#33843
06/27/2001 1:41 PM
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what’s to go in it?
If you had to reduce a required reading list of literature to exactly 10 authors whose work was in English (any world variety), whom would you choose?
This question was sparked by Avy’s comments about a global conversation, with some thoughts rattling round my brainpan that I would be interested to compare with others’.
My list might be this, for example:
Geoffrey Chaucer
John Donne
William Shakespeare
Sam Coleridge
Oscar Wilde
Thomas Hardy
TS Eliot
George Orwell
Arthur Miller
Dylan Thomas
Some of the above names have to have an almost totemic function – perhaps you might prefer Jane Austen in the discursive novel slot in which I have put Thomas Hardy?
This is not my ‘list of favourites’ – it hurts to miss out all kinds of names, from Keats to Frost, from O. Henry to John Steinbeck, from Swift and Fielding to Austen and Brontë. Rather, it’s a list of those crucial authors without whose work I could not have my current understanding of the language I know and love.
Please take at least a few minutes’ reflection time if you want to join this game, because I am asking a very specific question:
Which 10 authors should be representative of the canon of English literature, consistent with your formative experience?
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#33844
06/27/2001 2:29 PM
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Maverick: It seems to me inevitable that if everybody picks their ten, chaos necessarily will result, no two lists would be the same.. How about modifying the selection process to all of us agreeing on number one, then debating who should be number two, and so on. For instance, we might all agree to make Shakespeare number one, but who would be as overwhelmingly number two?
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#33845
06/27/2001 2:42 PM
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On the assumption (not unwarranted, I think) that this list is supposed to be personal and not, as some may believe, a must read list for the serious student of the English language, I would have to include Walt Kelly in any list of formative influences of my experience with the language. I would probably not include Willy Shaksper.
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#33846
06/27/2001 4:26 PM
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Well Dr Bill, I guess I was actually looking for a whole range of answers, so bring on the chaos if you want!
And Faldage, yes, I think you have my intention pretty closely, although I might try and shape it as a combination - sort of 'the must read list as viewed from your experience', which as Bill says will likely vary.
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#33847
06/27/2001 4:35 PM
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Which 10 authors should be representative of the canon of English literature, consistent with your formative experience?
Sweet mav, your words formative experience sent my mind back to school. I'd have to say Chaucer--he was the first.
Also S.T. Coleridge, for Kubla Khan if nothing else. William Blake. Shirley Jackson--in junior high school, I had never, ever come across anything like "The Lottery"--it shook me to the core. Arthur Miller. Mary Shelley--nothing like Dr. Frankenstein had ever appeared, either, I don't think. Beatrix Potter, who showed the way to what good children's literature could be. Charles Dickens.
Robert Frost. T.H. White, for The Once and Future King:
that description of the "duel" between those two inept knights nearly got me tossed out of the library for laughing!
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#33848
06/27/2001 4:36 PM
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Dear Faldage: I should be most interested to hear your reasons for not including Shakespeare. I cannot think of anyone who so demonstrably influenced our vocabulary.
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#33849
06/27/2001 5:09 PM
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addict
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I'm somewhat hesitant to post my list, as I imagine some of the entries will be met with a fair bit of derision, but I want to answer Mav's question (as I understand it) honestly. These are not the best authors I have ever read, but they are the ones whose work has influenced me and my understanding of the language the most. Keep in mind that I am among the younger Board members, and I went to a high school (and colleges) that largely frowned upon reading only "the canon." In no particular order:
William Shakespeare
Arthur Miller
Ray Bradbury
Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel)
Emily Dickinson
John Steinbeck
J. D. Salinger
Stephen King
Toni Morrison
Douglas Coupland
Near misses include Twain, Frost, Asimov, Shirley Jackson, and Philip K. Dick.
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#33850
06/27/2001 5:27 PM
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It seems to me that many of the choices reflect the tastes of the contributors, with little clues as to the reasons for putting them on a required list, which it seems to me to demand intellectual merits, not entertainment merits.
