King Lear – Shakespeare
Othello – Shakespeare
Julius Caesar – Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Shakespeare
Outside Homework:
4+ hours per week
Students will write six 2-3 page papers each semester. The MLA format will be required for all papers, including a cover page and a works cited page. Homework may also include writing one paragraph on a major theme or quotation from the literary work to be discussed that day in class. Notes must be taken every day in class and there will be an in class first semester exam and also an in class second semester exam.
