Ethics and Existential
Philosophy
(emphasis on the problem of evil)
Novels
Moby-Dick (chaps. 23, 96), Billy Budd
[novella], Herman Melville
Miss Lonelyhearts [novella], Nathanael
West
Homo Faber, Max Frisch
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Short Stories
“Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The Coup de Grâce,” Ambrose Bierce
“The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane
“Waves of Darkness,” Cord Meyer, Jr. (in
“The Secret Sharer” and Other Great Stories, ed.
Lass and Tassman [New American Library,
1969])
“Good Country People,” Flannery O’Connor
“Sacrifice,” Ian Macmillan (in the
TriQuarterly
[Review], 1980)
“Dillinger in Hollywood,” John Sayles
(in TriQuarterly, 1980)
“Testimony,” Joyce Carol Oates (in Raven’s
Wing [Dutton, 1987])
“The Ideal Bakery,” Donald Hall (in The
Ideal Bakery [Harper, 1988])
Poetry
“More Light! More Light!”, Anthony Hecht
Night Thoughts, Edward Young
The Testament of Beauty, Book IV (Ethick),
Robert Bridges
“Out, Out—“ Robert Frost
“Musée des Beaux Arts,” W. H. Auden
“Spring,” Edna St. Vincent Millay
“High Windows,” Philip Larkin
Aesthetics, Epistemology, Phenomenology
Novels
The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, Henry
James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
James Joyce
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
Robert Pirsig
Flatland/Sphereland, Foreword by Isaac
Asimov (HarperCollins, 1994)
Poetry
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats
“The Last Night that She Lived,” Emily
Dickinson
“Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare,”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Study
of Two Pears,” “The Snow Man,” “So-and-So
Reclining on Her Couch,” “The Glass of
Water,” and “An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven” [high level of difficulty], Wallace
Stevens
Philosophy of Religion
Poetry by George Herbert and Gerard
Manley
Hopkins
In Memoriam [book-length poem in 131
sections],
Alfred Lord Tennyson
“God Lay Dead,” “I Walked in a Desert,”
Stephen Crane
“Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens
“i thank You God for most this amazing,”
e. e. cummings
“To Jesus on His Birthday,” Edna St.
Vincent
Millay
“Miracle Play” [short story], George P.
Elliott
Philosophy of Love
“Platonic Love,” Abraham Cowley
“Eloisa to Abelard,” Alexander Pope
“Epipsychidion,” Percy Bysshe Shelley
Women in Love [novel], D. H. Lawrence
*****
Kant’s favorite English novel: Tom Jones,
Henry Fielding
Bertram Russell’s favorite novel: Tristram
Shandy, Lawrence Sterne