The Complete English Reading List

Over the last century, English departments across the United States, Harvard, Yale, uh, Michigan, and Colombia, built reading lists that shaped generations of reading literature. But very few people today get a chance to study literature in the very structured uh, cumulative way that these old curricula were designed to offer. So, if you've watched my video about the changes in literature departments uh over the past few years, you know that many English departments in the US no longer have a comprehensive list of traditions of great literature. Um, and they definitely don't promote any sort of canon these days.

At least most of them don't. So, I've gone back to the archives. I've dug through mid-century course cataloges, reading lists, and syllabi, and studied the old degree requirements to recover for you a coherent map of the literary tradition for self-arners such as uh many of my viewers on this channel. And this list I have organized uh creates or recreates a cannon of literature that was most commonly taught in English departments.

And instead of organizing things chronologically beginning from, you know, the Bible and classical literature all the way up to modernism, I've actually organized it around um genres. Uh the way literature feels when you're inside it, inside the study of it, that is a set of of living genres that you can watch unfold across thousands of years. And that's actually very important to have a comprehensive view of the genre because then you can you can see and you can hear the texts talking to each other. So using this canon for yourself is simple.

Uh choose one of the five major genres epic, lyric, drama, the novel or essays and criticism and follow it from its biblical and classical origins all the way to modernism. And this lets you understand what was written and how forms evolve. How each generation makes it new, rewrites the one that came before and how great genres of literature all participate and carry on the conversation across centuries. And that's actually the invitation to all of you artists out there watching this now to participate in this great tradition and or lineage.

And the result of this kind of vertical curriculum that I've designed, this kind of reading pilgrimage, the five paths through the tradition that anyone can follow is that you see how the deep ...