FROM HOMER TO SHAKESPEARE

This course is a curation of the best resources on the web for getting into the great books of Western civilization. At your own pace, this course will introduce you to a short canon of great works in the Western Tradition by summarizing a lecture series called "Civilizing the Barbarians" by Alexander Stepanov.

Stepanov was a Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon.com when he produced this lecture series. He created it to give an overview of Western literature to his fellow engineers, many of whom did not grow up in Western countries and were assumed to be new students of the Western Canon. This audience makes Stepanov's lecture series the perfect starting point because you don't need any background knowledge whatsoever to enjoy his lectures.

Stepanov's lectures are available in a YouTube playlist of 34 videos. Half of these videos are Stepanov's lectures and the other half are Q&A sessions led by Stepanov. This course summarizes Stepanov's lectures for you before you watch them. With these summaries, you can skip lectures that may cover familiar topics and spend more time on the parts that are new or interesting to you.

Stepanov says that you don't have to read a lot of books to understand Western civilization. You just have to read a few, carefully. Thus, his lecture series offers a short canon of literature for careful reading. Stepanov's short canon includes the following authors and great works: