Enduring Texts: Growth Mindset

The Iliad is not merely a distillation of the whole protracted war against Troy but simultaneously an exploration of the heroic ideal in all its self-contradictoriness—its insane and grasping pride, its magnificent but animal strength, its ultimate if obtuse humanity. The poem is, in truth, the story of the wrath of Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side, that is announced in its very first words; yet for thousands of verses on end Achilles is an unseen presence as he broods among his Myrmidons, waiting for Zeus’s promise to be fulfilled—the promise that the Trojans will set fire to the Achaean ships and force King Agamemnon to beg him to return to the fight.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): History

The Iliad is not merely a distillation of the whole protracted war against Troy but simultaneously an exploration of the heroic ideal in all its self-contradictoriness—its insane and grasping pride, its magnificent but animal strength, its ultimate if obtuse humanity. The poem is, in truth, the story of the wrath of Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side, that is announced in its very first words; yet for thousands of verses on end Achilles is an unseen presence as he broods among his Myrmidons, waiting for Zeus’s promise to be fulfilled—the promise that the Trojans will set fire to the Achaean ships and force King Agamemnon to beg him to return to the fight

Primary Discipline: Literature

St. Augustine's Confessions is sometimes said to be the first autobiography. In the text we see Augustine in mid-life carefully and honestly relating the story of his life to that point - from the varied sins of his youth, through his conversion to Christianity, to some profund meditations on the nature of time and memory. Throughout, Augustine is directly addressing God and is primarily concerned with the well-being of his soul, i.e. his essence, and questions about the will and the intellect.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): Religion

April, 1984. Winston Smith, thinks a thought, starts a diary, and falls in love. But Big Brother is watching him, and the door to Room 101 can swing open in the blink of an eye. Its ideas have become our ideas, and Orwell's fiction is often said to be our reality. The definitive book of the 20th century is re-examined in a radical new adaptation exploring why Orwell's vision of the future is as relevant as ever.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): Political Science, Political Philosophy

Malcolm X, original name Malcolm Little, Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, (born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died February 21, 1965, New York, New York), African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam who articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s. After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story—The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)—made him an ideological hero, especially among Black youth.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): African American Studies, History

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new introduction by scholars Norma Cantu (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Aida Hurtado (University of California at Santa Cruz) as well as a revised critical bibliography.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): Cultural Studies, Linguistics

Also available here: http://users.uoa.gr/~cdokou/TheoryCriticismTexts/Anzaldua-borderlands-la-frontera.pdf

Best known for her novel The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's work includes poetry, novels and short stories focused on feminist themes of gender, identity, environment and power politics.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): Women's Studies, Gender Studies

Anne Frank, in full Annelies Marie Frank, (born June 12, 1929, Frankfurt am Main, Germany—died February/March 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Hannover), Jewish girl whose diary of her family’s two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands became a classic of war literature.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): History, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist recounts his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp.

Primary Discipline: Psychology

Malcolm X, original name Malcolm Little, Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, (born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died February 21, 1965, New York, New York), African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam who articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s. After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story—The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)—made him an ideological hero, especially among Black youth.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): African American Studies, History

Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of de-segregated city bus service.

Primary Discipline: African American History
Secondary Discipline(s): History

The struggle is my life, wrote Nelson Mandela in a letter from underground on June 26, 1961. "I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days." Within three years he was to be sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, together with others from the Rivonia trial.

Primary Discipline: African Studies

Chinua Achebe, in full Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, (born November 16, 1930, Ogidi, Nigeria—died March 21, 2013, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.), Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental depictions of the social and psychological disorientation accompanying the imposition of Western customs and values upon traditional African society. His particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of crisis; his novels range in subject matter from the first contact of an African village with the white man to the educated African’s attempt to create a firm moral order out of the changing values in a large city.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): African Studies

Huckleberry Finn has just been adopted by the Widow Douglass and her sister, and both are committed to changing Huck's "uncivilized" ways. Clean clothes, good manners, and steady church and school attendance are more than Huck can take. But when he is kidnapped by his drunken father, Huck's return to life without rules doesn't seem much better. He escapes and meets Jim, a runaway slave, and together the two travel the Mississippi River on a raft, heading toward Jim's freedom. This unabridged version of Mark Twain's classic American tale--a follow-up to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer--is taken from the 1885 copyright edition and includes original illustrations by Edward W. Kemble.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): American History

