Bringing Back the Romance in Reading Canon Don't wait for your college to institute this core curriculum-- read Hamlet and Moby Dick on your own! The Western Canon represented below is based on core curriculum of St. John's College. The classic works of most of the authors listed below, as well as many more, can be quickly found in Yahoo Search's Humanities section. And if you don't see them there, check out Project Guttenburg.

Year 1

[Literature]

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes

[Philosophy]/[Theology]

Plato,Aristotle, Lucretius

[History]/[Social Science]

Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch

[Math]/ [Natural Science]

Euclid, Nicomachus, Ptolemy, Lavosier, Dalton, Archimedes, Torricelli, Pascal, Viete

Year 2

[Literature]

Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell

[Philosophy]/[Theology]

Aristotle, Epictetus, Plotinus, M. Aurelius, the Bible, Augustine, Anselm, Auginas, Luther, Montaigne, Bacon

[History]/[Social Science]

Plutarch, Tacitus, Machiavelli

[Math]/ [Natural Science]

Ptolemy, Apollonius, Copernicus, Descartes, Pascal, Viete

[ Music]

Mozart Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Stravinsky, Haydn, Des Pres, Webern

Year 3

[Literature]

Cervantes, Milton, Swift, Racine, Fielding, Melville, La Fontaine, Austen, La Rochefoucauld

[Philosophy]/[Theology]

Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, History]/[Social Science] Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the Constitution, the Federalists, Tocqueville

[Math]/ [Natural Science]

Galileo, Kepler, Young, Euler, Mayer, S. Carnot, Kelvin, Taylor, and 6 others.

[ Music]

Mozart

Year 4

[Literature]

Moliere, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valery, Yeats, Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Twain, Joyce, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Flannery O'Connor