Great Books by Women?
Kurt Godden
Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly head again) We have noted
that there are no women authors included in the GB list. The question
is, should there be? The criteria for inclusion are:
1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the grounds that one
needs historical perspective to determine a great book.
2. the work be judged great by its influence in the thought of the
western hemisphere.
Don't flame the criteria, please. That's another thread. The question
is whether or not there are women writers who have written anything of
the caliber of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics/Poetics, and so on.
Antiquity alone does not qualify. Thus, imho Sappho does not qualify.
Philogynists, please keep your flames to yourself. I'm not a misogynist
just because I'm posting this query.
-Kurt Godden
"I guess there are never enough books." --John Steinbeck
Francis Muir
I've been having an off-line discussion with someone about
the Britannica Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly
head again) We have noted that there are no women authors
included in the GB list. The question is, should there be?
The criteria for inclusion are:
1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the
grounds that one needs historical perspective to
determine a great book.
2. the work be judged great by its influence in the
thought of the western hemisphere.
Since feminism is now an important topic, I don't see how you could leave
off Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.
Goofy
Sandra Loosemore
just taken from my own reading. Admittedly, there is somewhat of a
British/19th century bias here....
Mary Wollstonecraft ("Rights of Women", etc.)
Fanny Burney (prolific diarist as well as novelist)
Ann Radcliffe
Jane Austen
Maria Edgeworth
Charlotte Bronte (and Anne and Emily, too?)
Elizabeth Gaskell
George Eliot
Mrs. Henry Wood ("East Lynne")
Harriet Beecher Stowe
I suppose some people will complain that popular novels like "The
Mysteries of Udolpho" have had very little "influence in the thought
of the western hemisphere". But they *were* vastly influential in
the development of the traditions of modern literature.
-Sandra
Janet M. Lafler
>I've been having an off-line discussion with someone about the Britannica
>Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly head again) We have noted
>that there are no women authors included in the GB list. The question
>is, should there be? The criteria for inclusion are:
>
>1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the grounds that one
>needs historical perspective to determine a great book.
>
>2. the work be judged great by its influence in the thought of the
>western hemisphere.
>
>Don't flame the criteria, please. That's another thread. The question
>is whether or not there are women writers who have written anything of
>the caliber of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics/Poetics, and so on.
I won't flame the criteria (after all, it's not yours), but I just want
to pick a bit at your interpretation of it.
In the above explication of the "Great Books" criteria, you assume that
"caliber" implies "influence," and vice versa. I've never accepted this
assumption. If you're talking about "influence," then it may be true
that no women authors should be included in the "Great Books" list. But
please, don't drag "caliber" into the argument; it'll just confuse the
issue.
(Francis mentions Wollstonecraft's _A Vindication of the Rights of
Women_. An important work, but I'm not sure how "influential" it is.
I suppose it depends on who is being influenced. I don't know that
it's ever been widely read or taught.)
> Antiquity alone does not qualify. Thus, imho Sappho does not qualify.
Hey, Mike, is Kurt allowed to have an opinion about Sappho? Or is she
above his dislikes? Just curious.
But seriously folks, the "Great Books" advocates place a lot of emphasis
on the importance of "the test of time." In this case, oddly, the test
(which Sappho has certainly passed -- she's not even a recent rediscovery,
but has survived and been read over the centuries) is insufficient for
greatness. What else, then, is necessary? Is any other survivor of time's
test to be reassessed?
/Janet
--
Send mail to: ja...@netcom.com
Watch this space.
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
says:
>
>I've been having an off-line discussion with someone about the Britannica
>Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly head again) We have noted
>that there are no women authors included in the GB list. The question
>is, should there be? The criteria for inclusion are:
>
>1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the grounds that one
>needs historical perspective to determine a great book.
>
>2. the work be judged great by its influence in the thought of the
>western hemisphere.
_Middlemarch_ is perhaps the greatest English novel; but if it's only
the thought & not the art that count, it might not qualify for the
list, despite Eliot's tremendous intellect.
Perhaps _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ comes closer to fulfilling
the criteria.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Francis Muir
Perhaps _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ comes closer to
fulfilling the criteria.
A VINDICATION ... please. The indefinite article makes a substantial
difference.
Goofy
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
Muir) says:
>
>A VINDICATION ... please. The indefinite article makes a substantial
>difference.
Well good, things have settled back to a quotidian standard. I was
worried for a while, what with Goofy taking up my cause against Mark
and with both of us, quite independently, suggesting the same Great
Book By A Woman. But true colors will out: Goofy's an--, er,
fastidious nature cannot long conceal itself. So now, quick, Goofy:
is it _Second Treatise of Civil Government_ or _The Second Treatise
of Civil Government_. The fate of clouded minds hinges on a prompt
reply.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Jennie Goloboy
> I've been having an off-line discussion with someone about the Britannica
> Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly head again) We have noted
> that there are no women authors included in the GB list. The question
> is, should there be? The criteria for inclusion are:
>
> 1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the grounds that one
> needs historical perspective to determine a great book.
>
> 2. the work be judged great by its influence in the thought of the
> western hemisphere.
As other people have already said, Middlemarch- a complex, subtle, and
interesting novel, with a great plot, and a real desire to improve the
world. For those who are interested in reading it- I found the beginning
quite slow- hang in there, it's worth it.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Jane Austen. I think she is only
interested in a very small part of life (I've only read Pride and Prejudice
and Mansfield Park)- and, frankly, I'm just bored with novels about women
who can't decide which man to marry. However, other people enjoy the
psychological depths of her characters.
Has anyone read the Tale of Genji? Is it a Great Book?
Jennie
kimberly a ziev
Has anyone posted the Great Books List as it currently stands?
Kim
--
Kimberly A. Ziev kaz...@midway.uchicago.edu
University of Chicago Law School
"There's a mighty judgment coming...but I may be wrong." L. Cohen
Kurt Godden
writes:
>In the above explication of the "Great Books" criteria, you assume that
>"caliber" implies "influence," and vice versa. I've never accepted this
>assumption. If you're talking about "influence," then it may be true
>that no women authors should be included in the "Great Books" list. But
>please, don't drag "caliber" into the argument; it'll just confuse the
>issue.
OK, Janet. Point well taken.
>> Antiquity alone does not qualify. Thus, imho Sappho does not qualify.
>
>Hey, Mike, is Kurt allowed to have an opinion about Sappho? Or is she
>above his dislikes? Just curious.
Now it's my turn. Just because I said S. does not qualify, does not
imply that I dislike her.
>But seriously folks, the "Great Books" advocates place a lot of emphasis
>on the importance of "the test of time." In this case, oddly, the test
>(which Sappho has certainly passed -- she's not even a recent
rediscovery,
>but has survived and been read over the centuries) is insufficient for
>greatness. What else, then, is necessary?
Please! There were two criteria. Hence, the test of time is necessary
but not sufficient.
-Kurt
"Ever since Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, [Tom]
Lehrer has been unable to do satire." -- Geoff Pullum.
Jim Hartley
Books series:
>Mary Wollstonecraft ("Rights of Women", etc.)
>Fanny Burney (prolific diarist as well as novelist)
>Ann Radcliffe
>Jane Austen
>Maria Edgeworth
>Charlotte Bronte (and Anne and Emily, too?)
>Elizabeth Gaskell
>George Eliot
>Mrs. Henry Wood ("East Lynne")
>Harriet Beecher Stowe
Would you really put any of these women on the same level as Plato,
Aristotle or Shakespeare? While Jane Austen wrote some very good novels,
do any of them compare with _The Inferno_ or _The Iliad_?
If the Great Books series contained, say, 2 billion volumes, then all of these
women should certainly be included. However, the aim of lists like the
Great Book series is to come up with a list of, say, 50 books. Surely you
wouldn't insist that all of these female authors deserved a volume in a 50
volume set.
So, the question I have is whether ANY of those women can fairly be called
one of the 50 most influential authors in the development of Western
Civilization. It seems to me that it isn't even a contest. Austen,
Bronte, et al simply do not compare well to Shakespeare, Dante, Plato,
Homer, et al. Of course I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
--
Jim Hartley
jeha...@ucdavis.edu
"The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized,
and for this the uncivilized have never forgiven them." Cyril Connolly
auslin michael r
_The Tale of the Genji_. Written in Japan around the year
1000, it is not only widely considered the world's first
real novel (being 52 chapters long), but is still considered
Japan's finest prose work.
Misha Auslin
//////////////////////////////////////////////
Michael Auslin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
aus...@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
/////////////////////////////////////////////
Matt Austern
> words, If *I* were to draw up a list of, say, 100 ``best'' books
> for purposes of curriculum design, Locke and Voltaire and maybe
> _The Federalist_ would be on that list. If I expanded to 500
> or a thousand books, *then* maybe I'd include Burke and
> Paine, and I'd go to 2000, say, before I'd include Mary Wollstonecraft.
> In other words, *I* would tend to suspect any reading list
> of 50 or 100 Great Books that included _Vindication_ of tokenism,
> or at least of contemporarianism.
Actually, I would suspect the same thing about the Federalist---I
would suspect such a list of giving the political squabbles of the
fledgling United States far more importance, in the grand scheme of
things, then they deserve.
The Federalist, ultimately, is just a compilation of newspaper columns
that were written to drum up support for a certain legal document.
Most of those articles are written at least competently, but I
couldn't honestly describe any of them as great literature, or as
particularly original political philosophy. In fact, I thought that
one or two of them were embarrassingly bad; I'm thinking, in
particular, of Jay's article advocating that the United States ought
to be a single nation.
I enjoyed reading the Federalist, but that's just because I happen
to be interested in American history. Some day I'd like to read a
compilation of both the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist propaganda
pieces; reading both sides of a debate is much more fun than just
reading one side out ofcontext.
--
Matthew Austern Never express yourself more clearly
ma...@physics.berkeley.edu than you think. ---N. Bohr
MSMO...@delphi.com
Kurt Godden writes:
Antiquity alone does not qualify. Thus, imho Sappho does not qualify.
Hey, Mike, is Kurt allowed to have an opinion about Sappho? Or is she
above his dislikes? Just curious.
Of course Kurt is allowed to have an opinion about Sappho or wellnigh
any other subject.
On the other hand, though I think Kurt is right about antiquity alone
not qualifying, I do think Sappho is above his lack of enthusiasm
here. One way to put this is that I have read Ezra Pound, Hugh Kenner,
Kenneth Rexroth, and Guy Davenport all telling me that Sappho is
very important to lyric poetry. And not only for being
early, but rather that she was able to energize words in a way
they claim only a few poets in world history have ever been able to do.
Part of what I argued before is that it is sensible for me to listen
to the opinion of these guys over Kurt's opinion in the first place,
not only for deciding whether I should read Sappho, but also in guiding
my own reading of her to a sense of what it is I might be looking for
in her. Now, I have read Sappho in numerous ``versions'', and I've looked
into the Greek and I believe I have some small inkling of
what these guys mean by her ability to ``charge'' words to
their very highest pitch. I also confess to a small bit of
philistine skepticism, since I wonder if any good vers libre
poet wouldn't give about the same effect if you were to burn away
the right-hand half of the page for every poem.
On a related (but slightly different) other hand, I would
have a hard time including _Vindication of the Rights of Women_
on any short Great Books list I would attempt to draw up. My
point is not that it's not good or important or anything,
just that it seems derivative to me, something of an Appendix
to Enlightenment stuff like the U.S. Declaration, Bill of
Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
the debate exemplified by Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ and Thomas Paine's _Rights of Man_. And these
things also ride piggyback on Voltaire and John Locke. In other
words, If *I* were to draw up a list of, say, 100 ``best'' books
for purposes of curriculum design, Locke and Voltaire and maybe
_The Federalist_ would be on that list. If I expanded to 500
or a thousand books, *then* maybe I'd include Burke and
Paine, and I'd go to 2000, say, before I'd include Mary Wollstonecraft.
In other words, *I* would tend to suspect any reading list
of 50 or 100 Great Books that included _Vindication_ of tokenism,
or at least of contemporarianism.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
Kurt Godden
loosemor...@cs.yale.edu writes:
>Well, I would have to say that "Pride and Prejudice" has had more
>influence on contemporary culture than, say, Immanuel Kant's ramblings
>philosophical ramblings. And I would say that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had
>far more influence on historical events than anything Tolstoy wrote.
>
>I'm not claiming that any of these women have influenced civilization
>as much as Aristotle or Shakespeare, but I don't think Kant or Tolstoy
>fall into that category either.
>
Interestingly, both Kant and Tolstoy are included in the Britannica Great
Books, but Austen and Stowe are not. (I'm not defending, merely
observing.)
-Kurt
Sandra Loosemore
Would you really put any of these women on the same level as Plato,
Aristotle or Shakespeare? While Jane Austen wrote some very good novels,
do any of them compare with _The Inferno_ or _The Iliad_?
Well, I would have to say that "Pride and Prejudice" has had more
influence on contemporary culture than, say, Immanuel Kant's ramblings
philosophical ramblings. And I would say that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had
far more influence on historical events than anything Tolstoy wrote.
I'm not claiming that any of these women have influenced civilization
as much as Aristotle or Shakespeare, but I don't think Kant or Tolstoy
fall into that category either.
-Sandra
hhend...@vax.clarku.edu
>On a related (but slightly different) other hand, I would
>have a hard time including _Vindication of the Rights of Women_
>on any short Great Books list I would attempt to draw up. My
>point is not that it's not good or important or anything,
>just that it seems derivative to me, something of an Appendix
>to Enlightenment stuff like the U.S. Declaration, Bill of
>Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
>the debate exemplified by Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution
>in France_ and Thomas Paine's _Rights of Man_.
If it's so derivative, why is it important?
>In other words, *I* would tend to suspect any reading list
>of 50 or 100 Great Books that included _Vindication_ of tokenism,
>or at least of contemporarianism.
Why contemporarianism? According to the oracle Britannica, the fact
that the book's from before the 20th century should clear us of that
particular crime.
Heather Henderson (HHEND...@vax.clarku.edu)
*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*
Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do -- Marianne Moore
*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*
Katherine M. Catmull
Given the current state of things in the western hemisphere, I am
willing, even eager, to accept that it hasn't much been influenced by the
thinking of women.
Kate
--
- - - - - - - -
ka...@cactus.org
Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Jean Goodrich
How about Christine de Pizan, _The Book of the City of Ladies_.
I'd put de Pizan and Wollstonecraft on a list of Great Books. I've
certainly found them more influential in *my* life than Voltaire or
Locke. so perhaps we should better define what is meant by influential.
Are we talking numbers of people effected by a work or the philosophy
that work introduces? Are we talking about a social movement a work
has engendered? Are we talking the depth/complexity/quality of the
work as judged as a piece of art? What exactly do you mean by
influential? While Wollstonecraft, Aristotle and Shakespeare have been
influential to me (and perhaps to my peers), there are people in this
world (ok, in this country) who have been influenced more by Rush Limbaugh
and Gilligan's Island.
It should also be noted that while some authors have one work that
has been greatly influential, we are comparing them to authors whose
*collection* of works have been influential. Can we fairly compare
Homer's _Iliad_ to any one (and only one) of Shakespeare's plays? (I
wouldn't want to) And if so, which one?
(You may already have hashed this out, while discussing Great Books not
necessarily written by women. If so, what is the concensus: what are your
criteria for a Great Book?)
Jean
Deirdre A. Johnson
> Wednesday, the 19th of January, 1994
>
> Kurt Godden writes:
> Antiquity alone does not qualify. Thus, imho Sappho does not qualify.
>
> any other subject.
>
> On the other hand, though I think Kurt is right about antiquity alone
> not qualifying, I do think Sappho is above his lack of enthusiasm
> here. One way to put this is that I have read Ezra Pound, Hugh Kenner,
> Kenneth Rexroth, and Guy Davenport all telling me that Sappho is
> very important to lyric poetry. And not only for being
> early, but rather that she was able to energize words in a way
> they claim only a few poets in world history have ever been able to do.
Thanks, Mike! I agree completely. And I think that Sappho should certainly
be on the list, not just because she's antique (classical, I mean) but
because she exerted influence like mad, from the 18th century onwards.
Let's reinstate her!
> On the other hand, I would
> have a hard time including _Vindication of the Rights of Women_
> on any short Great Books list I would attempt to draw up.
> ... If *I* were to draw up a list of, say, 100 ``best'' books
> for purposes of curriculum design, Locke and Voltaire and maybe
> _The Federalist_ would be on that list. If I expanded to 500
> or a thousand books, *then* maybe I'd include Burke and
> Paine, and I'd go to 2000, say, before I'd include Mary Wollstonecraft.
Well, I don't think I'd argue with you there. But how about Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelly? Surely "Frankenstein" was wildly influential
and so should be on the list?
> (There. Just to stir things up a bit.)
Good stir, Mike!
>
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
>
While I'm typing, I'll add a couple of mystics to the list:
Hildegard of Bingen, "Ordo Virtutum," "Scivias"
Teresa of Avila, "Libro da la Vida," "Libro de las Fundaciones."
