What Auden's Students Read in 1941

I want to talk about the famous list of books that the poet WH Odden assigned for a course that he taught at the University of Michigan titled Fate and the Individual in European literature. It's a course that contains an infamously difficult reading list. It asked undergraduates to read about 6,000 pages of classic literature. And for undergraduate students who are taking at least three other courses that semester, this is just an insane list.

But I figured you all would be interested in seeing what is on it. So, it's a great example of how literature courses prepare students to face the civic and social challenges of their times. Odden taught this course in the year 1941, which was a huge turning point in the 20th century. It was a time of global ideological reckoning and the sharpening of another moral crisis of the 20th century.

Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and expanded into Eastern Europe. Systematic extermination begins with mass shootings and the machinery of genocide is accelerating. It's no accident that Odden takes an interest in fate and the individual in European literature. So in this video I'm going to talk about the 32 works that made it on the list and I'll also be speculating about what Odden was trying to accomplish in this class and how the books he chose are significant for the moment.

The life and works of whin spanned the major epochs of the 20th century from the dis disillusionment of the inter war years to the cultural reckonings of the cold war. He was born in 1907 and he died in 1973. So you can see how a life of a poet was really spanning a significant portion of the 20th century. He was born in York, England and he went to study at Oxford where he joined a circle of literary modernists that included Steven Spender and Cday Lewis among others.

And by the 1930s, Odden was a leading voice in what was called the Odden generation, a generation of readers who responded to fascism, social injustice, and spiritual crisis. And by 1939, Auden had moved to the United States. And this was a major turn in his career. And it was in the US where he returned to the Anglican faith.

It's where he distanced himself from political dogmatism. And he also began further filling out ...