We should talk about literature
Basketactortale
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I am a science graduate, I worked as a scientist all my working life. I have almost zero education in the humanities after the age of 14 and have not even taken an interest in "serious" books beyond a bit of philosophy for many decades. I read novels but almost none of those on the list of greats.
I recently read Mortimer Adler and have been thinking about this idea of a "great book" corpus of ideas in Western thought.
There may be people here who are more in touch with the literature and humanities tradition, so there might be a range of things we could discuss here.
First I am interested to think about the blacklash against "wokeness" in studying humanities and in particular English Literature. I have seen some people complaining that Marxism is taking over.
Second I am interested to think about what makes "great literature" and why we should trust people like Adler to tell us what it is. Nothing against the man himself, he seems like a good person, but a corpus of books which are only written by white men? Madness.
If anyone has other points or questions or different angles then I would be interested to hear them. I can say some more about Adler and what I make of it, but my knowledge of the "great books" narrative itself is very limited.
I recently read Mortimer Adler and have been thinking about this idea of a "great book" corpus of ideas in Western thought.
There may be people here who are more in touch with the literature and humanities tradition, so there might be a range of things we could discuss here.
First I am interested to think about the blacklash against "wokeness" in studying humanities and in particular English Literature. I have seen some people complaining that Marxism is taking over.
Second I am interested to think about what makes "great literature" and why we should trust people like Adler to tell us what it is. Nothing against the man himself, he seems like a good person, but a corpus of books which are only written by white men? Madness.
If anyone has other points or questions or different angles then I would be interested to hear them. I can say some more about Adler and what I make of it, but my knowledge of the "great books" narrative itself is very limited.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism#Major_twentieth-century_schools_of_critical_analysis
But a starting point might be understanding the significance of liberal humanism in literary critical theory and analysis, in relation to which I suspect there are a number of people on these forums who actually know what they are talking about.
There's a lot about him and the "Great Books of the Western World" idea on Wikipedia.
Who, for that matter was Adler? I regard myself as reasonably well read, and had never heard of him before I looked him up on wikipedia today. He sounds there like an example of the sort of high-minded worthiness that tends to give me the abdabs, but I am probably being grossly unfair.
Of course I cannot force you to be interested in any topic!
Mortimer Adler was and continues to be an influential figure for some and I think as such is worth considering. That you are unaware of him tells us something but I am not sure it is significant, I think that many British people (if you like me are of that persuasion) have inherited a particular educational pedagogy that abandoned this style of learning a long time ago. Adler essentially represents a style of learning that was the only available degree at Oxbridge until the 19th century.
Crudely it is the difference between reading a text and reading the learned opinions on a text.
Here's an obituary https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-30-me-16968-story.html
A lot seems to depend on circumstances when you read something. For example, I know a lot of people who were forced to read some of Thomas Hardy's works at school and they hate him. I discovered his work in my 20s and love his work. Yet at the same time, I was forced to read Pride & Prejudice at school and now can't stand Jane Austen, I spite of the fact that I very much live in the heart of Austen country.
One pair that did surprise was a couple of gothic classics. I was familiar with the concepts of Frankenstein and Dracula and, in my head, they were on a par with another. I red them back to back and discovered they could hardly be more different. Frankenstein is a deep philosophical work, incredibly rich and, at times, quite difficult to get through. Whereas Dracula is a tremendously entertaining yarn that is easy to tear through at a fast pace.
Thanks yes. I was born into the aspiring working class and the "great works" in my household were Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Which is interesting because they did not appear to have anything to say to us in our situation.
For me, Alices adventures (Wonderland and Looking Glass) are the greatest works of literature ever. They are stunning, and the more I learn about them and their context, the more I admire them. And they are deeply embedded in our culture - as well as inspiring so many other works. But others may not agree, and that is fine.
I don't read to be Well Read. I read for education, enlightenment and entertainment. I have read many of the classics, to see what they are about, why they are classics, and am convinced that is some cases, it is because they are so unintelligible that Those Who Make Lists assume these authors must be more intelligent than them, and so must be Worthy.
I assume they are on drugs. But that is why I am not an academic.
As to the backlash against "wokeness" - of course the fascists want us to read older works, where their stupid idyll of a White-Run world is portrayed. It was never real, and it would have been utterly awful if it had.
If I am honest, I don't specifically check gender, racial origins or sexuality of my authors. That is not especially relevant in terms of my wanting to start a book. It is relevant when it comes to the way the book progresses. If they are writing from their own experience - however tangentially - I do need to know that, and to listen more if they are not like me.
