THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Introduction to Year Two
curriculum for the marvellous sophomore
Welcome back to the 2025 year of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers.
In 2024, we completed three “semesters,” amounting to 46 episodes of two or more hours. (You can find the introduction and syllabus here and the archive here.) The focus was fairly narrow: canonical literature written in English between about 1792 and 1945 in Britain, Ireland, and the United States. We covered most of the major poets from Blake to Stevens and read a number of important novels, including the national epics Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, and Ulysses. Support for the project has grown, so much so that I’ve added almost 100 paid subscribers since this time last year, when the only subscribers were those happy few who’d signed up to read my serialized novel, Major Arcana.1
In planning for 2025, I combined the impulses to cast our net more widely and to explore certain topics from 2024 more deeply. All last year I received suggestions for what to cover next, and I’ve tried to take as many of those into account as possible, tempered by the knowledge that there are only so many weeks in the year. Without further ado, I give you the syllabus, followed by explanatory comments:
On the theory that the Invisible College does not need to play by the visible college’s rules, I’ve divided the year into four seasons rather than three semesters. The pace is again weekly for the most part, with a few week-long breaks timed to allow us to catch up or to coincide with major holidays. I confess I found the 2024 schedule sometimes punishing, so I added a couple more breaks next year, for a total of 43 episodes.
In the winter, I will honor those who requested I begin to cover more fundamental material, the ancient and medieval classics on which the modern western canon rest. I am not a classicist or a medievalist, however, and cannot, given the limits to my knowledge, cover too much of that material all at once.2 For the winter we will dwell on or with the ancient Greeks. We’ll begin with Homer’s Odyssey,3 passing through drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and ending with philosophy—the focus will be on foundational aesthetic and literary theory—in Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus.
In the spring, we will return to modernity. In designing these weeks, I wanted to answer this question: what was happening in western literature more broadly during the period we covered in British and American literature in 2024? What do Romanticism, realism, and modernism look like in French, German, and Russian4 (not to mention Norwegian and Spanish)? Accordingly, I made a list of great works in translation5 from Goethe to Borges roughly corresponding to our previous journeys from Blake to Beckett and from Emerson to Faulkner. I was forced by limits of time and space to be selective, but I believe my syllabus is representative, starring major figures like Flaubert, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust,6 Kafka, and more.
As for summer reading, I chose to respond to readers’ interest in two English poets pre-dating (and inspiring) the Romantics with whom we began last year, and probably exceeding them in range, power, grandeur, and invention: Shakespeare and Milton. I selected eight of Shakespeare’s most significant plays from the tragedies and comedies.7 Milton is represented not only by his grand epic Paradise Lost, but also by such lyric and dramatic poems as “Lycidas,” Comus, and Samson Agonistes, the brief epic Paradise Regained, and the prose treatise on free speech Areopagitica.
If winter, spring, and summer will broaden our range, fall will deepen our inquiry. We will return to American literature, this time for a survey of the American novel from the end of the 19th through the end of the 20th centuries. James and Faulkner will reappear from 2024; their stature, to my mind, justifies giving them at least two episodes, since we devoted multiple episodes last year to Joyce, Eliot, and Melville. The rest of the writers, including such requested figures as Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, will be making their Invisible College debut. This is admittedly the most self-indulgent section of the 2025 syllabus—a slightly loose list of novels8 I’d like to reread9—but also the most immediately relevant one, as these are our direct precursors if we are American readers and writers.
Please offer a paid subscription today, if you haven’t already, so that you, too, can enjoy this marvelous curriculum, as well as the now-vast archive. The first episode of 2025 will be released on January 17. We’ll begin our voyage, appropriately, with The Odyssey. I’ll see you onboard!
If this project continues into 2026, then we can begin to think about moving on to Rome and medieval Italy, to Virgil and Ovid and Dante. I know there’s also interest in the Bible, but people get too offended when one talks about the Bible.