It's a shame about the century stipulation; if only Marie Curie had
written her "Recherches sur les substances radioactives" ten years
earlier! But she didn't so I can't include her (more's the pity!)
BTW, any votes for Emily Dickenson?
(just to stir things up a bit more!)
Happy New Year, everyone! (A bit late, I know, but this is my
first posting of 1994)
--
the octopus s secret wish / is not to be a formal fish /
he dreams that sometime he may grow / another set of legs or so/
and be a broadway music show -archy|
-----------------------------------| (da...@Virginia.edu) -deirdre
John Wilkinson
|> So, the question I have is whether ANY of those women can fairly be called
|> one of the 50 most influential authors in the development of Western
|> Civilization. It seems to me that it isn't even a contest. Austen,
|> Bronte, et al simply do not compare well to Shakespeare, Dante, Plato,
|> Homer, et al. Of course I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
|>
|
I'd rather read Jane Austen than Shakespeare or Plato any day.
Millie Niss
I don't think any by women qualify... But if we want books by women
which were influential in _literary_ history I think Madame de
Lafayette's _La Princesse de Cleves_ (one of the earliest French
novels) and one of Virginia Woolf's novels (probably _To The
Lighthouse_, but _Mrs. Dalloway_ is a close second) should be
included. Virginia Woolf was the most accessible author to start
using interior monologue and therefore seems to me partially
responsible for the complete transformation of the novel which
occurred in this century. Before her work (and her criticm of
old-style novels) it was possible to write long, plot-driven novels of
the Dickens ilk and afterwards such books could only be written as
deliberate anachronisms... One could certainly argue that Joyce or
Proust were "greater" authors who used similar techniques, but I am
sure Virginia Woolf was much more widely read when the novels were
published. (The tortured publication history of Ulysses is well-known
and Proust was not recognized as important during his life-time. Gide
actually rejected _A La Recherche du Temps Perdue_ when he was an
editor at Gallimard...)
Millie
ObRabfest: I have now heard from 10 people who intend on coming, but
there is a disagreement about the time-- some people don't want to end
late while others can't come until 5 or 6. It seems as if 5:30 might
be an appropriate compromise.
The rabfest will probably happen at the Book Friends' Cafe on 18th
street. Another possibility is the West End Gate (114th & Bway).
I would appreciate hearing from people (especially those who expressed
strong opinions already) about the proposed change in time...
Millie Niss
>
>How about Christine de Pizan, _The Book of the City of Ladies_.
As an undegraduate at Columbia I had to read this book TWICE
in required courses and yet in four years of "core" (general education
requirements based on great books) we were never assigned Milton or
Chaucer or any plays other than Shakespeare or any poetry other than
Shakespeare... When I asked why they chose de Pizan I was told that
1) they needed a woman and 2) there was no one between Augustine and
Aquinas. This seems like a pretty weak argument for including a book
in a small list of great books. (The Columbia Contemporary Civ & Lit
Hum courses include about 40 books.)
>I'd put de Pizan and Wollstonecraft on a list of Great Books. I've
>certainly found them more influential in *my* life than Voltaire or
>Locke. so perhaps we should better define what is meant by influential.
Please tell me how de Pizan influenced you. I have yet to meet anyone
who genuinely enjoyed this book (as distinguished from oohing and
ahhing about how wonderfully modern and feminist and barve etc. it
is).
I didn't like the book much at all. It was very typically medieval
(simplistic allegory, stories from previous sources all glommed
together with a framing story, etc.) in many ways (including the ways
in which women could become holy) despite the feminism and extremely
repetetive. De Pisan is somewhat interesting historically (she was
related to various kings and had an interesting personal history) but
she is hardly influential considering that almost no one outside of
Romance Studies had heard of her 10 years ago (before PC feminist
academics got powerful). If one really wants a Renaissance woman
writer, Marguerite de Navarre is a lot more fun...
Millie.
N.M. Wierda
the first women writers who made a living by writing and all that being
not exactly upper class! or Hannah Woolley, 17th century cookery book
writer, or Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald or many more women writers of
more 'domestic genres' who must have a had a far bigger influence on
PEOPLE and especially women. it is no wonder that there are very few, if
any, world-wide-influential women writers as they always lacked the
education that was apperently needed to write so called major works such
as The Illiad (for example). even when women in Britain started writing
during and after the Civil Wars, they were restricted to records of
spiritual lives; works of piety; prayers; meditations; political
petitions; poetry; almanacs; practical advice; works on maternity;
general advice; and cookery; i.e. areas that were accesible for women,
because they knew about it and were allowed to write about it. and even
then is that 'writing group' very small - they simply lacked the education
to be able to write about e.g. science.
the group of writing men was far larger and therefore more influential.
they set the norm and really they still do. George Eliot should be
added to the list, if only because she succeeded in publishing her
work, although she had to do it under a male pseudonym. in that she was
not the only one. all women from all over history and all ages should
be added, because they managed the publish their work or have it
published in spite of male chauvinism: "Your printing of a Book, beyond
the custom of your Sex, doth rankly smell" (1650) These women have been
an example for other women over the centuries and have been an
encouragement and influential.
Include all women writers! there's only a few anyway..
Nynke Wierda
Groningen
The Netherlands
Meg Worley
>>How about Christine de Pizan, _The Book of the City of Ladies_.
Millie Niss:
>Please tell me how de Pizan influenced you. I have yet to meet anyone
>who genuinely enjoyed this book (as distinguished from oohing and
>ahhing about how wonderfully modern and feminist and barve etc. it
>is). I didn't like the book much at all. It was very typically medieval
>(simplistic allegory, stories from previous sources all glommed
>together with a framing story, etc.) in many ways (including the ways
>in which women could become holy) despite the feminism and extremely
>repetetive. De Pisan is somewhat interesting historically (she was
>related to various kings and had an interesting personal history) but
>she is hardly influential considering that almost no one outside of
>Romance Studies had heard of her 10 years ago (before PC feminist
>academics got powerful). If one really wants a Renaissance woman
>writer, Marguerite de Navarre is a lot more fun...
I agree that Marguerite de Navarre is entertaining, and that
*La Princesse de Cleves* is superb (referring to an earlier post),
but I can't agree with the opprobium you sprinkle Christine de
Pizan. I _liked_ *The Book of the City of Ladies*; it has humor,
it has entirely new ways of looking at certain age-old tales (I
wish I had a copy at hand to give examples), and it is beautifully
written. Moreover, if no one had heard of it 10 years ago as you
claim, how is it that I managed to read it in high school (for
fun, not for class)?
I might not put Christine de Pizan at the top of the Bimbo List,
but she's much better than you give her credit for, I think.
Rage away,
meg
--
mwo...@mathcs.emory.edu: Oldest Living Emory Junior Tells All
Michael Feld
>how about adding Aphra Benn, the British 17th century dramatist and one of
>the first women writers who made a living by writing and all that being
>Nynke Wierda
>Groningen
>The Netherlands
What a wonderful choice; and what a generous one, considering that
Aphra Behn seemed to derive some considerable part of her income from
spying, for England, against the Dutch!
Behn is part of one of our standard Intro to Lit courses.
-
--
Michael Feld | E-mail: <fe...@cc.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Philosophy | FAX: (204) 261-0021
University of Manitoba | Voice: (204) 474-9136
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2M8, Canada
Bob Allison
<god...@predator.cs.gmr.com> writes:
>I've been having an off-line discussion with someone about the Britannica
>Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly head again) We have noted
>that there are no women authors included in the GB list. The question
>is, should there be? The criteria for inclusion are:
>
>1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the grounds that one
>needs historical perspective to determine a great book.
>
>2. the work be judged great by its influence in the thought of the
>western hemisphere.
>
>Don't flame the criteria, please. That's another thread. The question
>is whether or not there are women writers who have written anything of
>the caliber of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics/Poetics, and so on.
Well, I'm not here to 'flame' the criteria, or fan any similar flames,
but...
It does beg some questions. If the time limit criteria had been
applied to music, nothing from this century could be considered. No
Beatles! How could that be?
So the question I ask is, should it be applied to books? Did some
stuffy old men sit around one day and say 'Look, we don't want any damn
women writers in here, let's say it can't be from this century, for the
sake of perspective, that's just believable enough.'
I'm not saying that actually happened. But could it have been
something that a bunch of men might have decided without consciously
thinking about it. Maybe the desire was subconscious.
Who are these people anyway? For something labeled as a 'Great
Books' collection, I would think the people in charge have a little wider
scope than one sex, one race.
Just my three cents (inflation).
--
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bo...@gagme.wwa.com \ "The Internet is like a hurricane. One is a big
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ bag of wind, and the other's a weather phemonemon."
Gabrielle Hodson
>Don't flame the criteria, please. That's another thread. The question
>is whether or not there are women writers who have written anything of
>the caliber of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics/Poetics, and so on.
> Antiquity alone does not qualify. Thus, imho Sappho does not qualify.
>Philogynists, please keep your flames to yourself. I'm not a misogynist
>just because I'm posting this query.
Please dont take this as a flame, but how many men have written anything of
the caliber of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics/Poetics.
Just borrowing from Virgina Woolf. (a writter of great books though of this
century unfortunately and therefore unacceptable)
--
Gabrielle g...@muffin.apana.org.au
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Trish Ledoux
> No list would be complete, IMHO, without Murasaki Shikibu's
> _The Tale of the Genji_. Written in Japan around the year
> 1000, it is not only widely considered the world's first
> real novel (being 52 chapters long), but is still considered
> Japan's finest prose work.
One of the finest works in Japanese literature, maybe, but a "Great Book"...?
One chapter alone in Japanese was enough to put me off my feed.
1000+ pages of Genji's shilly-shallying would be entirely too much, thank
you. ^_^
Trish
v...@netcom.com
--
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| "We are irascible malcontents / \
_-_ | --capable of performing ANY /___\
|o o| | dunderheaded act of idiocy |o o|
| < | "FEH! I EAT TRUTH!" | --no matter HOW wrongheaded | > |
| _ | | or injurious to others!" | - |
|___| --CHEESE | --MILK |___|
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Kurt Godden
writes:
> Well, I'm not here to 'flame' the criteria, or fan any similar flames,
>but...
> It does beg some questions. If the time limit criteria had been
>applied to music, nothing from this century could be considered. No
>Beatles! How could that be?
Look, I *really* like the Beatles, but let's face it--Mozart they're not.
>
> So the question I ask is, should it be applied to books? Did some
>stuffy old men sit around one day and say 'Look, we don't want any damn
>women writers in here, let's say it can't be from this century, for the
>sake of perspective, that's just believable enough.'
I doubt it. As Mike Morris suggested, go to your library and read volume
1 by Hutchins. It's a pretty short volume, and explains their selection
criteria. (But more importantly, it discusses the value of a liberal
education.) And also, they have women on their editorial board.
> Who are these people anyway? For something labeled as a 'Great
>Books' collection, I would think the people in charge have a little wider
>scope than one sex, one race.
One race? it may be the case that all authors are Caucasian, but I doubt
very much that race was even considered. What was considered were the
'great' works of the western hemisphere (before the 20th century). While
they didn't attempt to include Asian works, they did say (Hutchins said)
that they would welcome the addition of such a collection from the
eastern hemishpere, but do not feel qualified to do that themselves.
Gabrielle Hodson
>Would you really put any of these women on the same level as Plato,
>Aristotle or Shakespeare? While Jane Austen wrote some very good novels,
>do any of them compare with _The Inferno_ or _The Iliad_?
stuff deleted
>Civilization. It seems to me that it isn't even a contest. Austen,
>Bronte, et al simply do not compare well to Shakespeare, Dante, Plato,
>Homer, et al. Of course I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
I notice that whenever the proposed female novelist candidates are declared
unfit to sit with the greats, the male greats used as yardsticks are never
novelists. Is the problem with the suggested females the fact that they
are, almost uniformly, novelists?
Are there to be no novelists at all in the proposed series? Do we still see
prose fiction as a second rate form?
If there are to be novelist in the series at all, then these women must be
worthy of consideration.
--
Gabrielle g...@muffin.apana.org.au
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Jim Hartley
>>Civilization. It seems to me that it isn't even a contest. Austen,
>>Bronte, et al simply do not compare well to Shakespeare, Dante, Plato,
>>Homer, et al. Of course I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
Gabrielle Hodson notes:
>I notice that whenever the proposed female novelist candidates are declared
>unfit to sit with the greats, the male greats used as yardsticks are never
>novelists. Is the problem with the suggested females the fact that they
>are, almost uniformly, novelists?
Interesting idea. It is perhaps true that the novel has a disadvantage in
composing a list of Great Books since it is a relatively new phenomenon.
However, in the Great Books series, the following novelists do appear:
Dostoevsky
Tolstoy
Melville
Fielding
Swift
Sterne
So, I'm game for the new project. Do any female novelists rank higher on
the Great Book scale (influence, etc) than these male novelists?
It is perhaps relevant to note that there are more novels on the longer
list prepared by Adler and Van Doren, "A Recommended Reading List".
Moreover, this longer list includes Austen and Eliot.
The question of whether Austen should replace Tolstoy on the shorter Great
Books list (as someone here suggested) is an interesting question. I think
it is a suggestion that even Adler would entertain. (It would seem that
Adler would have to entertain such questions in order to make a list in the
first place). However, the suggestion by someone else that the authors of
these lists set out to systematically exclude women is absurd in light of
the longer list.
One last question prompted by Ms Hodson's (Gabrielle's? What is the proper
etiquette on using people's names around here? I'll have to check Miss
Manners later)--anyway, would Shakespeare have been less of a writer if he
had written novels instead of plays? Would the *novel*, _Hamlet_ be
read in High School English?
Joann Zimmerman
Hartley) wrote:
> One last question prompted by Ms Hodson's (Gabrielle's? What is the proper
> etiquette on using people's names around here? I'll have to check Miss
> Manners later)--anyway, would Shakespeare have been less of a writer if he
> had written novels instead of plays?
So far, Miss Manners does not appear to have addressed this burning issue.
Generally, we seem to use first names, with a few handles of the more
interesting sort thrown in for crunchiness. I personally tend to reserve
the use of the honorific and last name for those exchanges where I wish
categorically to display my complete lack of kinship or identification with
the person to whom I am referring or responding. A sort of reverse wherein
familiarity displays content.
--
"Attempts to turn universities and intellectual life into just another
form of enterprise, a business to be run like a corner shop, must be
resisted ..." -- Miri Rubin
Joann Zimmerman jz...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Andrew Dinn
>I've been having an off-line discussion with someone about the Britannica
>Great Books. (yes, rabble, it rears its ugly head again) We have noted
>that there are no women authors included in the GB list. The question
>is, should there be? The criteria for inclusion are:
>
>1. the work be previous to the 20th century, on the grounds that one
>needs historical perspective to determine a great book.
>
>2. the work be judged great by its influence in the thought of the
>western hemisphere.
>
Not a flame, more a shot across the bows. I think the answer to your
question has to be no.
If you stick to both the stated criteria you pretty well rule out any
contenders. Take say Mary Shelley. By all rights her work `Vindication
of the Rights of Women' *should* have influenced `the thought of the
western hemisphere'. But it didn't when published and it hasn't now
because `western hemispherical thought' has never been much subject to
influence from the thought of females. I think women are automatically
excluded by your definition.
And I have another quibble about your second criterion which is
highlighted by the question of Sappho's `influence'. She *was* a big
influence on `the thought of the western hemisphere' in her own
lifetime and shortly thereafter (in so far as one can generalise). For
she was regarded for several centuries as the greatest poet in an age
which took poetry very seriously.
So what do you intend by the second criterion: that the author has an
abiding influence visible in C20th thought (in which case doesn't that
also exclude lots of the boys too? Who reads Livy now?); that the
author's influence extends via other authors in the list down to
modern times (in which case it becomes a boys club by definition);
that the influence is felt in certain intellectual or academic circles
(in which case who are this happy band? - don't tell me r.a.b, in which
case I will add loadsawimmin :-).
Andrew Dinn
-----------
there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all
Andrew Dinn
>Well, here are some possible candidates for such a list of authors,
>just taken from my own reading. Admittedly, there is somewhat of a
>British/19th century bias here....
>
>Mary Wollstonecraft ("Rights of Women", etc.)
>Fanny Burney (prolific diarist as well as novelist)
>Ann Radcliffe
>Jane Austen
>Maria Edgeworth
>Charlotte Bronte (and Anne and Emily, too?)
>Elizabeth Gaskell
>George Eliot
>Mrs. Henry Wood ("East Lynne")
>Harriet Beecher Stowe
>
>Mysteries of Udolpho" have had very little "influence in the thought
>of the western hemisphere". But they *were* vastly influential in
>the development of the traditions of modern literature.
A good read which argues the latter case for these women and others
is `A Literature of their Own' by Elaine Showalter.
Oh, and of course I goofed in my last post and attributed Mary
Wollstonecraft's book to Mary Shelley. Blood may be thick but I can be
be yet more so.
