Foundation Year Program Book List 2022/23

The following is a list of the books to be read for the Foundation Year Program 2022-2023. There will be additional readings from the Foundation Year Handbook, which will be distributed to students by the FYP Office prior to the first day of classes.

All books will be available through the King’s Bookstore, located on the lower level, King’s Academic Building (also called the NAB). Any questions for the Bookstore can be directed to manager Paul MacKay at manager@kingsbookstore.ca. Should you plan to purchase second-hand books, please aim to obtain the specified translations.

Note for Science students (K1101/2): Students enrolled in KING 11001/2 should not purchase any of the books indicated by * as these are required readings for Thursday lectures only.

Section I: The Ancient World

You will begin by studying the classical cultures of ancient Greece, Rome and Israel through religious, poetic and philosophical works that articulate ideas and institutions at the origins of Western culture.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N.K. Sandars (Penguin Classics) 9780140441000
The Holy Bible (Penguin) 9780452006478
Homer, The Iliad, trans. S. Lombardo. (Hackett) 9780872203525
Sophocles, King Oidipous, trans. R. Blondell. (Hackett) 9781585100606
Plato, Phaedo, trans. E. Brann, P. Kalkavage, E. Salem. (Focus Philosophical Library) 9780941051699
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. S. Ruden (Yale University Press) 9780300240108
*Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. Melville (Oxford World Classics) 9780199555147

Section II: The Middle Ages

From the collapse of the ancient world arose medieval Europe, a culture apparently unified both religiously and politically, but in fact riven by deep tension and conflict. This section is brought to profound poetic conclusion in a reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Qur’an. Trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. (Oxford World Classics) 9780199535958
Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199537822
Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso, trans. A. Mandlebaum (Everyman’s Library) 9780679433132
*Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. K. Harrison (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199540167

Section III: The Renaissance and the Reformation

This section is characterized by ambiguity as Europeans look back to revive the ideals of antiquity (renaissance) and begin something new, the modern world. It is an age of worldliness, but also, as the Reformation shows, of radical piety. This is an age of a new sense of the human and of nature that will lead to good and evil as Europe spreads its culture throughout the world.

Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. C.G. Wallis, P.J.W. Miller, and D.
Carmichael (Hackett Classics) 9780872203969
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. P. Bondanella (Oxford World’s Classics) 9780199535699
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (Oxford World Classics) 9780199536535
Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, trans. M.A. Screech (Penguin Classics)
9780140446029
*Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus (Dover Thrift Editions) 9780486282084
Wu Cheng’en, Monkey King – Journey to the West, trans. Julia Lovell (Penguin Classics) 9780143136309
Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works ed. Rose-Mary Sargeant (Hackett Classics) 9780872204706
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Oxford World Classics) 9780199535903

Section IV: The Age of Reason

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern world fully established itself in thought, in science, in politics and society. Here you encounter accounts of human freedom and nature that are at the basis of our own sense of a secular world established for human happiness and well-being.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. I. Johnston (Broadview Press) 9781554811526
*Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Cleves, trans. T. Cave (Oxford World’s Classics)
9780199539178
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Parts 1 and 2 (Broadview Press) 9781554810406
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (Broadview Press) 9781554811564
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. I. Johnston (Broadview Press)
9781554812974
*Voltaire, Candide, ed. E. Palmer (Broadview Press) 9781551117461
Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. F.J. Lamport (Penguin Classics) 9780140443684
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (Penguin Classics)
9780140447507
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott (Broadview Press)
9781551115399
*Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflote): Lebretto 0073999673500

Section V: The Era of Revolutions

With the French Revolution, Europeans began a series of revolutions that sought to overthrow the older world of order and hierarchy to create a world that directly serves human ends and purposes. In this effort arose theories and political movements of liberalism and socialism and in response to them, profound political, literary and philosophic reactions and critiques.

*G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Hackett), 9780872200562
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. D.L. Macdonald & K. Scherf (Broadview Press) 9781554811038
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Broadview) 9781551113333
*J.S. Mill, On Liberty (Broadview) 9781554810444
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (G. Schirmer) 9780793514366
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics) 9780140449235
W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Dover) 9780486280417
Anton Chekhov, Five Plays (Oxford UP) 9780199536696

Section VI: The Contemporary World

In our own age, two world wars and a deepened experience of the modern world have given rise to a radical rethinking of various aspects of the western tradition, and a concern for much that characterizes our time: technology, globalization, social and political structures, and the human relation to nature and our own bodies.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (Broadview Press) 9781551119687
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) 9780156907392
Marie Clements, Burning Vision (Talonbooks) 9780889224728)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. C. Borde (Vintage/Random) 9780307277787
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (Penguin Classics) 9780143135203
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (Grove Press) 9780802158635
*J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton) 9780691173900

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