Why not The Iliad? While The Iliad is the earlier and in some ways more significant work—it launches the tragic tradition and inaugurates the dialogic spirit of our literature with its equalizing of Greek and Trojan perspectives—it is also the less unified one and the more laborious to read. It is moreover less generally influential on our idea of the epic, or of narrative structure in general, than The Odyssey. A reading of The Odyssey in 2025 will also nicely complement 2024’s reading of Ulysses. Finally, The Odyssey, more so than The Iliad, continues to inspire interest and arouse controversy, as in the recent news of the forthcoming Christopher Nolan film adaptation and the renewed social-media quarrels over Emily Wilson’s translation.
I’m aware some people want more Russian classics, but I think introducing that tradition here with one major Dostoevsky novel and two of Tolstoy’s best novellas in the context of their European precursors and influences is the better way to go than launching directly into the vastnesses of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. If there is a junior year in this college, we can consider the latter option then. Please also note that I snuck Nabokov into the fall American novel section.
I have made the controversial choice not to recommend translations here or in the Greek section. I’ve done so for several reasons. First, as I’ve said before, the online book community is positively neurotic on this topic. The denizens of Goodreads, BookTube, and Reddit obsess over finding the right translation rather than acknowledging that they will, one hopes, be in a lifelong relationship with Homer and Goethe and Dostoevsky, and that they will therefore necessarily read multiple translations over the years and maybe even pick up a language or two. (I blame Nabokov for this neurosis, with his endless heckling of the translators in Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature. But Constance Garnett and Willa and Edwin Muir are basically fine. They’re better than not reading Dostoevsky or Kafka at all.) Second, I don’t want to be responsible for encouraging people to buy specific translations of works I can’t read in the original. And even when I can read a work in the original, my preference of translators tends to be based more on aesthetics than accuracy. If I prefer Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon to Richard Howard on Baudelaire, it’s because I think they capture the poet’s velocity and concision better than he does, and thus are faithful not so much to his language as to his sensibility. Third, I may decide to get acquainted with a new translation myself as I read some of these works for a third or fourth time, and I don’t want to recommend something I haven’t read before; I may also compare translations or make translation an explicit topic of reflection on some of our episodes. If you read a translation of a work different from mine, the differences themselves might be illuminating. My advice is to follow your own preference in selecting a translation or to read whatever’s already on your shelf. Or to see what they say on Goodreads, BookTube, and Reddit!
Some time in 2024 I complained that The Invisible College wasn’t leaving me enough time to read books new to me, and I threatened to turn it into a book club where you would read works with me for the first time. I haven’t quite done that here. There are about three things on the whole 2025 syllabus I’ve never read before, including one completely ridiculous gap in my reading that some people are assigned in high school, but I’m not going to tell you what they are, and, in any case, they’re all short. I have read Swann’s Way before, but that’s as far as I’ve ever gone in Proust, and I need to reread it if I am ever to go any farther. Of all the big books of 2025, this is the closest to a “book club” selection, because I don’t remember the novel very well, and I also remember not exactly liking it, despite everyone else’s adulation. We’ll see how I fare this time.
In the “comedy” category, I’ve included one problem play and one romance. I apologize to the Henry and Richard fans, but I decided to exclude the English history plays rather than giving them a shallow treatment. Candidly, of all the Shakespearean “worlds,” those of the history plays are the ones in which this ahistorical American feels least at home.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is arguably not a novel. But I don’t want to reread Three Lives, I don’t want to read The Making of Americans for the first time, and, anyway, it’s not not a novel either. It is almost certainly the best book-length introduction to Stein. It also goes well with the other experimental hybrid semi-novelistic selections, Cane and Pale Fire. Other than that, I make no apology for any particular inclusion or exclusion in this section; I might have added this or dropped that, but all the books on the list as it stands are good; this is reason enough for them to be there. If there is a 2026 curriculum, I imagine, though I make no promises this early, that we will return to the British novel in the same spirit.
A friend once said of a certain professor that all his syllabi should just be called “Books I Like.” All good syllabi in the humanities, we agreed, might merit this description.
Can’t wait!!
Amazing. I've been working my way through your lectures on youtube as well. This is such a boon for those of us who didn't do the graduate school thing. I appreciate you! If ever you're able to provide suggestions for further reading in your show notes, I would love to stare down the source materials on those writers more near and dear to my heart.