Harvard Educated Reading
Have you given any thought to a degree from Harvard? Here is the syllabus for Humanities 10a and 10b, Fall ‘26 and Spring ‘27. This is a popular course limited to only 90 students. Use the syllabus below to join the fun (sans classroom discussion and final exam).
My score is 5 out of 22. That’s not great, but I’m still working on it…
Fall 10a covers classics from antiquity to the modern era, in chronological order. Here is the reading list:
Classical Antiquity
The Odyssey (Homer)
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Sappho).
Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
The Symposium (Plato)
The Aeneid (Virgil)
Medieval to Early Modern
Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
The Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio)
Hamlet (WIlliam Shakespeare)
Enlightenment to Modern
Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene’ Descartes)
The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. Du Bois)
The Metamorphosis (Frank Kafka)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Spring 10b covers classic literature from the modern era back to the ancient world. Here is the reading list:
Modern to Enlightenment
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth & Coleridge)
Emily Dickinson’s Poetry
Early Modern to Medieval
On LIberty (John Stuart Mill)
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller)
Classical Antiquity
Confessions (Saint Augustine)
The Golden Ass (Apuleius)
Antigone (Sophocles)