“My own answer to what the humanities are for is simple: They should help us to live. We should look to culture as a storehouse of useful ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues.” – Alain de Botton, author and educator (MindEdge, Inc., 2014)
From your studies, you have seen how culture, belief systems, and exposure to the arts affect the way people view the world. Learning about these differences in perspective helps us to have a better understanding of what it means to be human. When we understand and value the humanistic point of view, we bring creative solutions and fresh new ideas to the challenges we face in our personal and professional lives. We are schooled in the fundamentals of close analysis, critical thinking, and teasing out the complexities of issues which have no simple right or wrong answer.
write an analysis (suggested length of 3–5 pages) of one work of literature. Choose one work from the list below:
Classical Period
• Sappho, “The Anactoria Poem” ca. 7th century B.C.E. (poetry)
• Aeschylus, “Song of the Furies” from The Eumenides, ca. 458 B.C.E. (poetry)
• Sophocles, Antigone, ca. 442 B.C.E. (drama)
• Aristotle, Book 1 from the Nichomachean Ethics, ca. 35 B.C.E. (philosophical text)
• Augustus, The Deeds of the Divine Augustus, ca. 14 C.E. (funerary inscription)
• Ovid, “The Transformation of Daphne into a Laurel” an excerpt from Book 1 of The Metamorphoses, ca. 2 C.E. (poetry)
Renaissance
• Francesco Petrarch, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux” 1350 (letter)
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the first seven paragraphs of the “Oration on the Dignity of Man” ca. 1486 (essay excerpt)
• Leonardo da Vinci, Chapter 28 “Comparison of the Arts” from The Notebooks ca. 1478-1518 (art text)
• Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 30, “My Love is like to Ice” from Amoretti 1595 (poetry)
• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” 1609 (poetry)
• Francis Bacon, “Of Studies” from The Essays or Counsels… 1625 (essay)
• Anne Bradstreet, “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth” 1643 (poetry)
• Andrew Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress” 1681 (poetry)
Enlightenment
• René Descartes, Part 4 from Discourse on Method, 1637 (philosophical text)
• William Congreve, The Way of the World, 1700 (drama-comedy)
• Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” 1729 (satirical essay)
• Voltaire, “Micromégas” 1752 (short story, science fiction)
• Phillis Wheatley, “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works” 1773 (poetry)
• Thomas Paine, “Common Sense” 1776 (essay)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Fisherman” 1779 (poetry)
• Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” 1784 (essay)
Romanticism
• Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty” 1813 (poetry)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” 1816 (poetry)
• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” 1839 (short story)
• Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844 (novel)
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847 (novel)
• Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” 1853 (short story)
• Emily Dickinson, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” 1865 (poetry)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Book 4 from The Joyful Wisdom, 1882 (philosophical text)
Realism
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843 (novella)
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 (political pamphlet)
• Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” 1862 (poetry)
• Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” 1867 (poetry)
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886 (novella)
• Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” 1894 (short story)
• Mark Twain, “The Five Boons of Life” 1902 (short story)
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, 1921 (novel)
Sample Solution