Andrew Dinn
>Sandra Loosemore suggests some women authors for inclusion in the Great
>Books series:
>
>Would you really put any of these women on the same level as Plato,
>Aristotle or Shakespeare? While Jane Austen wrote some very good novels,
>do any of them compare with _The Inferno_ or _The Iliad_?
I would seriously consider putting Mary Wollstonecraft and George
Eliot on the same level as Plato, Aristotle or Shakespeare if the
question is one of their intellectual and visionary capacities (not
sure what the outcome of the consideration would be mind you).
However, the question cannot be worth a toss if you don't make any
allowance for the lack of a level playing field. And if you have to
make such an allowance then this makes the answer dependent upon a lot
of *necessarily* disputable assumptions.
In which case isn't it better just to drop the question altogether and
go read some books (selected according to some more worthwhile
criterion e.g. what you enjoy, find interesting, find illuminating,
need in order to deal with your personal problems, pass exams etc). I
think the thing I find most offensive about this discussion (and the
various other `I can piss higher up the wall than you' games - or
rather the `Writer X can piss higher up the wall than writer Y'
variant) is the presumption that there is some use for a universal
criterion by which things are to be judged. How can one weigh the
cultural or social significance of, say, Dante's writings against
those of, say, Hume or Fielding. There is too much diversity in
literature for such nonsense. The proper critical approach is to meet
this diversity with an open mind.
Practical exercise for the reader:
(Re)read Eliot's `Middlemarch' paying particular attention to the
scholarly achievements of Casaubon and then comment on the failure
of Eliot's characterisation to `influence modern western thought'.
Matt Austern
> If you stick to both the stated criteria you pretty well rule out any
> contenders. Take say Mary Shelley. By all rights her work `Vindication
> of the Rights of Women' *should* have influenced `the thought of the
> western hemisphere'.
That's by Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly was her
daughter.
Mary Shelly, the author of Frankenstein, may well deserve to be on
that list on her own merits. That book was clearly one of the most
influential works of the 19th century, in many ways. You could make a
pretty strong case that the entire genre of science fiction grew out
of Frankenstein.
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
I imagine Mike Morris might have something to say about this . . .
And I have to say it makes me uneasy as well. If the whole business
of making qualitative comparisons is simply thrown out (and one could
do so citing Henry Adams in defense--something to the effect that nothing
stubbornly eludes our grasp like such comparisons, which may be true),
aren't there quite serious ramifications, corollaries, etc., which
extend beyond the realm of aesthetics into that of politics?
For instance, in _White Noise_, Don DeLillo depicts "avant-garde"
professors of pop culture who read nothing but cereal boxes. Now,
when the comparison is between Dante or Hume, that's one thing, but
when it's between cereal boxes and Plato . . . hasn't a line somewhere
been crossed? or are we to throw over the whole game to relativistic
chaos? Mightn't Plato's grand trope of the cultural cave relate
to the question, in that what it seems to point up is a connection
between the search for quality and the search for liberty? If the
relativism you seem to be advocating becomes (as it is becoming) an
excuse to teach courses in rap, cereal boxes, etc., we, in the States
at least, may finally find a truly "democratic" education; but what
kind of polity will it be in the long run when citizens have no
exposure to ideals but internally-generated commercial ones? (As
Tocqueville noted, the liberal arts in a democracy serve as a
balancing principle against the "leveling" force of egalitarianism,
which itself finds justification in a relativistic philosophy;
I would hate to see us lose that principle altogether, though
the pospects aren't promising.)
Even if the whole business remains stubbornly elusive, I wouldn't
advocate letting this ungraspable phantom slip.
>Practical exercise for the reader:
>(Re)read Eliot's `Middlemarch' paying particular attention to the
>scholarly achievements of Casaubon and then comment on the failure
>of Eliot's characterisation to `influence modern western thought'.
Eliot's powers of representation seem to me to transcend those of
any other English novelist. Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Lydgate, in
particular, have lingered in my imagination among a small gallery
of characters the representation of which may be said to have
crossed over from the merely persuasive to the sublime. There. I
have made yet another odious qualitative judgment.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
MSMO...@butler.edu
I sent out a copy of this by an email gateway back on Thursday,
but, since I didn't see it show up on Friday morning, and then my
system was shut down, I re-edited it and added some stuff,
and so here is a revised version, which, even though the other
version's already appeared, I like better.
******************************************************
Monday, the 24th of January, 1994
I wrote:
On a related (but slightly different) other hand, I would
have a hard time including _Vindication of the Rights of Women_
on any short Great Books list I would attempt to draw up. My
point is not that it's not good or important or anything,
just that it seems derivative to me, something of an Appendix
to Enlightenment stuff like the U.S. Declaration, Bill of
Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
the debate exemplified by Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ and Thomas Paine's _Rights of Man_.
Heather asks:
If it's so derivative, why is it important?
Important? Oh, I was just being polite.
Seriously, Heather, my whole point is that there is a scale
to importance. Given an agenda (my own has been pretty open
here for all to see) and concomitant selection criteria, there are
books which would make a list of 1000 Important Great Books which
would not make a list of 50 Important Great Books.
In particular, _Vindication_ seems to this reader one of 10 or
20 ``Historically Important Works Developing the Doctrine of
The Rights of Man''. Now, I find Rights doctrine pretty important
indeed, but even so, and even if I were drawing up my GB list
limiting myself to Western civ for American readers (as Adler and
Hutchins did), I'd want to include works of imagination, works
of philosophy other than about Rights, probably more novels
than they include (I might, say, aim at 50, hit 100, and then
select further for logistical reasons, like Voltaire's importance
being spread over too large a body of work for including him). In
other words, *if I am going to make up a list of 50 books*---if
making up so short a list is even a reasonable exercise (I'm
willing to argue why and under what circumstances it is), then it
should be obvious that I can't honestly include 10 works all devoted
to Enlightenment Rights doctrine.
Why do I say ``derivative''? If we take what is perhaps
a central formulation of the Rights credo, in the opening of
the Declaration, it says: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...''. OK, now my point
is simply that if we are interested in what this might mean,
and not simply reassuring ourselves that women can write good
books, too, then we have to study the political-philosophical
movement from which this credo comes. We have to ask serious
questions about what these Rights mean and *why* men have them.
Now, my claim is that the second we start to think about it, we begin
to answer questions like: Do stones have Rights? Do animals have
Rights? Do propertyless males have Rights? Do women have Rights?
Do children have Rights? Do fetuses? Do blacks? That is, the
second we understand where this doctrine is coming from, I
claim it is obvious that ``men'' in the Declaration means _anthropoi_
and not merely propertied white males. The Declaration could
not retain its meaning and slavery survive. Jefferson, a
slaveholder, knew this. Neither could it retain its meaning
without full political equality for women. Rights for women
are simply and already implicit philosophically in Rights of Man.
Now left- and right-wingers both disbelieve in Rights in the first
place (sometimes by simply denying Rights in the face of naked
might-makes-right power, often by the articulation of all kinds of
wishes which are not Rights and then relativizing these wishes
against the Rights themselves, which allows them to claim that
Rights conflict, that therefore they must be limited, etc....)
(in fact, though I think the doctrine is one notch better understood
in the U.S. than in Canada or in Europe, I think one is hard pressed
today to find Americans who actually do believe much in Rights at
all) and I'm not here suggesting that one must needs be a believer.
Rather I am suggesting that if one wants to know why women have
Rights, then one had better understand what Rights are in the
first place, and that this prerequisite already brings 4 or 5 or 10
historically important books to mind *before* _A Vindication_.
I should also clarify, Heather, what I mean by ``an agenda''
above: My agenda is that an understanding of Rights
doctrine and what may be its moral and philosophical basis is
something that is fundamentally important to a responsible exercise
of U.S. citizenship, transfinitely shall we say *more* important than
an understanding of feminism or the quotidian politics of race.
*If* I were designing a curriculum to study ``The Historical
Development of Feminism'' or ``The Expansion of Rights to
Disempowered Groups'' (and I do think these are also reasonable
agendas in certain contexts), drawing up lists of 50 or 100 best
books, then certainly _A Vindication_ would be one of the first 10
(maybe even 5) books I would name on either list.
I also wrote:
In other words, *I* would tend to suspect any reading list
of 50 or 100 Great Books that included _Vindication_ of tokenism,
or at least of contemporarianism.
Heather takes the bait:
Why contemporarianism? According to the oracle Britannica, the
fact that the book's from before the 20th century should clear us of
that particular crime.
Then you have either not understood or not read the oracle
Britannica? I mean in particular the 1st volume of the Great
Books set, which contains an essay by Hutchins, I believe,
possibly by Adler, explaining their selection criteria. (I would
strongly recommend that anyone interested in arguing the
evilness in every way of the editors of the Britannica set first
*go and read* this short work.) In any event, this was also
Kurt's point about mere antiquity not qualifying.
The reason that one might like to confine oneself to passing the
greatness judgment on only pre-20th century works (please note
that ``passing the greatness judgment'' is not equal to ``reading''
or ``liking'' or even ``recommending to others that they read'') is that
the light is simply better where there has been accumulated
historical perspective and criticism. If a book comes highly
recommended by human readers over so much time, then the
belief is (again, I think this a reasonable belief and I have found it
consistent with my experience as a reader) that it might be
more worth study (on average) than other books which have been
less well recommended and critiqued over that same time.
I agree with Kate that it simply isn't remarkable
that works by women thereby get slighted. Women themselves
have been historically slighted. We know that. But the remedy
then is *not* (necessarily) to alter the selection criteria
in order to reassure ourselves that more women were really
authors of Great Books. That is what I meant by tokenism. If the
selection rules are reasonable in and of themselves (mine, as I said,
would be slightly different than Hutchins and Adler's---I'd be
more inclined to include novels than they, but I probably
am guilty of the 20th-century bias of literature-as-novel
in this regard), then the remedy is to make damn sure the
next 100 years of human history will offer women equal
opportunity to education with men. From there, it will be
up to the women. My bet, though, is that significant numbers
of Great Books by female authors will get written. They
already have been written, I'd like to say, and are being written now
I am confident, but judgment will be clearer in 100 years.
``Contemporarianism'' is the charge (which I just made up) that
we are including the work in order to be relevant to the issues of
today. Issues that is which are issues of today and not issues
for much longer than today. It's obvious I think that some such
relevance is a good thing, else we'd never be up on
any concrete debate within the political arena. I read books,
even excellent ones, for contemporarianist reasons. I just don't
think these reasons justify their inclusion on a Great Books
list. To my mind Rights for Women is a contemporary concern---
of less timelessness than the question of Rights period.
Which itself is of less timelessness than the question of
what is The Good in the first place (meaning I'd list Plato and
Aristotle and the Bible before Locke).
We should discuss number on these lists.
Personally, I see cuts at about 10, 100, and 1000. I couldn't
hack anything so drastic as T.S. Eliot's ``Dante and Shakespeare divide
the world between them. There is no third.'' 10 would
be the Desert-Island game, except I'd try to list 10 and probably end
up coming up with a list of around 20, from which my mood would
take 10 if I had to at any given moment. My 10 would go something
like:
Plato
Aristotle
Homer
The Bible
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
Herodotus, Thucydides
Plutarch
Declaration, Constitution, _The Federalist_
Dante
Racine
Shakespeare
Goethe
Wagner
Joyce
Pound
Chaucer
Melville
I could live as a reader in a universe with just these books to read
and reread (note that there is a strong GB set overlap, though not
100%, which is a rough measure how good I think the GB set
selection is, and note also that I cheat because a number of these are
multivolume sets---also, I think of Wagner as more literature than
music, but it means I'd have to be given a CD player as well--
with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Mahler thrown in in the bargain).
Except for Melville, where all I've read is _Moby Dick_, I've read
all (or at least most) of the works of everybody on this list. It is
therefore a personal list. But I also would want to underline
that saying it is personal does not not make it the same thing
as a List of Books which Have Been Most Important to Me. If
I were to draw up a list like that, I'd mainly be listing excellent
books like Paglia's, Allan Bloom's---current-events books which
somehow or the other dominated my thinking for a season and
perhaps led me onto reading whole threads of other stuff (Bloom I
think ultimately is responsible for starting me reading Nietzsche, for
example). The two most personally important books I can think of
are ``The Lord of the Rings'' and Jonathon Schell's _The Fate of the
Earth_. The first because it turned me on to reading good stuff in the
first place, the second because it began my concern for unilateral
nuclear disarmament, and spun off into all kinds of readings and
thoughts, especially having to do with the moral/political significance
of the Holocaust, and eventually to Rights and what they might mean.
But *I wouldn't want these books on a desert island with me*.
They may have been personally important to me, but that much I
view as *very subjective*. In any event, I simply know that
I would be bored by them after the first reread or two, whereas
Dante offers me a universe I could go on and on exploring without
getting bored. Thus, and to reiterate, being Personally Important
is not the same thing as being Great. That's why I think there's a
certain objectivity to the latter judgment, since it seems to
me to have to do with How Much a Book Has in It for Me to
Think About and not with How Much I Am Pleased by the Book.
(I grant that I am assuming a certain equality of capacity for
Thinking About from human mind to human mind, which equality
may be a liberal prejudice of mine, but it is a prejudice I intend to
hold on to.)
If I then went for the 100-scale, including stuff I'd like yet to read
and which I might expect to be great (an educated expectation from
out of the web of recommendations I have received from other
people, other books, etc. ), I'd probably end up with something
approximating Adler and Van Doren's list in _How to Read
a Book_. augmented by Kenneth Rexroth's _Classics Revisited_ and 50
or so 20th-century works, and then I'd have 200 or 300 books
total. This'd be a good short list I suspect from out
of which one could design a delightful St. Johns-style curriculum.
Personally, it's a list (I mean I've never actually written it down,
but I probably could) I figure I'll be reading in (by no means
exclusively) for the rest of my life---I'll probably not get done
with all of it.
Then there's a scale of 1000 books or so, where I'd still
be listing great books, but I'd be going more in depth into any given
category. As an example, I have raved about reading _Njal's Saga_
this year and I do consider it a great book. But, you'll notice
it isn't on my 10-scale list above. Though it is worth rereading
and study, I can't bring myself to consider it as the same calibre
as what I have listed above. It would definitely be on my 100-scale
list, however. Then for the 1000-scale list, I'd include the best of the
other sagas along with it: _Laxdaela Saga_, _Egil's Saga_, _Grettir's
Saga_ to round out what get called ``the great four'' and I'd
throw in _Heimskringla_, _The Elder Edda_, and a few of the shorter
sagas for good measure.
I.e., _A Vindication_ seems to me to be one of 10 or 20 books
gathered 'round the topic of Enlightenment Rights on my 1000-
scale list of great books. I do understand that there is
going to be substantial variation from individual to individual
over what our personal preferences and dislikes might be---
for one thing, we've read and do read different stuff.
Oh, before I forget, regarding some of the suggestions people
have been making: As I said above, I would tend to include
more novels on my 100-scale list than Adler and Company do.
And I would think of Austen and Eliot and the Brontes in
the same class as Dickens and Fielding and Hardy and Twain.
_Frankenstein_, definitely, Deirdre. I can understand, though,
Adler and Co's bias in including only Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
and Melville. These mark currents of thought, of deep philosophy,
in a way I think many great novels do not, and so if one *must*
pick only 2 or 3 19th-century novels, then I would say Adler and
Hutchins have done an admirable job of selection. I would just
be inclined to rate the novel---and imaginative literature in general
---a little more highly. Which is why I'd be confident of drawing
up a good list of 200 to 300 books, but I couldn't cut that list
to 50 without making tough and (to me almost) arbitrary choices.
Oh yeah: Take _Frankenstein_ and _Moby Dick_ for a moment.
(_Frankenstein_ is curious because, even though I did think of it
before Deirdre mentioned it, and even though I think of it as in
the same class with other great novels listed above, it took me
a little while to think of it---I thought of Eliot and the Brontes and
Austen and Woolf *first*---almost as if it were filed off in a genre
of its own---or maybe with _Dracula_?) I take these two for
comparison because I've read them both, and I think I can use
them to illustrate a point. Both of these novels to me have an
iconic quality feeding into, say, contemporary cultural literacy.
Even if you haven't read these books, you probably know something
about them and their significance. Calling a physicist, say, a Dr.
Frankenstein, say, probably means something to you (``you'', here,
= generic American newspaper reader) about the limitedness of the
physicist's moral understanding of his science. When the critics say
that Captain Quint in ``Jaws'' had the obsessiveness of Ahab, it
probably means something to you. Both of these books are
``important'' in this cultural literacy sense, and I am, in this sense,
happy to call them equally important. On the other hand, I would
suggest that for me, at any rate, once I have understood what it
is that Mary Shelley is pointing to, I find _Frankenstein_ rather
a dead end---I am not going to be able to keep returning to it
and keep having it ask me new questions. I don't feel it'll
keep forever fresh as an object of intellection for me. On the
other hand, _Moby Dick_'s head-on confrontation with monotheism
and the problem of evil I think will remain fresh for me no matter
how many times I read it. I've read each of these works only
once, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but _Moby Dick_
feels to me like somthing I could never outgrow, whereas
_Frankenstein_ seems like, though I might want to read it again,
I wouldn't want it to be one of only a very few books I could
keep.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
MSMO...@butler.edu
Monday, the 24th of January, 1994
I wrote:
words, If *I* were to draw up a list of, say, 100 ``best'' books
for purposes of curriculum design, Locke and Voltaire and maybe
_The Federalist_ would be on that list. If I expanded to 500
or a thousand books, *then* maybe I'd include Burke and
Paine, and I'd go to 2000, say, before I'd include Mary
Wollstonecraft.
