Great Books Ladder · High school · Grade 7–12

The 20th Century

Volumes 54 to 60: Freud, then one rung for each author of the six 20th-century volumes, in philosophy and religion, natural science, social science and imaginative literature.

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48 topics in 5 units. Builds on The 19th Century.

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Unit 1 Freud

2 topics

Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind, and how later research judged them.

  1. Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (being written)
  2. Freud: The Later Works (being written)

Unit 2 Philosophy and Religion

8 topics

Volume 55: eight thinkers of the 20th century.

  1. William James: Pragmatism (being written)
  2. Bergson: An Introduction to Metaphysics (being written)
  3. Russell: The Problems of Philosophy (being written)
  4. Whitehead: Science and the Modern World (being written)
  5. Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man (being written)
  6. Heidegger: What Is Metaphysics? (being written)
  7. Dewey: Experience and Education (being written)
  8. Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (being written)

Unit 3 Natural Science

11 topics

Volume 56: relativity, the atom, the expanding universe, genes and life.

  1. Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis (being written)
  2. Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics (being written)
  3. Einstein: Relativity (being written)
  4. Eddington: The Expanding Universe (being written)
  5. Bohr: Atomic Theory and the Discussion with Einstein (being written)
  6. Dobzhansky: Genetics and the Origin of Species (being written)
  7. Hardy: A Mathematician's Apology (being written)
  8. Schrödinger: What Is Life? (being written)
  9. Planck: Scientific Autobiography (being written)
  10. Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy (being written)
  11. Waddington: The Nature of Life (being written)

Unit 4 Social Science

7 topics

Volumes 57 and 58: economics, sociology, anthropology and history.

  1. Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class (being written)
  2. Tawney: The Acquisitive Society (being written)
  3. Keynes: The General Theory (being written)
  4. Frazer: The Golden Bough (being written)
  5. Weber: Essays in Sociology (being written)
  6. Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages (being written)
  7. Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology (being written)

Unit 5 Imaginative Literature

20 topics

Volumes 59 and 60: stories, plays and poems of the 20th century.

  1. Conrad: Heart of Darkness (being written)
  2. Chekhov: Uncle Vanya (being written)
  3. Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle (being written)
  4. Mann: Death in Venice (being written)
  5. Proust: Swann in Love (being written)
  6. Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (being written)
  7. Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author (being written)
  8. Shaw: Saint Joan (being written)
  9. Cather: A Lost Lady (being written)
  10. Kafka: The Metamorphosis (being written)
  11. D. H. Lawrence: The Prussian Officer (being written)
  12. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (being written)
  13. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (being written)
  14. Woolf: To the Lighthouse (being written)
  15. Faulkner: A Rose for Emily (being written)
  16. O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra (being written)
  17. Hemingway: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (being written)
  18. Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children (being written)
  19. Orwell: Animal Farm (being written)
  20. Beckett: Waiting for Godot (being written)
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