Drafted during a period of intensive fasting and “in-dwelling” at his ashram in Ahmedebad, his story of the soul portrayed the deeper, more inward experiences that made him externally an innovator in the struggles against violence, racism, and colonialism.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): History, Philosophy

Gilman was an American novelist and writer from the late 19th and early 20th century. Her most famous work is "The Yellow Wallpaper" which is arguably a gothic horror story focusing on the negative mental health consequences of the then famous "rest cure" as a treatment to female hysteria. Her works deal with feminine identity, social conformity, mental health and medical treatment, and the role women play in society. In her later life she wrote about her Eugenics beliefs and race in America, along with women's suffrage.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Friedrich Nietzsche, (born October 15, 1844, Röcken, Saxony, Prussia [Germany]—died August 25, 1900, Weimar, Thuringian States), German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his observation that “God is dead,” in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance the very things he loathed.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy

Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual legislator of his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an optic for the interpretation of culture and society. Despite repeated criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work, its spell remained powerful well after his death and in fields far removed from psychology as it is narrowly defined. If, as the American sociologist Philip Rieff once contended, “psychological man” replaced such earlier notions as political, religious, or economic man as the 20th century’s dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the power of Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the intellectual legacy he left behind.

Primary Discipline: History
Secondary Discipline(s): Psychology

Virginia Woolf, original name in full Adeline Virginia Stephen, (born January 25, 1882, London, England—died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex), English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.influence on the genre.

Primary Discipline: Literature

American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century (Britanica online). His intellectual work is wide ranging and produced in a variety of forms. He both documented the sturggle for equality in the USA as well as took an active role in that struggle. This text is a sociological study of Black people in the US and set him apart from other Black intellectuals of the time like Booter T. Washington.

Primary Discipline: Sociology
Secondary Discipline(s): History

A fascinating examination of the relationship between civilization and inequality from one of history's greatest minds The first man to erect a fence around a piece of land and declare it his own founded civil society--and doomed mankind to millennia of war and famine. The dawn of modern civilization, argues Jean-Jacques Rousseau in this essential treatise on human nature, was also the beginning of inequality. One of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau based his work in compassion for his fellow man. The great crime of despotism, he believed, was the raising of the cruel above the weak. In this landmark text, he spells out the antidote for man's ills: a compassionate revolution to pull up the fences and restore the balance of mankind.

Primary Discipline: Political Science

Censored in its own time, the Social Contract (1762) remains a key source of democratic belief and is one of the classics of political theory.

Primary Discipline: Political Science

First published in Spain in 1605, it was intended a parody of chivalric romances. The novel was immensely popular and is thought to have laid the foundations for the understanding of the modern novel. It is the realistic story of a knight (Don Quixote) and his companion (Sancho Panza) who set off on a serires of 'magical' quests in contemporary Spain and meet wtih unfortunate results. This is where the phrase "tilting at windwills" and the term "Quixotic" come from.

Primary Discipline: Literature

Published originally in 1845, this extremely influential autobiography by Frederick Douglass follows in the tradition of the American slave narrative. In it, he tells his own story of learning to read and write, his eventual escape from slavery, and his own work in the American abolitionist movement. Douglass is one of the preeminent abolitionists of the nineteenth century United States, whose work as an activist, public intellectual, writer, and publisher his work galvanized the abolitionist movement in the United States and abroad.

Primary Discipline: Autobiography
Secondary Discipline(s): Literature, American History, African American History

American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century (Britannica online). His intellectual work is wide ranging and produced in a variety of forms. He both documented the struggle for equality in the USA as well as took an active role in that struggle. The Negro is a comprehensive history of the Black people in the US, from first stepping foot on the continent to the time in which it was published.

Primary Discipline: Sociology
Secondary Discipline(s): History

Shakespeare's 39 plays consist of Comedies, Tragedies and Histories. Each play is filled with complex characters who grapple with the same enduring questions we attempt to understand today. Motives, causes, effects, and consequences all become evident through these dramas.

Primary Discipline: Literature
Secondary Discipline(s): History

Wollstonecraft argues for the education of women.

Primary Discipline: Philosophy
Secondary Discipline(s): History, Women's History and Gender Studies

After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.