Also, C.S.Lewis' view that there is no one set of excellences that make all good books good.
Both believed that some books were objective good or bad, and that there were classics which were much better than others. But in principle neither would have drawn up a canon and said these books and these only are real literature.
My understanding is that the concept of a canon was originally satirical: women scholars who were discouraged from writing academically about women talked of there being a canon of great usually men who were approved for scholarly study as a way to castigate the phenomenon. Then conservative scholars with no sense of humour tried to defend the idea seriously.
Personally I like lists of greatest authors - I think it's a fun parlour game. I think there's something important about an aesthetic achievement that goes beyond expressing attitudes that one can approve of. But it's not wrong to read and enjoy authors that would never make it onto those lists.
Some writers though are just bad.
This is another interesting thread to pull on. Many contemporary "greatest book" lists include Lolita by Nabokov and Blood Meridian by McCarthy. Neither of which are books I want to read and in some senses only appear to be on the list because they are so brutal.
Two things put me off modern literary fiction: the first is the way people who only ever read that look down their noses at anyone who prefers a book with a plot. The second is that many of the writers of literary fiction make a virtue out of writing impenetrable prose, and when you finally work out what they're talking about it's not that interesting anyway. And if everyone else around you is raving about how wonderful a book is, you need a lot of self-confidence to say 'Actually I didn't like it.'
It is worth mentioning here that Dickens was originally popular fiction.
@Dafyd I have never heard the idea that the 'Western canon' was originally satire. I have always understood it to have been a real thing, and the feminist critique of it is absolutely serious. When I was at university, nobody beyond a few drama geeks had ever heard of Aphra Behn. Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters were almost the only women writers who were widely studied, and non-white authors were basically ignored.
Blood Meridian I am not sure about, though I certainly remember it. If one likes it it's as much for the highly wrought descriptive passages as for the plot.
Did find the end of Dracula disappointing. Lots of struggling through mountains then "we caught him napping and killed him. The End"
His short stories are great. I keep meaning to read Women in Love.
I liked this part of that description
@Jane R @Dafyd as a teenager I read Lady Chatterley's Lover and half the book is just a lot of nasty complaining about lesbians - came across as very misogynistic and homophobic which put me off his other work.
I think Jane Austen is under-valued and not taken seriously enough as an author. In addition, there are many other pioneering women writers who are barely known - for example, Margaret Cavendish was writing science fiction in the 1660s. It seems bonkers that nobody has tried to adapt The Blazing World for the screen!
Lewis said (I think in Experiment in Criticism) that if there's even one person who reads a book and then re-reads it over and over, that that book cannot be completely bad. So when he thinks of a great book, he starts from the premise that it ought to be capable of producing pleasure for readers not just the first time round, but the second, the third, etc. It's been too long since I read EiC, and I need to go back and read it again--but it was very useful to me. He wasn't just laying out a list of Top 100 Great Books, he was trying to get at what makes a book worthwhile.
I'm pretty sure the idea of a "canon" goes back to the Bible, but got attached pretty quickly to the set of books most commonly taught in school. Which would have been before feminist theory came along--anyone have an OED and want to look up the first uses of "canon" in this sense?
That first set of books would probably have been the Greek and Roman classics. English literature was looked down upon for quite a long time--you enjoyed Shakespeare at home or in the theatre, but the Iliad and the Odyssey were truly great.
I think Jane Austen is under-valued and not taken seriously enough as an author.[/quote]
Austen's works are very widely read, have been in print continuously for the last 200 years, have been adapted numerous times for screen and stage, and some of her more famous characters are frequently cited in the press as a shorthand character descriptor.
Those things all seem important to me. If being "taken seriously" as an author means being some overly pretentious man who is so far up himself that he emerges from his own tonsils, then I'll stick with Austen, who is actually understandable.
The use of canon to refer to the definite collection of books regarded as worthy of inclusion in the Bible is of course old.
The transferred use to cover those works of a particular author accepted as authentic seems to be late 19th century - there's a quote referring to the "Platonic canon" where the writer is using scare quotes around 'canon'.
The OED didn't consider the use to refer to the body of secular literature regarded as worthy of study as a separate sense until 2002 - the earliest example of 'canon' in the OED to illustrate that sense is 1929, but it looks to me like it's a casual figure of speech rather than an expression of a thought-out theory. (Lewis in Studies of Words talks about the problem of determining when a word actually acquires a meaning, as opposed to a denotation or metaphorical use.) The use must have been established by 1994, when The Western Canon by Harold Bloom was published.