In other words, *I* would tend to suspect any reading list
of 50 or 100 Great Books that included _Vindication_ of tokenism,
or at least of contemporarianism.
Matt Austern responds:
Actually, I would suspect the same thing about the Federalist---I
would suspect such a list of giving the political squabbles of the
fledgling United States far more importance, in the grand scheme of
things, then they deserve.
I disagree. These particular squabbles deserve far more importance,
in the grand scheme of things, than they have ever been given.
Matt continues:
The Federalist, ultimately, is just a compilation of newspaper
columns that were written to drum up support for a certain legal
document. Most of those articles are written at least competently,
but I couldn't honestly describe any of them as great literature, or
as particularly original political philosophy. In fact, I thought that
one or two of them were embarrassingly bad; I'm thinking, in
particular, of Jay's article advocating that the United States ought
to be a single nation.
The fact that these were newspaper columns in a partisan debate
is rather enough to make me weep for the relative impoverishment of
present-day partisan debate.
On the other hand, I am happy enough with your assessment
of Jay's article.
Matt writes:
I enjoyed reading the Federalist, but that's just because I happen
to be interested in American history. Some day I'd like to read a
compilation of both the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist
propaganda pieces; reading both sides of a debate is much more fun
than just reading one side out ofcontext.
This almost sounds to me like you are confusing an admiration
for _The Federalist_ with agreement with its course of argument.
For example, I personally am in agreement with Jefferson's
rather mildly put anti-Federalist position. That is, I don't
really have a strong opinion about Jefferson's call for term limits,
but a Bill of Rights I would consider essential to ratification.
There are arguments which seem just glaringly wrong to me in
_The Federalist_: For instance, I still am puzzled by the assertion
made that the power of the presidency, the executive, is not
to be feared relative to the legislative branch *because* the citizenry
will remain loyal to their individual States, and hence, to their
congressional representation---they will somehow *identify* more
with Congress and their State governments than with any President.
Basically, my question has to do with whether this was just wrong in
some timeless sense, in and of itself---that they just underestimated
the demagogic focusing power of the executive office itself, or is it
only the advent of mass society and mass media responsible for the
imperial presidency? Also, one of the reasons they give
for why there needn't be a Bill of Rights is that the Constitution
only states those powers which government has, and, hence,
since it doesn't explicitly *say* Congress can violate Rights, therefore
Congress can't. Since the current constitutional interpretation is
along the lines that government can do anything government likes as
long as it isn't explicitly forbidden (and then some, some of us would
note), I wonder about whether this state of affairs today was a foregone
conclusion. If you like, Matt, in many ways _The Federalist_ *is* the
other side of the debate to me. It is food for my being able to think
about these things.
I have no quarrels at all with your wish to read anti-Federalist
writings, too. (No more than I have quarrels with anyone wanting
to read 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 volumes on Rights doctrine or political
theory). There is a Mentor paperback edition, I think,
with _The Federalist Papers_ in one volume and collected
anti-Federalist writings in a second. But, I figure my next time
through _The Federalist_ will be in the 2 Library of America
volumes titled something like ``Debates on the Constitution''.
These look very much like what you are asking for here, Matt,
a collection in chronological order of the opposing newspaper columns
(including all of _The Federalist_) as well as the speeches given for and
against ratification in the state assemblies.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
Rebecca Leann Smit Crowley
Andrew Dinn suggests we:
: just to drop the question altogether and
: go read some books (selected according to some more worthwhile
: criterion e.g. what you enjoy, find interesting, find illuminating,
: need in order to deal with your personal problems, pass exams etc).
: The proper critical approach is to meet
: this diversity with an open mind.
How eminently reasonable!
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu responds:
: If the whole business
: of making qualitative comparisons is simply thrown out (...)
: aren't there quite serious ramifications, corollaries, etc., which
: extend beyond the realm of aesthetics into that of politics?
: For instance, in _White Noise_, Don DeLillo depicts "avant-garde"
: professors of pop culture who read nothing but cereal boxes. Now,
: when the comparison is between Dante or Hume, that's one thing, but
: when it's between cereal boxes and Plato . . . hasn't a line somewhere
: been crossed? or are we to throw over the whole game to relativistic
: chaos?
A very good question. I, for one, have read many cereal boxes in
my young life, struggling vainly to pronounce words like mono and
whatever diglycerides, only to pore over Webster's and chemistry
texts in a vain attempt to understand what the heck those were
and why they were in my cereal (I eventually gave up and returned
to the old staples: Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies and Shredded Wheat.
At least I understand the ingredients list.). I found those cereal
boxes interesting and illuminating (that kind of cardboard burns
pretty well, as long as you didn't spill milk on it), altho I can't
say I enjoyed them, or needed the information to deal with my personal
problems, pass exams., etc.
But a professor of pop culture might have to read cereal boxes
as a part of her job. Advertising copy is perhaps the most ubiquitous
and universal source of literary experience for most of the population;
it's worth some attention, if that's what you do for a living.
For those of us more interested in the less ephemeral, however,
Dante, Hume, Plato, Austen, Shakespeare and a wide variety of
others will continue to amuse, educate, illuminate, provide
insight into our lives and the lives of those we love . . . and
provide fodder for essays and standardized tests.
Don't worry; the division of the marketplace is such that
a test on the slogans for Froot Loops, say, couldn't be administered
nationally, as they would differ from region to region. Only
the ancient is unchanging (because it's dead, mostly), and so
suitable for standardized tests.
Even without the mechanism of the national school system, and
standardized testing, don't you think Plato and co. have
what it takes to outlast ads for the last high-tech athletic
shoe even if it does exploit an important anti-grav breakthrough to
improve hang time? We're still reading Aristotle and Sappho,
despite every imaginable disaster natural, political and religious,
despite poor distribution and powerful religions hostile to
their ideas, and particularly the dissemination thereof. They
hung on this long; Nike isn't going to do them in.
Andrew isn't recommending that we revel in pop culture. I think
he's suggesting that when we who have awoken lift our heads
above the current confusing sludge of published reading material
to explore and enjoy its ancestors and forebears, we needn't concern
ourselves with comprehensive coverage, or fine qualitative
distinctions about reading the best first and working our way
down. He is suggesting we apply to reading what many of us apply
to the rest of our lives: set some standards and adhere to them,
look for intrinsic good rather than creating an artificial
competition, stop making the better the enemy of the good.
The notion that language and literature need guardians, and
that us plebes need to be told what's good and what's bad,
and advised as to relative rankings is an old one, enshrined
in educational curricula, letters to young relatives admonishing
them to abandon frivolous novel reading in favor of the Classics,
and prescriptive grammars and dictionaries.
The notion that good and useful language and literature (feel
free to define "good" and "useful" to please yourself) will
find its own lovers cherish it and pass it along is at least
as old. I expect between the two, the literary world will
continue to totter along for at least another few millenia.
Does anyone really think our world, even this particular corner
of it, so up-to-date as to contain no lovers of the pop culture
of previous eras (let's not forget the origins of Shakespeare,
to mention only one)? Or if that's not the problem, does anyone
seriously think that this world contains no one feeling impoverished
by what's available in current media, turning in desperation to
books of past worlds in search of a kindred spirit, thoughts
that resonate to a soul out of joint?
With B. Walden & Noble permanently stocking Austen and Melville, and
almost always having a smattering of the Greeks on the shelves,
can anyone seriously worry that our "citizens have no exposure
to ideals but internally-generated commercial ones"? Can a world
with dollar Dover books in it (Flatland to Lincoln's speeds to
Vachel Lindsay, side jaunt into comedy a la Congreve etc.) be
in grave danger?
For myself, I am glad I "had" to read few classics in school;
I got to read them on my own and enjoyed them immensely. Warned
assiduously by parents and teachers of the dangers of believing
everything one reads, I considered and still consider no author
exempt from my opinion. Of questionable value, perhaps, to you,
gentle reader, nevertheless my willingness to talk back to the
long dead, and argue with their wisdom, received or otherwise,
gives them the opportunity to convince me, to participate in my life,
and to become loved and passed along to someone else, not as "the best",
not as "a classic", not as something "with historical interest"
or that survived "the judgment of history", but as something the
person I give it to values uniquely, not comparatively: I give a
book that I, Rebecca, a friend, says is worth their time and their
thought.
The notion of a series of books as a great conversation down
through the ages, investigating ideas of wide interest and
influence and enormous power is one which holds a great deal of
appeal to me. This conversation is, imo, best continued in
marginalia, conversations that last into the wee hours,
and correspondence that runs to the thousands of lines.
If, as a matter of tactics, it becomes necessary to reduce that
conversation to essays due by Friday, 3-5 pages typed, double-spaced,
discussing a highly-artificial comparison/contrast/idea,
well, I can tolerate that. I can tolerate food stamps, too, but
I don't bless the world that requires them.
--
Rebecca Crowley standard disclaimers apply rcro...@zso.dec.com
Some risks are worth taking.
MSMO...@butler.edu
Monday, the 24th of January, 1994
Steve Berman quotes me from 3 places:
(1) [...] Rights for women are simply and already implicit
philosophically in Rights of Man.
(2) [...] Women themselves have been historically slighted.
(3) [...] To my mind Rights for Women is a contemporary concern---
of less timelessness than the question of Rights period.
Which itself is of less timelessness than the question of
what is The Good in the first place
Steve then responds:
As far as I'm aware, throughout history women have been on the
whole at a practical disadvantage vis-a-vis men with respect to
Rights (which have by and large been codified and enforced by
men).
It is of course my contention that the fact that these Rights
have been codified and enforced (I would put it: ``discovered
and applied'') primarily by men says zip about the maleness of
Rights. One would be very hard pressed to argue that the
doctrine affords even the slightest power advantage to male
human beings viv-a-vis female human beings. In fact, I would
think rather that it does everything possible artificially to equalize
what would be otherwise a natural power advantage of the male.
Steve continues:
So why is the question of Rights for women any less timeless than
the question of Rights period? Both are obviously contemporary
concerns, and both have the roughly same historical depth--so the
difference must lie in the future, is that it? (It can't just be that the
one is more general than the other--that has nothing to do with
timelessness.) (The same goes for the relation of Rights to the
Good.)
At first read, I was willing to allow that you may use ``more
general'' instead of ``more timeless'' if you so prefer. But,
on second consideration, I really think something like ``more
timeless'' is what I mean. Your assertion that they ``have the
same historical depth'' means to me that you are simply measuring
how long the issues have been around. I think rather Rights
Period is a bigger, more universal question, than Rights for
Women, that the former stands to the latter like The Laws of
Thermodynamics do to the question of the efficiency of heat
engines. One is a simple application of the other *if* we
have first got the larger question sorted out. Try ``more timeless''=
``less historically and societally contingent'' and you will catch
my drift, if not necessarily agree with it.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
Leann Smit Crowley") says:
>
>: If the whole business
>: of making qualitative comparisons is simply thrown out (...)
>: aren't there quite serious ramifications, corollaries, etc., which
>: extend beyond the realm of aesthetics into that of politics?
>
>: For instance, in _White Noise_, Don DeLillo depicts "avant-garde"
>: professors of pop culture who read nothing but cereal boxes. Now,
>: when the comparison is between Dante or Hume, that's one thing, but
>: when it's between cereal boxes and Plato . . . hasn't a line somewhere
>: been crossed? or are we to throw over the whole game to relativistic
>: chaos?
>
>as a part of her job. Advertising copy is perhaps the most ubiquitous
>and universal source of literary experience for most of the population;
>it's worth some attention, if that's what you do for a living.
I grant you tabloids, TV guide, morning newspapers, etc. provide
most their literary experiences: that's ubiquity, but I question
what meaning "universal" has in this context. The problem as I
see it is that the population is already inundated with such
manifestations of pop culture when they enter a university.
In the four years many will spend there, can't the few
humanities requirements they are asked to fill focus not on
what they already know but rather on what they haven't been
exposed to? The arguments in defense of teaching pop culture
depend on a notion of "relevance," as well as a relativism
that denies traditional qualitative judgments. But I think
we do ourselves a disservice by not looking into what lies
beyond the quotidian. I think a student can learn more about
popular culture by looking back to the intellectual foundations
of our culture than by studying rap videos they already know
by heart. Sure, by doing the latter they may learn to view
"more critically"; but by studying foundations and how certain
basic questions have been posed and how we have answered them
(and then learned to forget they exist at all, rather taking
the expressions of how we answered as "the way things are and
presumably must be") I think they can view the whole projects
of democracy and capitalism in a broader context and learn
to see what they take for granted as manifestations of
particular ideals. I'd like to call into question the
whole business of professors of pop culture.
>Even without the mechanism of the national school system, and
>standardized testing, don't you think Plato and co. have
>what it takes to outlast ads for the last high-tech athletic
>shoe even if it does exploit an important anti-grav breakthrough to
>improve hang time? We're still reading Aristotle and Sappho,
>despite every imaginable disaster natural, political and religious,
>despite poor distribution and powerful religions hostile to
>their ideas, and particularly the dissemination thereof. They
>hung on this long; Nike isn't going to do them in.
I have no doubt Plato & Aristotle will outlast our pop culture.
That isn't what concerns me. I'm alarmed at how our ignoring
the "classics" even in what we've set aside as their "proper"
place in our culture (i. e. the "humanities") may affect the
course of our civilization--that is the one we're stuck with.
Democracy, it seems to me, hinges almost solely on the creation
of a constituency capable of making reasonable choices. I'm
just anachronistic enough to believe the study of history,
philosophy & literature has something to do with all this; but
it is just there, in the education process, that we are failing
most dreadfully. We have so failed, in fact, that even the
professors, it seems, no longer can, or even have the desire
to, defend their disciplines. Why teach Locke or Milton or
a course on the French Revolutiuon? Why not teach about Elvis,
cereal boxes, car crashes in American film? "Sexy" is the
code word, and it's used to bludgeon anyone who isn't "post-
structural," "post-modern," "post-civilized" into feeling
like a retrogressive curmudgeon. But what is sexy is ephemeral,
skin-deep, will soon enough not be. The whole trend, though,
I find deeply disturbing because I don't think it's just
a "phase" we'll outgrow: I think it has resulted from
internal democratic and commercial pressures that are likely
only to intensify even as we become less and less equipped
to understand or counter them.
>Andrew isn't recommending that we revel in pop culture. I think
>he's suggesting that when we who have awoken lift our heads
>above the current confusing sludge of published reading material
>to explore and enjoy its ancestors and forebears, we needn't concern
>ourselves with comprehensive coverage, or fine qualitative
>distinctions about reading the best first and working our way
>down. He is suggesting we apply to reading what many of us apply
>to the rest of our lives: set some standards and adhere to them,
>look for intrinsic good rather than creating an artificial
>competition, stop making the better the enemy of the good.
I didn't claim Andrew was defending pop culture. I only
wanted to point out certain unpleasant corollaries of the
relativistic argument he was making. The same argument he
might use to defend a taste for Stevens, say, others are
using to defend academic courses in rap. It seems to me the
qualitative question is nowhere more important than when
it comes to the drawing up of syllabi. There is only so much
time, so many courses: what will we teach? The answer always
tells us a great deal about who we are and what kind of citizen
we desire to create. I believe, consciously or not, the universities
desire to create a good relativized product, eminently compliant
to the manufactured trends of commercial culture. (Oh sure,
they've been taught to be "critical" about rap videos and the
pepsi they drink, but they just can't seem to get enough . . .)
>The notion that good and useful language and literature (feel
>free to define "good" and "useful" to please yourself) will
>find its own lovers cherish it and pass it along is at least
>as old. I expect between the two, the literary world will
>continue to totter along for at least another few millenia.
>
>Does anyone really think our world, even this particular corner
>of it, so up-to-date as to contain no lovers of the pop culture
>of previous eras (let's not forget the origins of Shakespeare,
>to mention only one)? Or if that's not the problem, does anyone
>seriously think that this world contains no one feeling impoverished
>by what's available in current media, turning in desperation to
>books of past worlds in search of a kindred spirit, thoughts
>that resonate to a soul out of joint?
I don't like the note of complacency here. I guess what I
admire most about "conservative" rhetoric (by which I don't mean
Rush Lamebrain, but rather, say, Edmund Burke & Allan Bloom)
is that it always seeks to unsettle, always demands we can do
better by focusing attention on the highest achievements of the
past. If, too, it idealizes the past--and let's face it, all
human history has been rotten--it does so to ask we make the most
of the present, not so we should literally emulate a "golden
age" (which never existed), but so that we learn what we can
from the historical record and put it to use.
