How a decades-old syllabus inspired ‘the hardest course you’ll ever take’

The College Fix reports:

6,000 pages of reading. Shakespeare, Melville, and Dante. Opera libretti from Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner. In a university course from 1941, students were expected to consume all this and more in just one semester.

A syllabus from that class at the University of Michigan, taught by influential poet W.H. Auden, was discovered in 2012. It detailed an ambitious course filled with a staggering amount of work. The class, titled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” asked its students to read 32 books over the course of a single semester.

Now the decades-old syllabus has inspired the creation of a new class at the University of Oklahoma that proves that a “highly demanding sequence of classic works” can draw a large number of students.

Wilfred McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, decided that stepping outside of his field of American history to create the class was worth it.

There is hope!