W. H. Auden's syllabus will make your college courses look like a piece of cake | Hacker News Reader

W. H. Auden's syllabus will make your college courses look like a piece of cake

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18 pointsbenbreen12 comments

A lot of that would presumably have already been read by students taking this class, especially the Shakespearian tragedies and Moby Dick and perhaps Dante's Inferno.

As with other commenters, I don't think this is too bad. A quick reader could easily get through the Shakespeare in an afternoon (and surely most people taking this course would probably have read or seen them before anyway...), and some of the rest are quite short.

The hardest book there, I would say, is "The Brothers Karamazov", which is a masterpiece with a little of everything in it, but it is rather dense in the way that Russian novels, and those by Dostoevsky in particular, tend to be. "Moby Dick" is also quite a weighty tome, but it's not a particularly difficult one to get through. I have no idea about the opera libretti or what miseries having to read them might entail.

What a wonderful selection, though, regardless (and lovely to see one of T.S. Eliot's Greek tragedies in there).

I work full time+ writing software, also do some volunteering. I've read over 2000 pages of recreational reading so far this month. (admittedly, this month I'm not reading any classics - but I do include a few big classics each year as well). I've also had time for some movies and netflix and football games...

3000 pages in 4 months isn't too bad. Tracking my reading with Goodreads last year, I read just over 19000 pages - about 1600 pages a month.

None of that includes technical manual / comp sci reading, either - even though I also read plenty.

It really depends on the density of the material, and why you're reading it. 700 pages of George RR Martin is not the same thing as 700 pages of Thomas Pynchon. Furthermore, if you just want the plot you can read much more quickly than if you are reading to appreciate the language/references/themes, as I would expect of a college course.

Believe me, I know. I minored in English Lit & Math.

This piece is unfortunately almost content-free. Did his course really cover all those books? Did students actually read them?

It seems to me that this reading list goes way overboard and is more about checking off all the greatest works. A single semester barely provides enough time to give the typical Cliff notes coverage of all these works, let alone an in-depth treatment. Color me unimpressed (although I would like to be proven wrong given more details).

This is less reading than we had for my (rural public) high school AP English class. What's the big deal?

In fairness, our teacher simply said on the first day: "AP classes are supposed to be college classes, so we're going to do exactly the same reading as I did in my freshman literature course at Harvard."

This doesn't seem that excessive for a non-intro English course. For my Shakespeare course (I believe it was 2 semesters, and it was a long time ago) we read:

1. Over 30 of Shakespeare's plays

2. The Sonnets

3. Several plays by related playwrights (Marlowe, Ben Jonson, some others). Essentially the bulk of 3 separate collections of 6-8 plays.

"Nevertheless, 3,000 pages of Shakespeare and Sophocles in four months still sounds dense."

Seems reasonable. Assuming it takes you on average 2 mins to digest a page, we're talking 100 hours total or 8 hours / week. I have taken engineering classes with a workload of over 20 hours / week.

That's more reading that was expected of me during any of my college courses at UW Madison. I think universities used to require more from their students.

The honors English "Great Books" series at the University of Michigan has about that much reading in each semester.

3000 pages in 4 months, isn't that less than 30 pages per day? Sounds doable.

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