Themes, Genres, and Other Clusters

The syllabi for General Education survey courses concentrate on works of which students have probably heard or of which they may well hear in the course of the semester when teachers in other courses refer to them. This crude measure of canonicity powerfully reinforces the impact of the syllabus for a required course. Titles like Faust or The Bhagavad-Gītā or The Tale of Genji and adjectives like "Machiavellian" or "Confucian" or "gargantuan" have a reassuring resonance for your audience; students will have some vested interest in learning more about them, recognizing them as credentials for entering the community of educated persons.

Generically and thematically focused courses offer a framework for experimenting more freely with selections in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, second edition, that may have less immediate renown than the works referred to above, but no less intrinsic interest. The lists that follow should not be read as semester-long models but as collocations of works with shared characteristics. According to your own predilections and the curricular niche into which your course fits, these texts may be mixed and matched in a variety of combinations. As with all of these recommendations, of course, the groupings are meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive; at the same time, in most cases the number of works mentioned far exceeds what any one of us could actually teach in one semester.