I admire your sense of humor, but I'm uneasy about what it sometimes
covers up or apologizes for. That the 3-5 pg. paper has itself
become such an empty exercise is to me only one more symptom.
The humanities can convey little unless they are animated by
great vitality. Many professors today, seeking such vitality,
have taken an easy route by going into pop culture and catering
to their students' tastes (just as Plato said would happen in
a democracy). Admittedly, it is difficult for them to find
authentic vitality when the universities themselves treat the
humanities as so much window-dressing. And why? Because the
bottom line is economics. Our culture tells us so. Don't ask
questions.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Rebecca Leann Smit Crowley
I'm not entirely certain what I was thinking at the time, but
I seem to have embroiled myself in a canon-discussion, altho
not precisely described as such.
Part of what is being debated here is what goes into school curricula,
what tools will we give our offspring to prepare them for the
future, to defend what is good in what we bequeath them as individuals,
as a nation, as a culture, and to, when eliminating the bad, not
out of ignorance replace it with a far greater evil. Herein lies
the importance of the study of past genius: the cumulative wisdom
of bygone eras is available to be applied to our current dilemmas.
If all that is studied by the young is absolutely current, totally
pop, to the nth degree up-to-date, their view is narrowed, their
errors inevitable and repetitive, their choice hideously limited.
If, however, the young have available, nay, even forced upon them
the creakily ancient and the moldering wise men of old, _as well as_
what they will inevitably absorb of the current, the pop, the up-to-date,
they've got a good chance of a couple of angles of view, a wider
range of choice (because of a wider array of ideas). Their
errors are still inevitable, but they might be more interesting and,
best of all, they might be new ones, through which they can become great
to their descendants by making and then explaining how they got
themselves into their particular frying pans and fires this time.
Progress.
To the degree that you accept the above, and to the degree that
you use the above to enforce curricula including Great Books or
whatever you want to call them, I have no objections.
I think you do accept a lot of the above, in fact. You say:
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu wrote:
: I'm alarmed at how our ignoring
: the "classics" even in what we've set aside as their "proper"
: place in our culture (i. e. the "humanities") may affect the
: course of our civilization--that is the one we're stuck with.
: Democracy, it seems to me, hinges almost solely on the creation
: of a constituency capable of making reasonable choices. I'm
: just anachronistic enough to believe the study of history,
: philosophy & literature has something to do with all this; but
Ignoring the classics will, I firmly believe, affect the course of
our civilization. Paying attention to the classics will also
affect the course of our civilization. What is not so clear
to me as it seems to be to you is which of the effects is preferable.
Paying attention to the classics, particularly with a view to
*not* repeating their errors may, I think, result in a future
with at least some of the aesthetic appeal of novelty. Paying
attention to the classics with a view to recreating a non-existent
yet idyllic past (*not* something I think you want to do,
but something I suspect others in similar debates are in favor of)
strikes me as unimaginative, and, judging by past experiments,
likely to be an unsuccessful venture.
You object to the:
: relativistic argument he was making. The same argument he
: might use to defend a taste for Stevens, say, others are
: using to defend academic courses in rap.
I think an academic course in rap is a great idea. I just don't
think anyone under the age of 25 should be allowed to attend.
If we could require it for those over 35, this might, in fact, cure a lot
of misunderstanding. An academic course for young rappers on
their historical antecedents (you guys think you're doing something
new? Well, you're not. Check out these chants.) could be made
available as well.
At any rate, the history of curricula should clue us all in
real fast that someday, decades or a centuries hence, rap is going
to be _dead_, preserved in musty, nerdish fashion only in universities,
sort of like Gregorian Chants, only weirder. There will be a survey
course for undergrads, and the few songs studied, and the program at
the obscure recitals which will be required attendance will be
whatever survived by virtue of unkillable catchiness (which is to say,
universal appeal), combined with artistic virtues of the type which
lend themselves to analysis.
Those arguments, "It's not as hallowed as the existing classics,
but it's damn fine anyway", are the same used to justify
all additions to the canon. Think of it as upward mobility
for intangible human artifacts. The ghosts of the immortals.
(The corollary, "I don't care how hallowed it is, and neither
does anybody else" being the mechanism for downward mobility.)
You may call this complacency. I call this an application of
the lessons of history. That is, when I'm not hammering on
the word perspective.
The past does not die; its fragments appear and disappear in a
a confusing cadence which conservatives seek to control and revolutions
attempt to exploit. The dialectics of old and new, of lessons
learned and the will to experiment, of the desire to be safe and
the need to avoid boredom are tediously timeless in their appeal
to partisans of both stripes. (I thought I knew better, and
here I am in one again!)
: I guess what I
: admire most about "conservative" rhetoric (by which I don't mean
: Rush Lamebrain, but rather, say, Edmund Burke & Allan Bloom)
: is that it always seeks to unsettle, always demands we can do
: better by focusing attention on the highest achievements of the
: past. If, too, it idealizes the past--and let's face it, all
: human history has been rotten--it does so to ask we make the most
: of the present, not so we should literally emulate a "golden
: age" (which never existed), but so that we learn what we can
: from the historical record and put it to use.
As I said above, I get the distinct impression we agree on a lot.
Our disagreement lies somewhere in tactics (you seem more
concerned about We Should Do Something, perhaps by legislation
or social pressure; I am more interested in what I can do, by way
of reading good stuff _my_self and passing it along to those I know.
I think my method avoids some of the hairy moral dilemmas yours
has and I'm willing to take a hit on the fast and widespread aspects
of the solution, if I'm sure of being locally effective and ethically
pure), and assessment of current risk.
I think our society is in the process of becoming very different
from what it was a few years, or decades ago. We're headed in
a direction of higher taxes, and more extensive government services.
We're headed in a direction of increasing control of the details of
our lives, in the name of safety and security for ourselves and
others. We're headed away from freedom, and several of our basic
rights. This could potentially change real fast (economic collapse,
a war, significant upswing in religious fundamentalism, the creation
of a popular third party), but if it doesn't, just about everyone
who read and adored the motley crew which founded this country
_because of having read what that motley crew had to say_
(rather than out of raw patriotism) is going to be mourning
the death of a beautiful dream. A lot of other people will be
thankful to see the end of an ugly nightmare. I've long held
the opinion that to retain the present is to know one's
certain damnation; to change is to be certain of an unknown damnation.
When I asked if anyone seriously thought there was no segment
of society which felt so out of joint they had turned to the
past in search of something that resonated with their view,
I was indirectly albeit unsubtly fingering myself. For a variety
of reasons I find personally compelling, but rhetorically weak,
I am not too concerned with these trends in our society, primarily
because I feel, not merely uninvolved, but opposed at a
primal level to several of what I perceive to be our current
society's basic assumptions about the way things work. On top of
all that, I firmly believe in solutions on the personal level
(if I want it fixed, I fix it in myself, and then help others --
I don't organize a PAC and lobby congress. I'd probably homeschool
my kids before mucking about in anything as political as PTA.), which
generally means compliance with laws and customs, but in other
cases extends to various forms of resistance.
So when I said:
>The notion of a series of books as a great conversation down
>through the ages, investigating ideas of wide interest and
>influence and enormous power is one which holds a great deal of
>appeal to me. This conversation is, imo, best continued in
>marginalia, conversations that last into the wee hours,
>and correspondence that runs to the thousands of lines.
I described what I do now.
When I said:
>If, as a matter of tactics, it becomes necessary to reduce that
>conversation to essays due by Friday, 3-5 pages typed, double-spaced,
>discussing a highly-artificial comparison/contrast/idea,
>well, I can tolerate that. I can tolerate food stamps, too, but
>I don't bless the world that requires them.
I was cynically saying I wouldn't get in the way of others
imposing this sort of inanity, and could understand their
reasons for doing so, and honestly applaud its successes.
I pay taxes and try to be cheerful on those rare occasions
they don't disappear in a sink of corruption, bureaucracy, or
yet-another-way-to-kill-people-which-won't-ever-be-used-hopefully.
To the extent that I have a sense of humor about it, I hope
it is seen, not as an attempt to cover up, or apologize for
the current -- or any other -- system, but rather as perspective:
we aren't the first culture to find ourselves in this spot.
Induction, while not infallible, is persuasive in arguing
we will not either be the last.
Which is to say, I understand that you perceive a threat, and
what you perceive is real. I empathize with your feelings on
the subject, but am unsympathetic enough to be inclined to
point out that this is not unexpected, probably not avoidable,
and likely not the end of the world as we are willing to live in
it. I am intellectually opposed to enough of what some you
apparently respect (you did, after all, mention Bloom) want to
preserve to go so far as to engage in snickering on the sidelines,
while attempting to subvert your audience to my own way of thinking,
in a quiet, informal, and highly personal way.
And I find your passion for the subject impressive, and worthy
of respect, but not persuasive.
obBook references: _High Brow, Low Brow_, forgotten subtitle,
forgotten author. Very good, very enlightening. Also
_An Incomplete and Thoroughly Irreverent Social History of
Almost Everything_ by Frank Muir. Very funny, even better,
more enlightening. Either constitutes a suitable antidote for
most bouts of canonism.
--
Rebecca Crowley standard disclaimers apply rcro...@zso.dec.com
Do not reject these teachings as false because I am
crazy. The reason that I am crazy is because they are true.
John Wojdylo
#Given the current state of things in the western hemisphere, I am
#willing, even eager, to accept that it hasn't much been influenced by the
#thinking of women.
My dear Kate, don't you remember the tons of that nasty colonialism
stuff poured into the British Empire by Queen Victoria hardly 100 years
ago? How about Catherine the Great of Russia (a nice Polish lass,
actually), or the queens of Holland during the nation's period of glory
(remember the Boer Wars, hmmmm?). And all this is not to mention the
old wisdom that "behind every great man is a Greater woman". And the
mundane events that make up history's texture: the greedy women at the walls
of the Conciergerie in Paris in 1794. Just what consitutes "women's thought"
according to you, and why should women be exempt from responsibility for
"the current state of things in the western hemisphere"?
#Kate
#Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
jw
Steve Berman
Steve then responds:
As far as I'm aware, throughout history women have been on the
whole at a practical disadvantage vis-a-vis men with respect to
Rights (which have by and large been codified and enforced by
men).
It is of course my contention that the fact that these Rights
have been codified and enforced (I would put it: ``discovered
and applied'') primarily by men says zip about the maleness of
Rights. One would be very hard pressed to argue that the
doctrine affords even the slightest power advantage to male
human beings viv-a-vis female human beings. In fact, I would
think rather that it does everything possible artificially to equalize
what would be otherwise a natural power advantage of the male.
I wrote *practical* to suggest that the question of Rights as ideals should
take cognizance of the effects of their application (as I believe it mostly
does, just not enough). This is of course not to conflate Rights in theory
and in practice.
Steve continues:
So why is the question of Rights for women any less timeless than
the question of Rights period? Both are obviously contemporary
concerns, and both have the roughly same historical depth--so the
difference must lie in the future, is that it? (It can't just be that the
one is more general than the other--that has nothing to do with
timelessness.) (The same goes for the relation of Rights to the
Good.)
At first read, I was willing to allow that you may use ``more
general'' instead of ``more timeless'' if you so prefer. But,
on second consideration, I really think something like ``more
timeless'' is what I mean. Your assertion that they ``have the
same historical depth'' means to me that you are simply measuring
how long the issues have been around. I think rather Rights
Period is a bigger, more universal question, than Rights for
Women, that the former stands to the latter like The Laws of
Thermodynamics do to the question of the efficiency of heat
engines. One is a simple application of the other *if* we
have first got the larger question sorted out.
But this has nothing to do with timelessness, certainly not as you define
it below (which I basically agree with). (Note too that the efficiency of
an engine in a closed system is no less contingent upon properties outside
of the system than are the laws of Thermodynamics.)
Try ``more timeless''=
``less historically and societally contingent'' and you will catch
my drift, if not necessarily agree with it.
If this is your drift than I do not agree with it, though I do agree that
the question of Rights for women is less general than, and ancillary [oops,
that's rather an unfortunate word to use here--make it subordinate] to, the
question of Rights Period. We have to be careful not to conflate theory and
practice. I see no reason to believe that the question of Rights for women
in theory is any more historically and societally contingent than the
question of Rights period in theory (or do you contend that the theoretical
question of Rights for women is dependent on historical and societal
circumstance in a way that the more general theoretical question of Rights
period isn't? --if so, why?); mutatis mutandis for the question of
practical consequences. Can you give me some reason?
--Steve
Christopher Anderson
debate of the criteria in this thread, so I thought I would try to start a
new one.]
In article <1994Jan24.1...@cee.hw.ac.uk> and...@cee.hw.ac.uk (Andrew Dinn) writes:
>So what do you intend by the second criterion: that the author has an
>abiding influence visible in C20th thought (in which case doesn't that
>also exclude lots of the boys too? Who reads Livy now?); that the
>author's influence extends via other authors in the list down to
>modern times (in which case it becomes a boys club by definition);
>that the influence is felt in certain intellectual or academic circles
>(in which case who are this happy band? - don't tell me r.a.b, in which
>case I will add loadsawimmin :-).
While perhaps noone reads Livy now, he certainly deserves notice by dint of
his influence on other authors. Machiavelli, of course, was somewhat
obsessed by Livy, and Madison, I believe, was rather familiar with him as
well. His accounts of the tribulations of Rome provided the raw data for
the generalizations of political theorists for several generations in the
early modern period.
Indeed, this criterion does ensure a boys club, since, obviously, the boys
have conscientiously refused to read the girls. Catherine Macauley, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and Margaret Fuller were all ignored
by all but a few of their male contemporaries. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
perhaps enjoyed somewhat greater standing in wider circles, but her writings
appeared at a time closer to the more general male recognition of women's
political rights.
>Andrew Dinn
Christopher Anderson
>Matt continues:
> The Federalist, ultimately, is just a compilation of newspaper
> columns that were written to drum up support for a certain legal
> document. Most of those articles are written at least competently,
> but I couldn't honestly describe any of them as great literature, or
> as particularly original political philosophy. In fact, I thought that
> one or two of them were embarrassingly bad; I'm thinking, in
> particular, of Jay's article advocating that the United States ought
> to be a single nation.
>The fact that these were newspaper columns in a partisan debate
>is rather enough to make me weep for the relative impoverishment of
>present-day partisan debate.
I do agree with Mike on this point, and would like to point out that even
while these peices may have been only newspaper columns, they did,
nevertheless, reflect a new and original political philosophy, for the most
part. I challenge anyone to find the arguments in Federalist 10 in any
previous peice of writing. [If anyone can point these out it would be of
great interest.] The Federalist is concerned with theorizing about the
composition of a republic on an unprecidented scale which quite naturally
lead to new and original conclusions. As a whole, the papers reflect
Madison's views, and to a much lesser extent Hamilton's. Poor Jay, of
course, had been too injured in a street riot to contribute very much. The
bulk of the peices are Madison's and we might suspect that he was able to
produce such high quality peices in so short a period because he was writing
in defense of a political philosophy which he had himself formed in making
the Virginia plan. While he was responding to the issues raised by local
anti-Federalists, his responses were based on a rather well thought out
theory of how politics should opperate in a large compound republic.
>_The Federalist_: For instance, I still am puzzled by the assertion
>made that the power of the presidency, the executive, is not
>to be feared relative to the legislative branch *because* the citizenry
>will remain loyal to their individual States, and hence, to their
>congressional representation---they will somehow *identify* more
>with Congress and their State governments than with any President.
>Basically, my question has to do with whether this was just wrong in
>some timeless sense, in and of itself---that they just underestimated
>the demagogic focusing power of the executive office itself, or is it
>only the advent of mass society and mass media responsible for the
>imperial presidency?
At that time the individual states did conceive of themselves as having
rather more distinct cultures than we attribute to individual states today.
Madison's experience with the fierce opposition of the anti-Federalists
possibly lead him to believe that the spirit of local attachment was rather
well entrenched in the United States. It is possible, of course, that
it was simply a rhetorical move; he may have been trying to use
this anti-Federalist assumption of local attachment against the anti-
Federalists themselves. He could not have been ignorant of the "demogogic
focusing power" [nice phrase, by the way] of the Presidency since it was
assumed by everyone that the President was going to be Washington.
Washington, by virtue of his overwhelming fame in the new nation, had more
demogogic focusing potential perhaps than any contemporary figure.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like a purely strategic
argument on Madison's part. His original Virginia plan, I believe, had to
executive appointed by the legislature as in the Parliamentary pattern.
This obviously would have made for a executive more beholden to the
legislature than the final version of the Constitution allowed. Madison
himself may not have been very pleased with the final form of the executive
but would have been obliged to defend it anyway, in any way that he could
think of.
> But, I figure my next time
>through _The Federalist_ will be in the 2 Library of America
>volumes titled something like ``Debates on the Constitution''.
>These look very much like what you are asking for here, Matt,
>a collection in chronological order of the opposing newspaper columns
>(including all of _The Federalist_) as well as the speeches given for and
>against ratification in the state assemblies.
Do you know offhand who the editor of these volumes is?
