Found: W. H. Auden Syllabus for 'Fate and the Individual in European Literature'

In 1941–42, W. H. Auden's one-semester course at the University of Michigan, "Fate and the Individual in European Literature," required over 6,000 pages of reading. The New York Daily News has more:

The syllabus (first unearthed by the blog "more than 95 theses") identifies the reading list as being for the "first semester," but Professor Lisa Goldfarb, Associate Professor and Associate Dean at NYU's Gallatin School (and who is in the midst of writing essays on Auden), cautioned that the indication of "first semester" suggests that the course would have continued into the second.

Nevertheless, 3,000 pages of Shakespeare and Sophocles in four months still sounds dense.

"What I find fascinating about the syllabus is how much it reflects Auden's own overlapping interests in literature across genres - drama, lyric poetry, fiction - philosophy, and music," Goldfarb said. "He also includes so many of the figures he wrote about in his own prose and those to whom he refers in his poetry: especially "The Tempest" of Shakespeare; Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Melville, Rilke, as well as the opera libretti on the syllabus.

Read more at the NY Daily News.