Some readings from past and coming FFC classes...

Among the ancients, Plato’s Republic, Apology, and Symposium are FFC regulars. You might find Aristotle’s Poetics or Nichomachean Ethics. The tragedies, too, like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (a nice tie-in to Freud; Civilization and Its Discontents is a common choice) or Euripides’ Medea. Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid

Selections from the Bible and/or the Qur’an. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, the work of Thomas Aquinas

You might read some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and William Shakespeare shows up a lot—The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, too

Readings range from the pragmatics of Machiavelli’s The Prince to the reason of René Descartes’ Discourse on Method and the critique of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto; from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Voyage of the Beagle

Others treat real and imagined stories of cultural contact, from Mary Rowlandson’s The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson to Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Some sections include classic novels by women--Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Existential questions arise in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, scientific answers in James Watson on The Double Helix, a Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

Henry David Thoreau explains resistance in Walden and Civil Disobedience; Michel Foucault traces the oppressive system in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

The gender-bending M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, is a possibility. English-Spanish texts like Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera embody a different kind of hybridity

Social justice issues come up with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Maria E. Lucas’s Forged Under the Sun: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas, and Ruth Underhill, Papago Woman. Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands raises identity issues

Our summer reading will be on quite a few syllabi—Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Films are often a are part of class texts--Fail-Safe, The Ugly American, Matewan, Inherit the Wind, Hester Street, The Grapes of Wrath, Sunrise at Campobello, Saving Private Ryan , and Dr. Strangelove are all possibilities in one section on U.S. history; Major Barbara, 1984, Orlando, The King of Hearts, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest form a critical part in another, this one on the individual’s relation to society; another, on issues of religious faith, has included Ben Hur, Dogma, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Omen, The Rapture, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Ten Commandments.

If you have favorite authors and texts that you’d like to recommend, send your suggestions to the FFC Curriculum Committee and Associate Provost Jeanne Gunner at gunner@chapman.edu.