Great Books at Hopkins

"Great Books at Hopkins" (now titled FYS or "First Year Seminar") is a longstanding course offered to incoming students. The aim of the course is to get students reading very quickly, very closely, and in very large quantities. An auditorium of students is divided into reading groups, supervised by instructors from different departments. Classes alternate between auditorium lectures and reading group discussions. The reading list is subject to change each year.

During the course I taught, the reading list was:

• Homer (fl. c. 800 BCE), The Odyssey, trans. Lattimore. Harper Perennial, 1999). 978-0-060931957

• Dante (c. 1265-1321), Inferno. Trans. Durling and Martinez (Oxford, 1997). 978-0-195087444

• Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Frankenstein (1818). Ed. J. Paul Hunter (Norton, 1996). 978-0-393927931 

• Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Ed. John W. Blassingame.

• Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896 – 1957), The Leopard (1958), trans. Archibald Colquhoun (Pantheon Books, 2007). 9780375714795

• Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998), Neapolitan Chronicles (1953), trans. Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee (New Vessel 9780375714795

• A Room of One’s Own, Intro. Mary Gordon (San Diego: Harvest, 1989) 9780156787338.