tuannyriver

Great Books at Pepperdine. Here are a brief overview of the program, a video channel, the Facebook page, and the course website of a long-time Great Books faculty.

Essays. Students in my GB I sections typically write one 1000-word essay and three essays of 1500-2000 words each.  For II and III, they write three (3) essays of 2000 words or more.  In IV, they write two (2) essays of 2500 words or more and complete a special project to be determined in consultation with the instructor.

Here’re the reading lists from 2017 to 2020.
They’re subject to change after Spring 2020.

GREAT BOOKS I
Homer, Iliad
Greek tragedy produced by the Getty Villa (such as the Bacchae in Fall 2019)
Plato, Republic
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars
Virgil, Aeneid

GREAT BOOKS II
Augustine, Confessions
Dante, The Divine Comedy
De Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Machiavelli, The Prince
Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

GREAT BOOKS III
Molière, Tartuffe
Milton, Paradise Lost
Descartes, Discourse on the Method
Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality
Voltaire, Candide
Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
Austen, Persuasion

GREAT BOOKS IV
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Gilkey, The Shantung Compound

Readings for 2014-2015

GB I & II

Homer, Iliad
Aeschylus, Persians (plus viewing at the Getty Villa)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Plato, Republic
Virgil, Aeneid
Plutarch, Roman Lives

Augustine, Confessions
Benedict, The Rule of Benedict
Dante, The Divine Comedy
De Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
Machiavelli, The Prince
Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

—

Readings for 2013-2014
GB III & IV

Molière, Tartuffe
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (viewing at the Getty Villa)
Milton, Paradise Lost
Shelley, Frankenstein
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Locke, Second Treatise on Government
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Franklin, Autobiography

Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Percy, The Moviegoer
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Weil, Waiting for God
Proust, Swann’s Way
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Last but not least, let’s dance and let’s rap to Great Books!