Hi guys, I was interested in getting a more comprehensive view as to what pieces of literature are prominent in the Core sequences of Humanities at UChicago. Thanks for all your input!
Literature is a large and diverse kingdom. No lifetime is long enough to discover, much less understand, all its greatest works. However, I do have some suggestions for summer reading before you go off to start your education at the U of C. These selections aren’t particularly based on what you will find in your HUM course but would, I believe, get you in the mood for the spirit of the place you’re coming to.
George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia and Essays (for style and the authentic rendering of personal experience)
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India (for moral complexity)
Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard and Stories (for honesty)
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from the Underground (for a walk on the wild side of human nature)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (a symphony of ideas)
Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (six chapters will do; any more will spoil the lessons in prose writing you learned from reading Orwell and Forster)
Shakespeare - any play you didn’t read in high school, perhaps a dark one like Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida or Coriolanus
Dante - Inferno (speaking of darkness)
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim (read it as a palate-cleansing Bon Bon right after Dostoevsky and just before Dante!)
If you are going off to the U of C I send you all good wishes. You will not simply be taking courses there, they will be taking you - to a different place than the one from which you began or perhaps you could have imagined. You and your Profs and classmates will be making that journey together. Have fun! Darkness can be bracing (as the Greeks knew - add Oedipus Rex to your list).
Answering the question asked a little more directly:
Genesis
The Iliad (a bygone, short-lived Chicago BDSM club printed T-shirts with the slogan “Beat Me Whip Me Make Me Read The Iliad!”)
Plato, Apology & Symposium
Virgil, Aeneid
St. Augustine, Confessions
Dante, Inferno
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (especially “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”)
I don’t remember what else my kids read. The different Humanities sequences diverge more in their reading lists now than was the case 20-30 years ago.
^ Would second that the array of material for Hum has widened. Some sequences don’t even rely exclusively on printed material.
You should peruse the choices for the Hum sequence using your Class Search tool. Practically all have comprehensive descriptions of the course and the material to be covered. Come registration time, you will need to select up to three different sequences in order to ensure you get something you like so no time like the present to start mulling it over.
Good luck!