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
Leann Smit Crowley") says:
[I've edited a lot, including those places where Rebecca stresses our
positions aren't so very different--a claim with which I agree. I've
tried to retain passages that help define what remain points of
contention.]
>When I asked if anyone seriously thought there was no segment
>of society which felt so out of joint they had turned to the
>past in search of something that resonated with their view,
>I was indirectly albeit unsubtly fingering myself. For a variety
>of reasons I find personally compelling, but rhetorically weak,
>I am not too concerned with these trends in our society, primarily
>because I feel, not merely uninvolved, but opposed at a
>primal level to several of what I perceive to be our current
>society's basic assumptions about the way things work. On top of
>all that, I firmly believe in solutions on the personal level
>(if I want it fixed, I fix it in myself, and then help others --
>I don't organize a PAC and lobby congress. I'd probably homeschool
>my kids before mucking about in anything as political as PTA.), which
>generally means compliance with laws and customs, but in other
>cases extends to various forms of resistance.
The individualism you cling to here is fine homespun Emersonian
stuff, American to the core. Whitman liked to point out how
such was the counter-force to the "leveling" pressures within
democracy. All this is fine. But self-reliance itself can
become dangerous on a political level when it becomes an
excuse not to engage. I take the disaffection you evince for
the political scene at large as symptomatic of how we've all
pretty much come to feel the individual can do nothing except
look after his or her own good and, as for the rest, hope for
the best or just adopt a pessimistic (or smugly pessimistic)
attitude. But it hasn't always been like that in this country,
and it needn't continue to be.
>Which is to say, I understand that you perceive a threat, and
>what you perceive is real. I empathize with your feelings on
>the subject, but am unsympathetic enough to be inclined to
>point out that this is not unexpected, probably not avoidable,
>and likely not the end of the world as we are willing to live in
>it. I am intellectually opposed to enough of what some you
>apparently respect (you did, after all, mention Bloom) want to
>preserve to go so far as to engage in snickering on the sidelines,
>while attempting to subvert your audience to my own way of thinking,
>in a quiet, informal, and highly personal way.
I strongly disagree with the element of determinism here: "not
unexpected," "not unavoidable." From what vantage point was the
current American scene at all a probable prospect? Certainly
not from that of the Founding Fathers or Emerson--probably not until
well into the "Gilded Age." The questions are, it seems to me,
how did we get here? what went wrong?--and then, what can we
do about it? My feeling is revamping education wholesale has
got to be the first step. Aristotle points out that laws and
cultural ideals are ineffectual unless citizens are educated in
their rational justifications, so that they both understand &
come to care deeply about them. It seems to me that's the cue
to follow.
I also feel I should say, briefly, in defense of Mr. Bloom
that he's not what he's sometimes thought to be: a blow-hard
ultra-conservative pedagogic high-brow Pat Buchanan. He claimed
not to be a conservative at all (but I suppose if you stand
far enough to one end of the spectrum, everything left or right
will appear extremely far away: some need binoculars just to
see the center). He was an immensely erudite man, a translator
of both Plato & Rousseau and a highly competent hermeneutical
critic in the mold of his mentor, Leo Strauss. Just because
one of his books became, for whatever reason, a coffee table
bugbear should not be sufficient cause to dismiss him out of
hand.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Matt Austern
> Just what consitutes "women's thought"
> according to you, and why should women be exempt from responsibility for
> "the current state of things in the western hemisphere"?
If it's really true that none of the major intellectual themes in our
culture are due to women's writing, if it's really true that not a
single woman in the history of the world has ever written a book that
has had significant influence on subsequent developments, then I think
it's quite reasonable to say that women are exempt from responsibility
for whatever is wrong with today's world. Credit and blame go
together.
I don't agree with the premise of the last paragraph, of course, but
it does seem to be the opinion of many of the compilers of Great Books
lists.
Evelyn C. Leeper
> I wrote:
> >>Civilization. It seems to me that it isn't even a contest. Austen,
> >>Bronte, et al simply do not compare well to Shakespeare, Dante, Plato,
> >>Homer, et al. Of course I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
>
> Gabrielle Hodson notes:
> >I notice that whenever the proposed female novelist candidates are declared
> >unfit to sit with the greats, the male greats used as yardsticks are never
> >novelists. Is the problem with the suggested females the fact that they
> >are, almost uniformly, novelists?
>
> Interesting idea. It is perhaps true that the novel has a disadvantage in
> composing a list of Great Books since it is a relatively new phenomenon.
> However, in the Great Books series, the following novelists do appear:
> Dostoevsky
> Tolstoy
> Melville
> Fielding
> Swift
> Sterne
>
> So, I'm game for the new project. Do any female novelists rank higher on
> the Great Book scale (influence, etc) than these male novelists?
I would rank George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte above Sterne or Fielding.
(I would rank Cervantes, Dickens, or Twain above some of those listed as
well.)
Okay, here's an interesting exercise. (Well, it seems interesting to
me.)
You are asked to come up with a list of thirteen (13) novels to be read
for a course entitled "The Novel Before the Twentieth Century." The
only requirements are that the books be 1) novels, 2) all by different
authors, and 3) written before 1901.
What is your list?
After you come up with this list, the college decides that they want
the course to be "The English-Language Novel Before the Twentieth
Century." Now what is you list?
I'll start off with a really off-the-top-of-my-head list, in
chronological order:
Murasaki--TALE OF GENJI (~1000)
Cervantes--DON QUIXOTE (1615)
Swift--GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1726)
Austen--PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813)
Shelley--FRANKENSTEIN (1818)
Dickens--DAVID COPPERFIELD (1850)
Melville--MOBY DICK (1851)
Bronte, C.--VILLETTE (1853)
Hugo--LES MISERABLES (1862)
Eliot--DANIEL DERONDA (1876)
Dostoevski--THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1880)
Twain--ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884)
Doyle--A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887)
The all-English list (with replacements starred) would be:
Swift--GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1726)
*Fielding--TOM JONES (1749)
Austen--PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813)
Shelley--FRANKENSTEIN (1818)
*Bronte, E.--WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847)
*Thackeray--VANITY FAIR (1848)
Dickens--DAVID COPPERFIELD (1850)
Melville--MOBY DICK (1851)
Bronte, C.--VILLETTE (1853)
*Carroll--ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865)
Eliot--DANIEL DERONDA (1876)
Twain--ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884)
Doyle--A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887)
I realize some of these may seem odd choices (particularly the Carroll
and Doyle), but their lasting popularity calls for their inclusion
(IMHO, of course). I would claim that the Doyle, for example, is read
by more people per year than any of the other books on this list, or on
most lists of "great novels" that I see, and that this has been true
for most of the last hundred years. My choices of the specific novels
for some of these authors is also probably a function of what I have
read most recently.
(Why thirteen? Because usually you ask somebody for a "ten-best"
list, they give you a list with thirteen items. :-) )
So what are your lists?
--
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | Evelyn...@att.com
"Remember, high-tech means breaks down next week, while cutting
edge means breaks down this afternoon. -Bruce Sterling
Gabrielle Hodson
>Gabrielle Hodson notes:
>>I notice that whenever the proposed female novelist candidates are declared
>>unfit to sit with the greats, the male greats used as yardsticks are never
>>novelists. Is the problem with the suggested females the fact that they
>>are, almost uniformly, novelists?
>Interesting idea. It is perhaps true that the novel has a disadvantage in
>composing a list of Great Books since it is a relatively new phenomenon.
>However, in the Great Books series, the following novelists do appear:
>Dostoevsky
>Tolstoy
>Melville
>Fielding
>Swift
>Sterne
>So, I'm game for the new project. Do any female novelists rank higher on
>the Great Book scale (influence, etc) than these male novelists?
Well it is certainly a better forum for comparison. Fielding vs. Eliot
is a lot more debatable than Plato or Einstein vs. Eliot.
I think the previous posts questioning female novelists credentials have
shown a measure of intellectual dishonesty in using the non-novelist
male greats as yard sticks. Hmmmmm?
>It is perhaps relevant to note that there are more novels on the longer
>list prepared by Adler and Van Doren, "A Recommended Reading List".
>Moreover, this longer list includes Austen and Eliot.
>The question of whether Austen should replace Tolstoy on the shorter Great
>Books list (as someone here suggested) is an interesting question. I think
>it is a suggestion that even Adler would entertain. (It would seem that
>Adler would have to entertain such questions in order to make a list in the
>first place). However, the suggestion by someone else that the authors of
>these lists set out to systematically exclude women is absurd in light of
>the longer list.
>One last question prompted by Ms Hodson's (Gabrielle's? What is the proper
>etiquette on using people's names around here? I'll have to check Miss
>Manners later)--anyway, would Shakespeare have been less of a writer if he
>had written novels instead of plays? Would the *novel*, _Hamlet_ be
>read in High School English?
>--
>Jim Hartley
>jeha...@ucdavis.edu
>"The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized,
>and for this the uncivilized have never forgiven them." Cyril Connolly
--
Gabrielle g...@muffin.apana.org.au
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Rebecca Leann Smit Crowley
when it gets past 200 lines. I'm going to try to keep it short this
time. I'm afraid it's a function of having spent my life being
accused of apathy, when I am anything but.
Allan does a good job illuminating our points of disagreement. They
are, as I suspected, not many. However, he seems to have misunderstood
my motivation for my choice of tactics (personal, rather than
political; individual, rather than aimed at institutional change).
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu wrote:
: But self-reliance itself can
: become dangerous on a political level when it becomes an
: excuse not to engage. I take the disaffection you evince for
: the political scene at large as symptomatic of how we've all
: pretty much come to feel the individual can do nothing except
: look after his or her own good and, as for the rest, hope for
: the best or just adopt a pessimistic (or smugly pessimistic)
: attitude.
That's all well and good and may describe why others feel
"disaffected" with the "political scene at large". But for
me, it is not so. My choice not to participate in this political
scene is not only that: it is a moral choice not to engage
in what I consider immoral behavior. Most, if not in fact
all, mechanisms used by governments strike me as inherently
bad, wreaking subtle havoc, damaging ripples which undermine
all participants' potential for great moral worth. Good
behavior got by coercive force is good behavior we can now never
know might have came from a better source. You may say homespun
American individualism; I say it was molding with age when Locke
got hold of it, and used it as the basis for an ingenious argument
for tolerance _not_ based on moral relativism, which can be found
in "Essay On Toleration", unless I've gone and messed up the title
again. (Translation in case that was confusing: I don't involve myself
in government/politics because I consider them *bad* -- not
because I don't care, not because I don't think I can accomplish
anything through them. Think of me as a conscientious objector.)
I do not, however, use this as an excuse to throw up my hands
and fend for myself in some Hobbesian sense. I choose to
improve my life and the lives of those I encounter, to help
humanity by helping individuals, rather than by attempting
via legislation or public service announcements or increased
law enforcement to _make_ people be better, whether they want
to or not, whether they have the tools or not. Denigrate
my approach at the peril of your credibility; entire religions
have been based on it, with more than a small impact on history.
Your contention that it is "dangerous on a political level" is
absolutely the truth, in senses other than the one you likely
meant: governments which encounter such individuals often take
a dim view of us heel-draggers getting in the way of mobilizing
the populace and the resulting personal dangers are real; but
simultaneously, such an attitude -- if widespread -- can topple
governments, which is why the hostility in the first place.
On a final note, altho I wish I'd come up with the description of
Allan Bloom as
: a blow-hard ultra-conservative pedagogic high-brow Pat Buchanan
(it is, after all, very humorous), I never thought that. My objection
to Bloom was always that his models, his classical heroes, were not
mine -- not mine to the degree I had tentatively placed a lot
of them in the camp of Them, aka, the Enemy. Plato and Rousseau,
ironically enough, were both in the top ten.
But I don't dismiss him out of hand, as that would constitute
a dangerously stupid instance of failure to know one's enemy.
--
Rebecca Crowley standard disclaimers apply rcro...@zso.dec.com
Walk softly and carry a big fish.
Rachel_...@walnut.prs.k12.nj.us
making up a bibliography of writings of women in the early Church. There
seems to be quite a bit; if anyone is interested, I'm sure he'd be glad to
send some info (though not the whole book. :) )
Rachel Meredith Kadel
The school barely lets me speak for myself, let alone for it.
Rachel Meredith Kadel rka...@corbin.prs.k12.nj.us
Be alert . . . the world needs more lerts.
MPR...@bclands.crl.gov.bc.ca
as an undergraduate political science student, I found them to be, perhaps,
the best of a wide selection of important writings on the legal, political
and constitutional foundations of the United States. I am not big on John
Jay, but Madison and Hamilton really impacted me. Just a thought.
Best regards,
Mark A. Price
Policy Analyst, RESB (BC Lands)
Environment, Lands and Parks (MPr...@bclands.crl.gov.bc.ca)
Janet M. Lafler
>He is suggesting we apply to reading what many of us apply
>to the rest of our lives: set some standards and adhere to them,
>look for intrinsic good rather than creating an artificial
>competition, stop making the better the enemy of the good.
Applause, applause.
The longer this debate goes on, the more I'm mystified at why anyone
would want to make a ranked list of "Great Books," with cuts of 10,
50, 100, 1000, etc. Why, why, why? A pool of 1000 I could almost under-
stand, as long as its borders were fluid. But ranked lists strike me
as inevitably subjective and artificial, and I'm tired of seeing sub-
jectivity masquerading as absolutism. Ranked lists reflect a rigidity
which doesn't encourage the formation of absolute values so much as it
discourages criticism, debate and (sorry, folks) diversity.
The central problem seems to me to be this: the List is self-fulfilling.
Books are on the List because they are on the List. Their place on the
List can't be questioned or reevaluated because they are, after all, on
the List. Books are on the List because they are influential. Who do they
influence? Other writers whose works are on the List!
I'm sure I've said this all before.
My objection has little to do with a desire not to make judgements or
a horror of absolutism. I make judgements all the time (about the validity
of the List, for example), and I firmly believe, much as I've been indoc-
trinated into the values of tolerance and relativism, that there are many
things that one *must* be absolute about. I just don't accept the premise
that the List is, by virtue of its existence, beyond criticism, and that
its formation is entirely objective; rather, the opposite.
/Janet
--
Send mail to: ja...@netcom.com
"Haven't you got a trashy novel or two in the house? That's the literature
to send her to sleep." -- Elizabeth Gaskell, _Wives and Daughters_
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
A question one probably needs to ask in making such a list is
what do I want that list to do or show? The problem with the
two lists you provide, at least from my perspective, is that
they seem arbitrary, just "masterworks in the dark," as though
a class should view them sub specie aeternitatis, without
reference to historical contexts or the development of fictional
techniques or traditions. As a clear symptom of this, I would
point to the Murasaki. What relation does it have to the
other novels on the list, other than that it's often thought
to be a "great novel"? No continuous tradition emerges from
it, and it exerted no influence whatever on the other novels
you place on the list.
If I were designing such a course, I would want one novel to
"speak" to the others, so that lines of developmental (formal,
stylistic, thematic) could be traced. _Don Quixote_ would
seem a solid starting point (unless one desired to demonstrate
through a concrete example the older mode of "romance" against
which the novel positions itself). From that beginning I
would probably add something like the following twelve:
2) _Pamela_ & 3) _Joseph Andrews_ (which exemplify the 18th C
divergence of the novel into a "novel of manners" tradition
and a "picqresque" tradition (or if you prefer romantic/
classical or psychological realist/self-reflexive experimental,
etc., the point being the main lines of development through
the next two centuries are here suggested)
4) _Emma_ (my fav. Austen, an Austen being important for
demonstrating new subtleties of psychological representation
and ironic detachment on the narrator's part--though perhaps
I've leapt far too quickly into the 19th C, but it's where
the really good stuff is :-))
5) _Pere Goriot_ & 6) _Bleak House_ (new sociological trends &
movement toward cultural--as opposed to psychological--
analysis, a new "realism" despite the retention of traditional
narrative features, e. g. marriage contract, sub-plot, etc.)
7) _Madame Bovary_ (new objectivism, all modernism already
implicit here: perhaps the most influential novel since
_DQ_)
8) _Anna Karenin_ & 9) _The Brothers Karamozov_ (the major
Russian novels (_War and Peace_ being too long) 'nuff said)
10) I'd then jump back to _Moby-Dick_, taking it out of
chronological order since it was really neglected until
the 1920s but has been since then a major influence because
its "inclusive" & self-reflexive narrative method makes
a bridge between _DQ_ (& lesser epigones such as _Tristram
Shandy_, _Sartor Resartus_) and certain tendencies of
"modernist" and "post-modernist" fiction (and it could
be usefully compared/contrasted w. _TBK_)
Then I'd close out the century by examining 11) _Middlemarch_,
that apotheosis of realism & watershed of psychological
analysis, 12) a Zola novel, maybe _Germinal_, with which to
demonstrate the rise of Naturalism, and 13) _The Portrait of
a Lady_, in which psychology & the analysis of consciousness
displace realistic & naturalistic tendencies & adumbrate
the techniques of early 20th C fiction (Proust, Joyce, Woolf,
Faulkner).
