- The Bhagavad-Gita
- Li Bo and Du Fu, selected poems
- Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
- W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
- Jan Gross, Neighbors
- Homer, The Iliad
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Franz Kafka, selected tales
- Lu Xun, selected stories
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, selected short stories
- Toni Morrison, Sula
- Plato, Apology/Crito/Phaedo
- Selections from the Quran
- Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
- Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood
These works, all taught previously, may also be used in the course:
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems
- Jorge Luis Borges, selected short stories
- Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night
- Zhuangzi, Basic Writings
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
- Book of Job
- Plato, The Republic
- Voltaire, Candide
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
This list was prepared by Lawrence's humanities faculty and revised in March of 2009. There are five divisional lists, and the syllabus for Freshman Studies must include at least one work from each of them.
