Auden's required reading

From College Students Don’t Read. But Can They? by Joseph Bottum.  The subheading is With the new literature course I’m teaching at the University of Colorado, I’m aiming to find out.

In 1941, W.H. Auden listed nearly 6,000 pages of required reading for an undergraduate course at the University of Michigan. In 2018, the historian Wilfred McClay tried recreating that course at Hillsdale College. It quickly became one of the school’s most popular classes, wildly oversubscribed. The undergraduates even printed up T-shirts that read, “I Survived the Auden Course!”

Perhaps that’s proof that students rise to the level of expectations. If universities demand reading, they will get it. But such fire-hose courses as Auden’s demonstrate something more. College graduates used to have stories of the trenches they loved to tell—stories about the backbreaking organic-chemistry course that decided medical-school admissions. The required engineering course on dynamics. The ridiculous French literature survey course that demanded studying everything from “Song of Roland” to “The Stranger.”

Bottum will be a visiting professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and will be trailing Auden's curriculum as an experiment to reveal whether kids can read.  Bravo for the first steps in bringing back the richness of our heritage to the wastelands of academia.  Our kids deserve the best and it has been held back from them.

What was Auden's curriculum?  Here it is in its one page glory (requiring 6,000 pages of reading of the greatest literature of the West.)

Click to enlarge.

In plainer form:

Required Reading

Dante — The Divine Comedy

Aeschylus — The Agamemnon (tr. Louis MacNeice)

Sophocles — Antigone (tr. Dudley Fitts or Fitzgerald)

Horace — Odes

Augustine — Confessions

Shakespeare — Henry IV, Pt 2

Shakespeare — Othello

Shakespeare — Hamlet

Shakespeare — The Tempest

Ben Jonson — Volpone

Pascal — Pensees

Racine — Phedre

Blake — Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Goethe — Faust, Part I

Kierkegaard — Fear and Trembling

Baudelaire — Journals

Ibsen — Peer Gynt

Dostoevsky — The Brothers Karamazov

Rimbaud — A Season in Hell

Henry Adams — Education of Henry Adams

Melville — Moby Dick

Rilke — The Journal of My Other Self

Kafka — The Castle

TS Eliot — Family Reunion

OPERA LIBRETTI:

Orpheus (Gluck)

Don Giovanni (Mozart)

The Magic Flute (Mozart)

Fidelio (Beethoven)

Flying Dutchman (Wagner)

Tristan und Isolde (Wagner)

Götterdämmerung (Wagner)

Carmen (Bizet)

Traviata (Verdi)

RECOMMENDED CRITICAL READING:

Patterns of Culture — Ruth Benedict

From the South Seas — Margaret Mead

Middletown — Robert Lynd

The Heroic Age — Hector Chadwick

Epic and Romance — W.P. Ker

Plato Today — R.H.S. Crossman

Christianity and Classical Culture — C.N. Cochrane

The Allegory of Love — C.S. Lewis

As if I needed another book list.  But . . .