Without boring anyone further: the six English-language novels
I'd probably add for the second list would be: _Robinson Crusoe_,
_Headlong Hall_, _Wuthering Heights_, _The Scarlet Letter_,
_Tess of the d'Ubervilles_ & _Lord Jim_ (1900, still part of
19th C). This, off the top of the head: I might receive criticism
for not including Scott or a Gothic novel, but the trajectory
I would want to trace would not be through Stevenson & Stoker
to Zane Grey & Stephen King, but rather would point toward,
say, Gaddis or Hawkes or DeLillo or McCarthy. Peacock I'd
justify as an early (and almost singular) instance of the
"novel of ideas."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
John Wojdylo
# In article <2i50n3$1...@uniwa.uwa.edu.au# woj...@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (John Wojdylo) writes:
# # Just what consitutes "women's thought"
# # according to you, and why should women be exempt from responsibility for
# # "the current state of things in the western hemisphere"?
# If it's really true that none of the major intellectual themes in our
# culture are due to women's writing, if it's really true that not a
# single woman in the history of the world has ever written a book that
# has had significant influence on subsequent developments, then I think
# it's quite reasonable to say that women are exempt from responsibility
# for whatever is wrong with today's world.
1) "book of influence -> blame" : So, Herman Goering could have blamed
it all on that nasty nasty book by his hero Adolf. If you want to blow
someone's brains out, just pick up the appropriate book, take in its
"message" as your religion, and go right ahead.
2) "no book of influence => no blame" : as if one can only be blamed
for political thought expressed in books, ha! How about political
thought expressed by pouring buckets of shit on condemned inmates in the
Conciergerie in 1794? Did somebody's book give it meaning before or
after the event? And what's this mystical significance we are
finding attributed to books in this newsgroup, why are events "caused"
by books rather than the hands of murderers? And this ridiculous
segregation of women from the class of "human"...? Every book ever written
is as much written about women as men, even books on the anatomy of gonads.
How long have you been out of college, College Boy?
# Credit and blame go together.
I hope you take credit for the sentence that says: "...I think it's quite
reasonable to say that..."
# I don't agree with the premise of the last paragraph, of course, but
# it does seem to be the opinion of many of the compilers of Great Books
# lists.
What's the formula for divining the subtext implied by the "many" compilers of
the Great Books?
# --
# Matthew Austern Never express yourself more clearly
# ma...@physics.berkeley.edu than you think. ---N. Bohr
jw
Keith Morgan
Bernard Bailyn
Keith
--
Keith Morgan
kamo...@mit.edu
Rebecca Leann Smit Crowley
: perhaps the best choice is to make
: what we can of our imperfect societies.
I pay taxes; I observe laws which do not directly violate what
I consider higher moral imperatives. To this extent, I make
do with imperfect societies.
: Yes, but governments are only toppled to clear space for new
: ones. You can't, in the end, factor politics out of your
: equations. Better to deal with it head-on.
I have dealt with politics head-on. I refuse to accept human government
as a good thing. As for the "clearing space for new ones", well,
hope springs eternal.
: I don't really want to get side-tracked by an argument concerning
: Allan Bloom; but can you tell me precisely why you conceive of
: him as an enemy? It seems to me that even if you dislike
: much of what he said, at least you could admire how stubbornly
: he faced so many of the fundamental problems of our society. He
: was one of the great enemies in our time of complacency.
In late 1986/early 1987, a couple of books were published which
did not initially appear to be all that important. One was Hirsch's
_Cultural Literacy_; the other was _Closing of the American Mind_, by
Allan Bloom. A combined review appeared in Newsweek, a review which
seemed to me, as a senior in high school, to peg a lot of what I felt was
lacking in the public school system as I had experienced it (this,
in view of the fact that other discussion on this newsgroups suggest
I had a far above average experience in school): coverage of the classics,
a grounding in the background which informs all literary experience
to one degree or another. I was fascinated. A teacher gave me
the Bloom; I bought Hirsch's book when it showed up in paperback a year
or so later.
I had anticipated, based on the Newsweek review, an emphasis on learning
this stuff so as to understand things which must otherwise be opaque
and incomprehensible (particularly in the case of Hirsch). I then only
had a very vague notion of what I now get from the classics, which is to
say, an idea of how people used to think, and how that mediated what
they could think and do and be. What I got instead was an emphasis on
learning this stuff so it wouldn't be lost, circular logic of the worst
variety, and, in the case of Bloom, what appeared to be a belief that our
contemporary mind is so abominable that the only possible solution
is to stamp it out of existence, and replace it with something better.
To me, it was the voice of a man who did not understand his own
world, and damned it nonetheless. His problems were not my problems,
stubbornly tho he faced them, courageously tho he confronted them.
I was appalled. I'd read this book because I'd thought to find a
kindred spirit. What I'd actually found was another person lacking
either in empathy or in comprehension.
I do not object to classes which teach pop culture -- by which I mean
all popular culture, not just the "bad" -- so long as those classes
are attended by those who do not understand popular culture. Rap for
the over 35 (agism noted, unapologetically; exceptions granted). Classes
about the antecedents of rap -- whether clear and direct, or merely
similar art forms in other times and places -- as a means to segue into
appreciation of other art forms are, imo, a _wonderful_ idea.
In the end, I have an agenda every bit as much as everyone else: I
want everyone to realize and constantly take into consideration
the idea that they might be wrong. That what they think is good
is bad; that the bad might be great -- that the lazy might have
the right idea, and the industrious might be the cause of untold
evil (or vice versa). That Plato may have been an idiot, and
Madonna a virtuoso of the video art form -- and that that art form
is as valid -- or invalid -- as sand raking or sonnet
writing. Most importantly, that this idea, once internalized,
makes it utterly wrong to even think of coercing someone else
to think and believe and act as I do -- persuasion always; compulsion
never. Bloom's _tactic_ of writing a book, I might note, was an act
I have not only no objection to, but, in fact, applaud.
The perspective of a different mind may be found in the classics,
but if you aren't in it right now, it can also be found in the
contemporary world. Wherever found, the practice of gaining it
is valuable as an exercise in empathy, a practical application of
love. You may persist in calling me an individualist, and I
see no reason to object, but I'm one of the most socially involved ones
you're ever likely to encounter -- and my brothers and sisters go back
farther than you imagine.
The bummer being, of course, we never seem to win.
There's a quote in Lysander Spooner's _No Treason_ (after all,
Burns has me pegged as an individualist; might as well supply
him with some serious ammo) I'm unlikely ever to forget about
democracies. Paraphrased, it goes: No honest person would
exchange the certainty of being told what to do, with the possibility
of telling others what to do. Let's just say that resonated when
I read it. And continued vibrating through my center for days.
Considering how short it is, Spooner repeats himself _a lot_.
His sentence structure really isn't what it could be, and it's
the baldest polemic I'd read since, um, the back half of Faludi's
_Backlash_ (made poor McWilliams in _Ain't Nobody's Business if
You Do_ look downright wimpy). But for subversive ideas per page,
it's hard to beat. And every once in a while, CNN has a little news
blip about how the U.S. Post Office decided that FedEx and a few
others were delivering what amounted to first class mail, and
effectively blackmailed them out of a chunk of change, in exchange
for a promise not to prosecute -- this time. Makes you think. Hard.
That makes five book references. I'm working my way around to
being back on topic. Sloooooooooowly. :-)
I _thought_ about mentioning Pericle's speech in Thucydides, and how
we oscillate on overcoming the problem he identified, but decided
against it. That, imo, is a much more serious issue in a
democracy than a lot of the rest of this stuff, because it's a
subtle coercion, hard to identify, hard to get people to back you up on,
and not the sort of think that can be dealt with legally. You and your
strength of character are all that let you do the things your neighbor
frowns upon. Never mind.
--
Rebecca Crowley standard disclaimers apply rcro...@zso.dec.com
Those who speak, don't know; those who know, don't speak.
Matt Austern
> However, in the Great Books series, the following novelists do appear:
> Dostoevsky
> Tolstoy
> Melville
> Fielding
> Swift
> Sterne
...
> The question of whether Austen should replace Tolstoy on the shorter Great
> Books list (as someone here suggested) is an interesting question.
Depends on the criterion, doesn't it? Are we asking for literary
quality, or for influence, or for something else, or for some
combination of several criteria?
I happen to like Tolstoi's best novels better than Austen's (my own
definition of "best" for either of those authors might not be the same
as anyone else's, of course), but I think there's no doubt that Austen
had a great deal more influence on later development of the novel than
Tolstoi had.
Of course, Tolstoi also hasn't really passed the test of time like
Austen has: he didn't even die until the 20th century. Maybe we just
need a little bit more time before we can decide whether or not to
include Tolstoi on our lists.
If we're simply asking for literary quality, I'd happily replace either
Melville or Sterne with Charlotte Bronte.
--
Matthew Austern Never express yourself more clearly
Jim_...@transarc.com
A Study in Scarlet? I always thought Holmes was as his best in the
short stories. The novels (with the possible exception of the Hound)
always seemed to me to be overlong for what they were.
Perhaps I should reread Frankenstein. When I read it many years ago, I
thought it was very overrated.
Let me give a shot at my top 10 (though since this is off the top of
my head, I'm probably forgetting one or two).
Cervantes Don Quixote
Defoe Moll Flanders
Austen Pride and Prejudice
Dickens Bleak House
David Copperfield
Melville Moby Dick
Bronte Jane Eyre
Flaubert Madame Bovary
Twain Huck Finn
Dostoevski The Brother Karamazov
Caveat: I have not read Tolstoy's great novels (I hope to read War and
Peace sometime in the next month or so). Nor have I read Villette, of
which I have heard many good things.
> I realize some of these may seem odd choices (particularly the Carroll
> and Doyle), but their lasting popularity calls for their inclusion
> (IMHO, of course). I would claim that the Doyle, for example, is read
> by more people per year than any of the other books on this list, or on
> most lists of "great novels" that I see, and that this has been true
> for most of the last hundred years. My choices of the specific novels
> for some of these authors is also probably a function of what I have
> read most recently.
I agree with your statements about Doyle. However, as noted above,
when I read (or reread) Doyle, I tend to stick to the short stories.
******************************************************************
Jim Mann jm...@transarc.com
Transarc Corporation
The Gulf Tower, 707 Grant Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
(412) 338-4442
Michel_B...@fc.babylon.montreal.qc.ca
Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick.
Francis Muir
Evelyn Leeper qrites:
Doyle--A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887)
I agree with your statements about Doyle. However, as noted
above, when I read (or reread) Doyle, ...
I don't know how it is in the States, but in England I doubt anyone would
recognize Doyle as Conan Doyle. In other words, we would take Arthur to be
his given name and Conan Doyle his patronymic.
MSMO...@butler.edu
Andrew, I think, asked if anyone really reads Livy today (I
saw this quoted in another article, but I don't think I've seen
the original yet). Anyway, Andrew's point is well enough taken
that some ``classics'' are of more esoteric or academic interest
than others. But, I thought I would note that I actually have
read the 14 or so volumes of Livy extant in the Loeb edition.
Besides underlining Livy's connection to Machiavelli, already noted,
and to the U.S. Founding Fathers (I would say the history
of the Roman republic---meaning Livy and Polybius and
Plutarch and Cicero primarily---was more important to the
Americans than, say, Herodotus or Thucydides), I would like to
say, too, just that Livy is a blast to read.
Livy also gives me one perhaps interesting datum point for testing
the stuff included and excluded from the Britannica set against my
own reading experience. Livy is on the Adler and Van Doren
100-scale list of recommended great books (the one in the back
of _How to Read a Book)_, thus I think it's fair to consider it
as having been on the short list for inclusion in the 50 or so
volumes which made it to the Britannica set. Yet Plutarch's _Lives_
is included in the set, Livy is not. Having read Livy the year before
and now Plutarch this last year, I can say I think that's a good choice.
Plutarch is probably the more influential, and has an eye for distilling
the very best of the best of story. Livy, in comparison, has his
dry spells (i.e. there were times when the Romans just weren't doing much),
and you hit the high points by reading Plutarch anyway. If you like,
I see Livy and Plutarch as very nearly equally worthy reads,
but I see and understand why it is, assuming one has to choose to
read one and not the other, one might give the nod to Plutarch.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
Francis Muir
The longer this debate goes on, the more I'm mystified at why anyone
would want to make a ranked list of "Great Books," with cuts of 10,
50, 100, 1000, etc. Why, why, why?
Simple. Forced ranking is what men do. Greatness is a male notion.
Goofy
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
Dinn) says:
>
>Oh dear, another joke misunderstood. [. . .]
Not at all. My remark was wholly tangential to yours.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Janet M. Lafler
>Mary Shelly, the author of Frankenstein, may well deserve to be on
>that list on her own merits. That book was clearly one of the most
>influential works of the 19th century, in many ways. You could make a
>pretty strong case that the entire genre of science fiction grew out
>of Frankenstein.
_Frankenstein_ is certainly an influential work, but has it influenced
anything *important*, as far as the makers of the Great Books lists are
concerned?
What kind of influence are we talking about here?
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
Leann Smit Crowley") says:
>
>are, as I suspected, not many. However, he seems to have misunderstood
>my motivation for my choice of tactics (personal, rather than
>political; individual, rather than aimed at institutional change).
I wonder, though, whether "tactics" of any sort can avoid being
political, in some sense, even if they aren't directed through
institutions.
>[. . .] My choice not to participate in this political
>scene is not only that: it is a moral choice not to engage
>in what I consider immoral behavior. Most, if not in fact
>all, mechanisms used by governments strike me as inherently
>bad, wreaking subtle havoc, damaging ripples which undermine
>all participants' potential for great moral worth. Good
>behavior got by coercive force is good behavior we can now never
>know might have came from a better source. [. . .]
> (Translation in case that was confusing: I don't involve myself
>in government/politics because I consider them *bad* -- not
>because I don't care, not because I don't think I can accomplish
>anything through them. Think of me as a conscientious objector.)
Hmmm . . . you sound more to me like an anarchist. But if
Aristotle was right in saying that human beings are by their
nature social creatures--a claim the abominable Rousseau
wanted to refute--then perhaps the best choice is to make
what we can of our imperfect societies.
Let me return for a minute to Whitman's analysis of the
American scene, specifically his claim that in a democracy
two forces predominate, a leveling egalitarianism and a
self-reliant individualism. Think of the one as centripetal
(tending toward what Tocqueville called "the tyranny of the
majority" and just bland old homogenization) and the other
as centrifugal. The key, it seems to me, in a democracy
is to keep them in balance. But balance today has been
lost, largely I think because of commercial pressures, and
most people aren't exactly what you'd call self-reliant in
an Emersonian sense. That leaves the real individualists
(among whom you, Rebecca, seem to belong) on the fringes,
feeling powerless to effect change except by going out of
bounds, so to speak. But I feel the real work has to be
getting back to some kind of equillibrium, which means
teaching people to think critically, which also, it just
so happens, means pulling them away from easy, mind-numbing
capitalist pleasures. Thus my quarrel with "pop culture."
>I do not, however, use this as an excuse to throw up my hands
>and fend for myself in some Hobbesian sense. I choose to
>improve my life and the lives of those I encounter, to help
>humanity by helping individuals, rather than by attempting
>via legislation or public service announcements or increased
>law enforcement to _make_ people be better, whether they want
>to or not, whether they have the tools or not. Denigrate
>my approach at the peril of your credibility; entire religions
>have been based on it, with more than a small impact on history.
>Your contention that it is "dangerous on a political level" is
>absolutely the truth, in senses other than the one you likely
>meant: governments which encounter such individuals often take
>a dim view of us heel-draggers getting in the way of mobilizing
>the populace and the resulting personal dangers are real; but
>simultaneously, such an attitude -- if widespread -- can topple
>governments, which is why the hostility in the first place.
Yes, but governments are only toppled to clear space for new
ones. You can't, in the end, factor politics out of your
equations. Better to deal with it head-on.
>But I don't dismiss him out of hand, as that would constitute
>a dangerously stupid instance of failure to know one's enemy.
I don't really want to get side-tracked by an argument concerning
Allan Bloom; but can you tell me precisely why you conceive of
him as an enemy? It seems to me that even if you dislike
much of what he said, at least you could admire how stubbornly
he faced so many of the fundamental problems of our society. He
was one of the great enemies in our time of complacency.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Matt Austern
> Perhaps I should reread Frankenstein. When I read it many years ago, I
> thought it was very overrated.
My own opinion is that Frankenstein isn't written all that well from a
purely technical standpoint. I don't think any of the characters feel
like real people. Worse, they all speak with the same voice. Still,
some of the ideas in the book are interesting.
More to the point, though: whether or not Frankenstein is a very good
book, I don't think there's any denying that it has been a very
influential one. Whether that qualifies it for inclusion on a List is
another matter.
Sanjiva Prasad
| Jim Mann writes:
|
| Evelyn Leeper qrites:
|
| Doyle--A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887)
|
| I agree with your statements about Doyle. However, as noted
| above, when I read (or reread) Doyle, ...
