The Early Moderns: Old Western Culture

The Early Moderns is a 3-credit integrated humanities course designed to lead the student through the greatest and most influential works of the early modern period. Students in The Early Moderns course will learn to read and appreciate works of poetry, theology, novels, and political treatises from the period, think critically about, and cultivate answers to, perennial human questions, and expand their imaginative faculties to envision truth in a context outside of reason alone.

This 32-week course consists of four eight-week quarters. Each quarter students will be assigned a weekly pre-recorded lecture, reading appropriate for the week, relevant reading questions, a weekly 1.5 hour live recitation, one 1200-word essay, and a quarterly exam. In the course of the year, the students will read all the texts listed below, listened to 32 lectures, write four essays and attended a minimum of 30 (ideally 32) live recitations to discuss the texts in Socratic fashion.

Course Objectives

To become proficient in the conversational approach to learning: close readings, interpretive questions, and Socratic discussions of the texts.
To gain a grasp of the literary figures and the historical framework of the time period.
To develop lateral thinking skills by analyzing and synthesizing themes and motifs.
To cultivate an appetite for learning as a way of life (the life of the mind).
To cultivate a desire to pursue the highest things.
To be able to think Christianly and write persuasively about perennial human questions.

Texts

Students taking this course will need to purchase the Old Western Culture: The Early Modern's lectures and readers (students may access the PDFs of the readers free of charge). Roman Roads Media provides Kepler students with a 25% discount on all OWC Materials. See the link for details.

Unit 1

William Shakespeare, Sonnets 3, 73, 55, 60, 103, and 106, King Lear, Richard III, and Merchant of Venice
John Donne, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Holy Sonnets 10 & 14, and Meditation 17
George Herbert, Redemption, The Collar, and Love III
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
John Milton, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, On His Blindness, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, and Paradise Lost

Unit 2

Alexander Pope, Essay On Criticism, Iliad, Essay on Man, and Ode on Solitude
C. S. Lewis, On the Description of Times
Edmund Burke, Selections & Letters and Reflections on the Revolution in France
Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty and The Destruction of Sennacherib
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Percy Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Unit 3

Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado, Annabel Lee, To Helen, The Raven, and The Bells
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, In Memoriam, The Eagle, and Crossing the Bar
Robert Browning, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Dover Beach
Christina Rossetti, Song and A Better Resurrection
Gerald Manly Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, Windhover, and Pied Beauty

Unit 4

Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment?
Galileo Galilei, The Sidereal Messenger, Letter to Benedetto Castelli, and Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany
Rene Descartes, Meditations
Sir Isaac Newton, Principia: Laws of Motion & Gravity and Principia: General Scholium
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Anton Checkov, The Bet
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
C. S. Lewis, XMas and Christmas, De Descriptione Scriptorum, and On the Reading of Old Books