The Classic Texts Core is the heart of the Honors College. These courses are designed to immerse and engage you in the “great conversation” of our inherited tradition, encompassing philosophy, history, literature, religious studies, and the foundations of the modern social, political, and natural sciences.
Honors College Texts
HON 2123 Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem
- Homer, “The Iliad”
- Sappho, “Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments”
- Coogan, Michael et al. (eds.), The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version
- Burstein, Stanley (ed.), The Essential Greek Historians
- Lefkowitz, Mary, and James Romm (eds.), The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
- Plato, “Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo”
- Plato, “Symposium”
- Aristophanes, “Frogs and Other Plays”
- Aristotle, “The Nicomachean Ethics”
- Virgil, “The Aeneid”
- Livy, “The Rise of Rome”
- Ovid, “Metamorphoses”
- Seneca, Dialogues and Essays
HON 2143 The Long Middle Ages
- St. Augustine, “The Confessions”
- Boethius, “The Consolation of Philosophy”
- St. Benedict, “The Rule of St. Benedict”
- Einhard, “Life of Charlemagne”
- Dhuoda, “Letter for William”
- Icelandic Sagas
- Marie de France and Beroul, “Tristan and Isolde”
- Arthurian Romances
- St. Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologiae”
- Dante, “The Divine Comedy”
- Pizan, Christine de, “The Book of the City of Ladies”
- Luther, Martin, and John Calvin, “Selections”
HON 2223 The Birth of Modernity
- Machiavelli, Niccolò, “The Prince”
- More, Thomas, “Utopia”
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de, “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”
- Hobbes, Thomas, “Leviathan”
- Milton, John, “Paradise Lost”
- Cervantes, Miguel de, “Don Quixote”
- Shakespeare, William, Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
- Montaigne, Michel de, The Essays: A Selection
- Pascal, Blaise, “Pensées”
- Locke, John, “A Letter concerning Toleration”
- Locke, John, “Two Treatises of Government”
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “The Basic Political Writings”
- Hamilton, Alexander, et al., “The Federalist Papers”
- Kant, Immanuel, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”
- Burke, Edmund, “Reflections on the Revolution in France”
- Equiano, Olaudah, “The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings”
- Wollstonecraft, Mary, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”
- Shelley, Mary, “Frankenstein: The 1818 Text”
HON 2243 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- Tocqueville, Alexis de, “Democracy in America”
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Self-Reliance”
- Thoreau, Henry David, “On Walden, Resistance to Civil Government”
- Baudelaire, Charles, “The Flowers of Evil”
- Kierkegaard, Søren, “The Sickness unto Death”
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, “Crime and Punishment”
- Mill, John Stuart, “Utilitarianism”
- Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On the Genealogy of Morals”
- Marx, Karl, “The Communist Manifesto”
- Luxembourg, Rosa, “Reform or Revolution?”
- Douglass, Frederick, “My Bondage and my Freedom,” “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”
- Du Bois, W. E. B., “The Souls of Black Folks”
- Eliot, T. S., “The Wasteland,” “The Four Quartets”
- Joyce, James, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
- Murdoch, Iris, “The Sovereignty of the Good”
- Foot, Phillippa, “Virtues and Vices”
- Camus, Albert, “The Myth of Sisyphus”
- King, Jr., Martin Luther, “I Have a Dream,” “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
- Morrison, Toni, “Beloved”