Philosophical and Religious Studies

Following the same pattern established for literary courses attached to different consortial programs, the Norton anthology provides an astonishing set of possibilities for courses in philosophical and religious studies. A valuable reference work for this undertaking is Mircea Eliade and Ioan P. Couliano, The Eliade Guide to World Religions (1991). Faced with these very long lists, teachers should simply pick and choose; as always, be guided by your own interests and shape a set of readings accordingly. Most of these "focus" areas will supply a whole semester’s reading (and some more than that); any combination of elements should stimulate productive discussions, whether you want to trace resemblances, stress divergences, study foundations, or assess modern responses to ancient texts.

1. Canonical Texts

   The Bible: The Old Testament
   Confucius, Analects
   Chuang Chou, Chuang Tzu
   The Bhagavad-Gītā
   The Jātāka Tales
   The Bible: The New Testament
   The Koran
   Popol Vuh
   The Night Chant

2. Establishing Traditions

   Augustine, Confessions
   Ibn Ishaq, The Biography of the Prophet
   Dante, The Divine Comedy

   Medieval Lyrics: A Selection

   Notker Balbulus, "A Hymn to Holy Women"
   Hadewijch of Brabant, "The Cult of Love"

   Petrarch, Sonnets 3, 62
   Everyman
   Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
   Pope, An Essay on Man

3. Varieties of Mysticism and Religious Experience

The Bible: The Old Testament: Song of Songs, Psalms
The Koran, Surah 1
Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Rumi, Robais, Ghazals, Spiritual Couplets
Mystical Poetry of India

Medieval Lyrics:  A Selection

Hildegard of Bingen, "A Hymn to St. Maximinus"
Ben Jacob, "The Sacrifice of Isaac"
Anonymous, "Calvary"
Anonymous, "Lament of the Virgin"

Blake, "And Did Those Feet"
Novalis, Yearning for Death
Tennyson, In Memoriam
Ghalib, Ghazals
The Night Chant
Tagore, from The Gardener; The Golden Boat; from Naibedya; from Smaran; from Shesh Saptak
Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo"
Zuni Ritual Poetry
Eliot, Four Quartets: "Little Gidding"

4. Critiques of Orthodoxy

The Bhagavad-Gītā

Medieval Lyrics: A Selection

Ben Jacob, "The Sacrifice of Isaac"
Alexander the Wild, "Strawberry Picking"

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue; The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale
Milton, Paradise Lost
Sor Juana, Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz
Voltaire, Candide
Goethe, Faust
Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman
Yehoshua, Facing the Forest

5. The Search for Meaning in a Secularized World

Machiavelli, The Prince
Montaigne, Essays
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Blake, Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience
Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us"
Hugo, Et nox facta est
Tennyson, In Memoriam
Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Tolstoy, The Death of Iván Ilych
Freud, Dora
Beckett, Endgame
Mahfouz, Zaabalawi
Camus, The Guest
Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Amichai, God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children

6. Sickness, Aging, and Death

Ssu-ma Ch‘ien, Letter In Reply to Jen An
Po Chüi, "Golden Bells"; "Remembering Golden Bells"; "Winter Night"; "Lost Poem"
Ferdowsi, Shâhnâme
Beowulf
Dante, The Divine Comedy

Medieval Lyrics: A Selection

Abulafia, "A Letter from the Grave"
Pizan, "Alone In Martyrdom"
Villon, "The Testament"

Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale
Everyman
Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part II
Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Tale of the Heike
The Florentine Codex, "The Midwife Addresses the Woman Who Has Died in Childbirth"
Cao Xuequin, The Story of the Stone
Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "Ode on Melancholy"; "To Autumn"

Romantic Lyrics: A Selection

Hölderlin, Poems
Novalis, "Yearning for Death"
Lamartine, "The Lake"
Heine, "Ah, death is like the long cool night"
Leopardi, "To Sylvia"
Bunina, "From the Seashore"
De Castro

Pushkin, The Queen of Spades
Tennyson, In Memoriam
Dickinson, poems
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tolstoy, The Death of Iván Ilych
The Night Chant
Yeats, "When You Are Old"; "Sailing to Byzantium"; "The Circus Animals’ Desertion"
Dario, Fatality
Mann, Death in Venice
Rilke, The Swan
Lu Xun, Wild Grass
Joyce, The Dead
Inuit Songs: Netsit, "Dead Man’s Song"
Eliot, The Waste Land
Akhmatova, Requiem
Storni, Departure
Lorca, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
Peynetsa, The Boy and the Deer
Mahfouz, Zaabalawi
Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Solzhenitsyn, Matryona’s Home
Robbe-Grillet, The Secret Room
Borowski, Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber
Bachmann, The Barking
Devi, Breast-Giver
Marquez, Death Constant Beyond Love
Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman

Perhaps with this last topic, it is appropriate to stop, to rest and reflect on the opportunities for teaching with The Norton Anthology of World Literature, second edition. Lest this seems a morbid note on which to end, it should hearten us that so many of these literary responses to sickness, aging, and death end in a moment of illumination. Read and enjoy the selections in these volumes, and go gently with them into the classroom, if not into the night.