I myself am fond of the work of Austen (though not much "Emma"), Kipling, Tennyson, Samuel Clemens, Damon Runyon, Ursula LeGuin, Italo Calvino, and various others.
The thread's title does not specify "Great" literature. Does anyone have any favorite good but less than great literature?
What's your source for this?
I would also add some non-fiction into the mix, as two of my favourite books of all time are The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Nor should they be long dead. Some are only recently dead, for example, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Then we get the case of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It's a tremendous work, but somehow now deemed great because it's a work of comedy.
I have a bone to pick with the Guardian's list of '100 greatest books in English,' actually. I was reading through it thinking 'meh, OK, OK, hell yes, wtf?' Depending on my own opinion of their selection. Somewhere in the 80s, they included Buddenbrooks.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time
It's a great book, don't get me wrong. It's also a classic of German literature, and I'm fine with reading books in translation if your command of the original isn't up to snuff, but *not* appropriating books from the literature of other languages to make your 'canon' look more impressive. They also had Russian and Spanish writers in the mix. It's not like we're short of original English works, is it? Why not have a list of '100 greatest translated books' as well?
A Literary Canon would seem to be a type of social (or ideological) construct concerning the historic and cultural importance of reading and of education (and more). One interesting aspect is the way in which its normative values get debated. The rather eurocentric nature of the literary Canon being discussed here seems relevant.
It is attested to in Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov.
My personal take on books is that a lot of what's called great literature bores me - possibly because all the stuff we had to read in English had to have a "message", which put me right off some things. When I commented on that in my part of an end-of-term report in 4th form, the teacher handed out Lord of the Flies the next term with a comment that she was sorry, but it had a message again. Think she was a bit concerned when I pointed out that I'd read it at least 3 or 4 years earlier, and much preferred The Inheritors... still do for that matter. I read to enjoy the story, although I do have a preference for characters I could believe were people, and who don't jar in the setting of the story.
Exactly. The real tragedy is that fifty or a hundred years later, it probably would have been socially acceptable for them to marry. As it is, all Dorothea can do is persuade his wife not to leave him, which didn't do either of them any favours.
I'm not sure Austen's works are particularly 'romantic' in the modern sense. All her heroines, with the possible exception of Fanny in Mansfield Park, are concerned with finding a tolerable husband who is rich enough for them.
I don't think you're alone in thinking The Inheritors is better than Lord of the Flies. If someone had to only read one Golding, I'd pick The Inheritors or The Spire.
The question of messages is interesting. I do think stories are better if they're about something and have something to say, but at the same time one's not interested in stories that are too obviously and blatantly out to illustrate a thesis. Dostoyevsky is an interesting case: he's saying things about Christian themes of sin, love, and redemption. But I don't think that his stories can be reduced to illustrations of those themes: there's an excess in the presentation that goes beyond the theoretical.
The purpose of reading works in this way being to allow them to change us as part of this combative conversation, to notice when our reading opens up new ways of thinking and seeing the world.
I do not think I was changed at all by any reading I did at school. Dissecting the language and grammar seemed to destroy the thing we were supposed to be reading and understanding "the human condition" was never said to be an objective of the lesson.
The things that changed me were the things I read at home, initially Isaac Asimov which led into various other diversions. None of which led me to Jane Austen, so I accept my impoverishment in that direction.
Pomona: You are certainly correct about "The Odyssey", and now you can go argue with people who think we should stick to works originally written in English.
It is advertised as 'the best 100 books published in English,' which to my mind very heavily implies 'first published in English.'
And look at us all getting het up about a publisher's marketing stunt...
Crime and Punishment is an outstanding novel. It just is and would be in any language I would argue.
Emily Wilson's collection of essays on translation, 'Crossing the wine-dark sea' is an interesting take on the subject of literary translation. She's talking specifically about translating Greek and Roman literature, but a lot of her comments apply to translation generally. It's not just a question of translating the original author word for word. You need to end up with something that captures the spirit of the original, but is also readable and stylish (I can't think of a better word here) in the target language.
All of that is true and I acknowledge that there are further depths to be found in reading Cervantes in the language he wrote in. But that does not in itself mean that the work in English is bad.
Two things can be true at the same time - it is incredible in mediaeval Spanish but it is really good translated into English.