Francis Muir (very politely) writes:
I don't know how it is in the States, but in England I doubt
anyone would recognize Doyle as Conan Doyle. In other words,
we would take Arthur to be his given name and Conan Doyle his
patronymic.
Maybe they meant to refer to "Ruddy" Doyle (the blushing unsuitable
winner of the Booker) --- Ha Ha Ha --- rather than Arthur The Barbarian.
Oh, yes, I'd be interested in any lines on cricket that Walcott, that
Windwordsmith (windwardsworth?), might have spun.
Copingly,
- S.
--
Sanjiva Prasad, Magus E-mail: san...@ecrc.de
European Computer Industry Research Centre Off: +49 89 92 69 91 58
Arabellastrasse 17 Fax: +49 89 92 69 91 70
81925 Muenchen, Germany Res: +49 89 16 33 59
ent...@ritvax.isc.rit.edu
>Okay, now let's start posting lists of great books by women.
>
>Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick
Celestial Navigation and/or Breathing Lessons, Ann Tyler
Erik Timmerman
Andrew Dinn
>
> [deletia]
>
>As I said above, I get the distinct impression we agree on a lot.
>Our disagreement lies somewhere in tactics
Motto of the month, foax :-)
Andrew Dinn
-----------
there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all
Evelyn C. Leeper
> In article <CKA0t...@cbnewsj.cb.att.com>, e...@mtgpfs2.att.com (Evelyn C.
> Leeper) says:
> >You are asked to come up with a list of thirteen (13) novels to be read
> >for a course entitled "The Novel Before the Twentieth Century."
> >
> >the course to be "The English-Language Novel Before the Twentieth
> >Century."
>
> what do I want that list to do or show? The problem with the
> two lists you provide, at least from my perspective, is that
> they seem arbitrary, just "masterworks in the dark," as though
> a class should view them sub specie aeternitatis, without
> reference to historical contexts or the development of fictional
> techniques or traditions. As a clear symptom of this, I would
> point to the Murasaki. What relation does it have to the
> other novels on the list, other than that it's often thought
> to be a "great novel"? No continuous tradition emerges from
> it, and it exerted no influence whatever on the other novels
> you place on the list.
One of the interesting things about this exercise is that it points
out that people make these lists for different reasons, and that
maybe one needs to find out the reason before arguing about what's
on the list.
In my case, the list consisted of novels I thought worth reading and
re-reading, novels that were enjoyable and had some substance to them
(though I admit the (Conan) Doyle to be somewhat lacking in the latter,
at least compared to the other entries), and to represent a wide range
of backgrounds, styles, etc. Hence I include a French novel, a Spanish
novel, a Russian novel, and so on. I might have included a Chinese
novel, but the Murasaki is better known and serves as a reminder that
the novel is not a Western invention (plus it's fun to read).
> If I were designing such a course, I would want one novel to
> "speak" to the others, so that lines of developmental (formal,
> stylistic, thematic) could be traced. _Don Quixote_ would
> seem a solid starting point (unless one desired to demonstrate
> through a concrete example the older mode of "romance" against
> which the novel positions itself).
This is perfectly reasonable also. Maybe my list is closer to a
"desert-island" sort of list. Your course traces the development of
the novel; mine serves as a sampler for the student, who can then go
and read more or whatever s/he likes best. I think both are worthy
goals.
(In response to another comment, yes, (Conan) Doyle's short stories
were better than his novels, but I needed to include a novel. A STUDY
IN SCARLET seemed a better choice than THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES or
VALLEY OF FEAR, given the restriction. Mark (Leeper) asked me, by the
way, why GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is considered a novel and a collection of
Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, is not. Beats me.)
Andrew Dinn
>
> [wise words excised]
>
>My objection has little to do with a desire not to make judgements or
>a horror of absolutism. I make judgements all the time (about the validity
>of the List, for example), and I firmly believe, much as I've been indoc-
>trinated into the values of tolerance and relativism, that there are many
>things that one *must* be absolute about. I just don't accept the premise
>that the List is, by virtue of its existence, beyond criticism, and that
>its formation is entirely objective; rather, the opposite.
I couldn't agree more. I don't understand where the charge of
relativism came from in the first place. The problem with the Great
Books list is not that all things are subjective or relative to
circumstance but that it makes a false claim to objectivity puffing
itself up to be something which it cannot live up to.
Of course, I know it is nothing more than a number of titles chosen
according to some rather vague (but possibly workable) rules. The list
is in itself innocuous, since it is what people do with it that
matters. However, there is a deceit behind this description of
things. The rules and the books which they select come charged with a
significance which it is difficult to resist (given a certain
education) and dangerous not to explicitly question. It paints a
simple picture of a complex issue and I see little virtue and much
danger in that.
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
hobby horses off to different sunsets. I will thus be brief.
First, "Burns" does not frown upon individualism. He even considers
himself something of one. Individualism, esp. in a democracy, is
the great palliative of the majority's tyranny. His only quarrel
with it is when it is used as an excuse for withdrawal from political
responsibility.
Second, suffice it to say I am not terribly impressed with
Rebecca's summary of Bloom's argument in _Closing of the American
Mind_. The circularity enters not in the reason for why we should
read, but rather in how what we have read has made us what we
are. To understand that, Bloom suggests, we should read Plato,
Locke, Heidegger, etc. They have created, to borrow a phrase from
the other Bloom, the master tropes that contain us. One can choose
to know or to evade. But as I said before: I don't want to be
drawn into a tedious polemical argument concerning Bloom's merits
or lack thereof.
So let me ask Rebecca: have you thought of any more Great Books by
women?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Miriam Nadel
It struck me that I don't recall ever seeing a great books list that purported
to rank them within that limited number selected.
I know I've said this previously but it seems worth repeating. I consider
there to be one good reason to read classics. Namely, that books become
classics largely because they've spoken to a large number of people over a
long period of time.
Which is where women's writing becomes a problem as there has historically
been a gap between "things women are interested in" and "things men consider
it worth being interested in." This makes the lists slanted towards things
that were traditionally male interests. So Melville gets named more often
than the Brontes and Dickens more often than Austen and so on. Personally,
I don't find this all that troubling as long as we recognize it and each of
us evaluates how similar our tastes are to the compilers of a given list.
I'd rather read Daniel Defoe than George Eliot, myself, and would resent
any implications that anyone might try to draw about my femininity from that.
Miriam Nadel
MSMO...@delphi.com
Monday, the 31st of January, 1994
Janet Lafler writes:
The longer this debate goes on, the more I'm mystified at why anyone
would want to make a ranked list of "Great Books," with cuts of 10,
50, 100, 1000, etc. Why, why, why?
Can't think of a single good reason myself. Of course,
when they make me education tsar, I'm likely to just
design a curriculum around a fluid list of 1000 books,
and we'll see how many persons even get through half the reading.
Janet continues:
A pool of 1000 I could almost under-
stand, as long as its borders were fluid.
at any level are fluid.
Janet:
But ranked lists strike me
as inevitably subjective and artificial, and I'm tired of seeing sub-
jectivity masquerading as absolutism. Ranked lists reflect a rigidity
which doesn't encourage the formation of absolute values so much as it
discourages criticism, debate and (sorry, folks) diversity.
for diversity. Do you call ``ranked lists strike me as inevitably
subjective...'' ``criticism'' or ``debate'', Janet? In my
opnion, you are simply stuck in some never-never land of
dichotomy. For instance, whose lists of 50 or 100 books
can be accurately described as ``rigid'' or ``non-fluid''?
Mine? Adler's?
Janet:
The central problem seems to me to be this: the List is self-fulfilling.
Books are on the List because they are on the List. Their place on the
List can't be questioned or reevaluated because they are, after all, on
the List. Books are on the List because they are influential. Who do they
influence? Other writers whose works are on the List!
I'm sure I've said this all before.
Is the list self-fulfilling? How would we know if it is or not?
Does inclusion merely measure ``influence'', as you imply? Is
influence ``mere'', as you also seem to imply? Or could it
be that writers are influenced by works on the list for an
objective reason?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@ovid.butler.edu)
Bill Riggs
herein:
In article <2i9rca$m...@usenet.pa.dec.com> rcro...@zso.dec.com writes:
>Mike very politely pointed out that when I said:
>
>: Paying attention to the classics, particularly with a view to
>: *not* repeating their errors ...Paying attention to the classics
>: with a view to recreating a non-existent yet idyllic past ...
>
>I was offering a very limited -- an unfairly limited, unfairly
>limiting to me as a reader -- range of choices.
No need to apologize. We can't always score home runs all the
time. Choice is a limiting, not a delimiting, concept anyway.
Note: This distinction is less than easily apparent. See Webster's
Ninth;
limit n 7. something that is exasperating or intolerable
Some will consider this hairsplitting to be excessive. They
may be right.
>
>Specifically,
>
>MSMO...@Butler.EDU wrote:
>
>: And as a reader you would thereby seem to be closing your mind to the
>: otherwise open possibility that the classics---the Bible, say,
>: or Plato, or Aristotle---may not be so much repositories of
>: errors to be avoided as strictly and exactly true.
If Harold Bloom were right that the "Book of J" was written by
a women, would we care ? SHOULD we care ?
On another, related, matter, isn't it about time that Mike Morris
took a public position on whether Plato really wrote _Timaeus_ - and not some
Hellenistic copycat ? Or has this already been discussed ?
The point being that if we are willing to give myth-making a seat at the
table with the rest of the Great Books, the hand of those who wish to weigh
anchor and cast off from the past (I'm still working on _The Other Heading_,
by "You-know-who") is strengthened. This is apparently not Rebecca's agenda
(Her disclaimers are faithfully quoted below). But, we are not islands in
the cosmos. either. We live in a world where political hacks say things as
ridiculous as "75% of American slaveholders were Jews". In comparison to the
outright lies being told every day in the mass media, tales of Eden and Atlantis
look downright credible, don't they ?
In such a situation, we couldn't possibly understand Plato to be
pulling our leg, even IF that were the "Original Intent". So much for the
dialogue between the Ages. (I'm in a really cynical mood, aren't I ?)
>: That is,
>: it may be not a non-existent past one would be looking
>: to re-create, but a perfectly existent one. Not some societal
>: utopia which I perfectly well agree has never existed, that is, but a
>: level of exercise of *mind* that very well could be (could have been
>: and could be again) the actual case.
To the _Timaeus_ (while we're on the subject):
How did the P-man get from a summary of the _Republic_ to
tales told by Egyptians to Solon, and down through the Athenian
geriocracy ? The standard argument that this was a realization of the
"noble lies" needed to hold the republic together, reinforced by the
P-man's failures in Sicily, is somehow unsatisfactory. And the thought
that somehow, right in the middle of Zeus's speech in the _Critias_, the
P-man got a thunderbolt of a thought, something to the effect that, "You know,
this is a really stupid dialogue, I think I'll start over again and write
the _Laws_." - can we believe this, either ?
The explanation is only TOO obvious:
We Christians did it. We edited out Zeus's speech, and the remainder
of the _Critias_, some time in the early Dark Ages. We also doctored up the rest
of the _Timaeus_ and the _Critias_ to mock the gnostics. Even the Rosicrucians,
the Masons, and the Templars never found out about this. :)
>
>: I think we can really close off our minds to reading these
>: works if we don't at least wrestle with this possibility, that there
>: is something to Plato, say, which---perhaps miraculously?---
>: transcends Plato's society, geographical location, historical time, race,
>: sex, class, etc. and speaks across all of these supposedly insuperable
>: gulfs to the reader, one extraordinary human mind to another.
>
>Which I had to read several times in order to have any confidence
>I'd properly understood him, which is why I am so rudely quoting
>so much of the article. (And for all I know, I still got it wrong.)
Rebecca does a good job in rebutting Mystical Mike. Something
smells like synchronicity in this thread. I just wonder how "original"
my own "noble lies" really are. Did the Demiurge make me do it ?
Bottom Line: There are few items more embarrassing in Western Culture
that the _Timaeus/Critias_ dialogues.
>
>A variety of polemics present in the political climate today
>are variations on routines that have been playing for thousands
>of years, yet most of the participants behave as if they are saying
>something new. This irritates me -- I say they lack historical
>perspective. I *know* my positions on these things have all been
>done before -- that's how I came to hold some, and others have
>been brought to my attention when I attempted to articulate them
>and got pointed at a better explanation.
>
>One of the _many_ valuable things I get from reading the classics
>is this awareness that I Am Not Alone -- that others who believed
>and thought the way I do have been around a long time, having
>roughly the same disagreements with people who believed and
>thought other ways. I consider this one tiny aspect of historical
>perspective.
All very good.
>
>In thinking about this idea (and I'm sure someone will point me
>at a philosopher of history who says it much better than me,
>and I look forward to reading that when I'm told what it is),
>I have tried to delineate to my own satisfaction what, exactly
>I mean by this "historical perspective" and what I think the
>classics offer which contemporary culture cannot (or can only
>do with difficulty). One variant of learning from history has
>us examining the errors of the past and not repeating them. Another
>has us turn to the past for similar situations, in search of
>solutions which can be applied to our own problems. Both -- very
>similar to the formulation I gave above which Mike rightly
>found limited and objectionable -- study the past with the
>mind of the present.
>
>They are horribly shallow, and while they may lead to intelligent
>decisions, they rarely lead to an understanding of the whys and
>wherefores, they do not bring wisdom, more importantly, they
>do not give perspective.
>
>What I have come to conclude is the best I am currently able
>to get from reading the classics (I fully anticipate this is
>still an immature stage -- I'm young yet) is not to study
>the past with the mind of the present, with its problems and
>assumptions in mind, but to study the past with the intention
>of studying the past, and the minds which characterized it,
>the beliefs in its foundations, and the paths of assumptions
>which made it traversible.
The S-Man couldn't have said it better. Nor the late great
Alan Bloom.
Continuing the irreverance, a quote from Rush Limbaugh:
"We are winning." :)
>
>It is this, I think, that Mike is talking about (if not, I
>hope he will correct me):
>
>: to re-create, but a perfectly existent one. Not some societal
>: utopia which I perfectly well agree has never existed, that is, but a
>: level of exercise of *mind* that very well could be (could have been
>: and could be again) the actual case.
>
>Do this, connecting across all the
>
>: gulfs to the reader, one extraordinary human mind to another.
>
>across time and space and universe of belief, gives us another
>mind, a new mind, most importantly a *different* mind, with
>which to think of the present. A historical perspective.
>
>A lot of what Allan Burns has posted has this implicit in it,
>particularly when he talks about the great books as containing
>ideals outside our current commercialized, democratized, very,
>very leveled world. I do not in any way disagree with it.
>My dispute is with tactics, artificially restricted selections
>of texts, and the emphasis on "quality" of the ancients,
>compared to the always shoddy goods of the present. When the
>world has turned enough for minds to be difficult to recognize,
>our shoddy, mass-market culture will have been sieved for
>a few representatives, so there's little point in slamming
>the current fun stuff because it isn't "great". Nor need we
>spend all our time getting to know strangers; there's something
>to be said for knowing others like ourselves, as well.
Two points in closing:
1. The folks who invented deconstructionism probably never
realized - until it was too late - that this was a weapon
that could be turned against THEM. too. But now, the very best
deconstructionists are bourgeois conservatives, employing
deconstructionist tactics to preserve the remnants of the past.
A lean and mean "rear guard" that has been kicking the hell
out of the avant-garde, lately. My tongue-in-cheek quotation
of Mr. Limbaugh was meant as a warning, as well as typically
gauche masculine cackling. What is really puzzling to
poor old middle-aged me, is how those bruised up veterans
of the avant-garde are managing their reconcilation with the
past. (They are on MY turf, now.)
2. On a "lighter" note: If the left wing ends up abandoning the
future for the past, will the right wing capture the future ?
This may be a light matter in America, where Heinlein and Pournelle
are already established among the ranks of sci-fi writers, and
"Star Wars" have merely entered a gestation phase. But what of
Zhirinovksy's map, where the Russians make a deal with Gross
Deutschland, Austria for the Ukraine, Prussia (East AND West) for the
Baltics, Czechoslovakia for Belarus ? Twill be a black day
in Europe of the avant-garde doesn't get off its ass and do some
rear guardmanship with Maggie and me.
The real question is whether we like our neighbors enough not
to hide in the past - or the future - from them. I shan't accuse Rebecca or
Mike of such escapism. They are both good Internet citizens. But you can bet
that there is a lot of that stuff going around nowadays. Sometimes a close
acquaintance with an Athenian Stranger is a lot more rewarding than the other
available options.
At first, I was going to use one of my soft-core .sigs, but this supports
the ending better.
Bill R.
--
"When up a dangerous faction starts, "My opinions do not represent
With wrath and vengeance in their hearts; those of my employer or
By solemn League and Cov'nant bound, any government agency."
To ruin, slaughter, and confound; - Bill Riggs (1994)
To turn religion to a fable,
And turn the Government to a Babel;
Pervert the law, disgrace the gown,
Corrupt the senate, rob the crown;
To sacrifice old England's glory,
And make her infamous in story.
When such a tempest shook the land,
How could unguarded virtue stand ?"
- Jonathan Swift (1732)