From the beginning of recorded human history, literature has been the primary means by which people reflected on the world’s perplexities—its richness, disasters, comedies, and defeats. Religious aspiration, profound questioning, lighthearted merriment, and sober reconsideration comprise its texture, as much as artistic ambition and the thrill of hearing something elusive made beautifully clear. Literature is thought and language in pursuit of powerful intuitions about how the world is or how it might be. Even when it seems to tell a plain tale, it draws on the mysterious power of metaphor, which allows us to hear one thing and see another.

Partly because all truly educated people have some command of literature, and because all truly effective leaders understand the power of language to shape worlds and worldviews, the Literature Concentration is an important option for PPE students. Each course in the Literature Concentration is also available to students as an elective.

The Literature Concentration begins in the fall of the sophomore year with Classical Literature, which surveys the literary heritage of classical Greece and Rome. In the spring semester, Literature students take Shakespeare, which covers the full range of Shakespeare’s writing, including his sonnets, narrative poems, and plays—comedies, histories, and tragedies. In the fall of their junior year, students take English and American Poetry, an immersion in great poems but also an exploration of how poetry can summon, define, and persuade people about how to live, how to think, and what to aspire for. In the spring of their junior year, students take American Literature, which focuses mainly on the American novel and its double legacy of narrative realism and idealistic yearning. The final course in the Literature Concentration is British and European Novels in the senior year, which gathers together great authors such as Miguel de Cervantes, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who have quickened the moral sense as well as the imaginations of generations of readers.

The PPE Literature Concentration differs from many college literature programs in significant ways. First, it is focused almost entirely on reading original works by great writers. We are not using literature to advance any political or ideological point. Second, the Literature Concentration focuses on literature, not on contemporary theories about literature or the nature of language. Third, the Literature Concentration emphasizes deep familiarity with literary works. Students are required, for example, to memorize and recite some of the poems they study, and to enact scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.

The Literature Concentration offers students a way to approach the imaginative horizons surrounding the key social institutions that are the central focus of the PPE program.