Home Page for English 287: Great Books (Fall 2002)

You are now reading this home page at our back-up site. The course main site is not here but at KSU-Online. The Class Message Board and all copyrighted materials will be available only there.

As soon as you are enrolled in the course, you should go to our main course site at online.ksu.edu and establish an account there. Just follow the directions.
You will want to bookmark this site (the one where you now are) in case some temporary problem with the server at KSU-Online prevents you from accessing material there.

Our course in Fall 2002 is designed to enable students to get practice in thinking through, privately and in group discussion, sophisticated literature from a variety of times and places, and at the same time to acquaint themselves with some of the acknowledged masterpieces of literature in the Western Tradition.

In the course of the semester, we will read through and discuss 8 works of various kinds from different subcultures within the larger Western Tradition.

Author/work	Period (first appearance)	Type (one set of classifications)
Homer, *The Odyssey*	Dark Age/Archaic Greece (around 800-750 BCE)	Heroic Epic Poem
Sophocles, *Oedipus Rex*	Classical Greece	Greek Tragic Drama
Cervantes, *Don Quixote*	Renaissance/Baroque Spain (1605/1615)	Picaresque Novel
Shakespeare, *King Lear*	Renaissance England (1605-6)	Jacobean Tragic Drama
Molière, *Tartuffe*	Baroque/Enlightenment France (1664)	Comic Drama
Fielding, *Tom Jones*	(1749)	Comic Novel
Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle	(1963)	Postmodern Satiric Novel
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	(1974)	Novel as "Chautauqua monologue"

For information on which editions to acquire, and where to get them, see Texts for the Course.

Although we will primarily be taking up these works individually, we will also see how a number of the later ones are (among other things) "carrying on a conversation with" some of their predecessors, and that this contributes in an important way to their overall meaning.

The table above gives you a chronological picture of the order in which our works emerged in history. In our course, however, we will begin with Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, then proceed from The Odyssey through Tom Jones, and wind up with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The course grade will be based a final exam, a series of quizzes, and regular participation on the course message boards. An alternative to the final exam might be a couple of short out-of-class essays. (I'm still making up my mind about this.)