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#33851
06/27/2001 9:21 PM
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Well, I've been wrackin' me brain about this, and I'm still not quite sure, but here's my list:
William Shakespeare
John Donne
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Jane Austen
Walt Whitman
James Joyce
John Steinbeck
Ayn Rand
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#33852
06/28/2001 2:53 AM
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Separating the objective from the subjective on lists like this is always a chore...I've been on the Top 100 music lists discussion boards at VH1 for quite some time, and I've learned that 1. you always leave somebody out; 2. you can never quite detach yourself from your passion no matter how fair-minded you're striving to be; and 3. there is NEVER a general consensus! All that being said, here are my author picks: Walt Whitman and Eugene O'Neill (well, of course!...who else?)  H.G. Wells Ray Bradbury Edgar Allan Poe Joseph Conrad Ralph Waldo Emerson Robert Frost Dylan Thomas tie: Alistair MacLean - James Thurber - Ogden Nash (Major runners-up: Jack London, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Steinbeck, William Shakespeare, Robert A. Heinlein)...Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov and others were translated into English and so miss the criterion. (honorable mentions a must!: Pearl S. Buck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tennessee Williams, William Blake, Woody Allen, E.B. White (for "Charlotte's Web"), William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, Mark Twain, Ernie Pyle, John Keats, and Delmore Schwartz) And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the lyrics of many singer/songwriter/poets including Harry Chapin, Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Jonathan Edwards, Bernie Taupin (w Elton John), Carole King, Dan Fogelberg, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Guy Clark, two guys named Lennon and McCartney, and, of course, Bob Dylan) And, now, I'l release this, stand back and take a look, remember important names I've missed, hone it down to a truer Top Ten, and then post a revision...it's a never-ending process...  
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#33853
06/28/2001 5:38 AM
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Dr. Bill - I'm *sure I am way out of line here, however, methinks that language and vocabulary are at odds with each other... even in this context (whatever that is?). (more than happy to admit I don't understand the "quest"-e)
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#33854
06/28/2001 7:58 AM
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>It seems to me that many of the choices reflect the tastes of the contributors, with little clues as to the
reasons
I agree - it would be more interesting to know why but maybe tedious to write the reasons?
(working-on-my-list e)
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#33855
06/28/2001 12:01 PM
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1. you always leave somebody out...Good point - I have left out Daedalus himself, so I would probably have to sub one of my original *team. Musick, all I was trying to get at was how far there was communality and division amongst our views of the most important literature written in English - 'the canon', so called. I was also half expecting more than one voice to question the very notion of a canon...
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#33856
06/28/2001 1:44 PM
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Dear musick: " I f you had to reduce a required reading list of literature" A required reading list obviously ought be chosen for educational value. It seems to me that many of the choices were based mostly on entertainment value. Without meaning to offend the member who chose it, but imagine requiring the reading of Dr.Seuss' entertaining but hardly educational works.
And it does seem to me that we have a chaotic set of selections with no easy way to compare their relative merits and agree on the best one.
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#33857
06/28/2001 3:08 PM
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Dear maverick: Please don't hate me, but I feel strongly that we will never settle on one list of ten books. And from the educational standpoint, a much more appropriate list might be selections from a hundred authors. I have a private joke about the Harvard seal: VE on one book,RI on a book beside it, and TAS on a book below, which to me suggests that the whole of truth can be contained in three books - an obvious fallacy.
For instance, nobody mentioned the Bible.But even those of other religions might profitably read the Ten Commandments and The Golden Rule. And anyone studying English ought at least read excerpts from Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, and many other important authors.
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#33858
06/28/2001 3:21 PM
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mav (et al),
I nearly jumped into this one with both feet, but then took note of your plea for "reflection time". and then, the more I reflected (and saw other's responses), the more I thought that I wasn't getting at the "formative experience" part of the question. furthermore, in reading the proferred lists, I had to ask myself "was this really the sort of stuff I read during my formative years?" (which I take to mean those writers and that work that profoundly influenced my use and abuse of language today)
so my list (there's no way that I could do "ten") would include a whole bunch of science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury... later to include Tolkien and other fantasy) and adventure (Jack London, Twain) and Civil War (Bruce Catton) and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Salinger, Kesey, Heller and Vonnegut, and so on; until by the time I got to Shakespeare and James Joyce and Gene Wolfe and all my other latter-day saints, I was probably beyond being saved.
oh, and I almost forgot the Usual Gang of Idiots (®Mad).
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#33859
06/28/2001 4:22 PM
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tsuwm > "was this really the sort of stuff I read during my formative years?" (which I take to mean those writers and that work that profoundly influenced my use and abuse of language today)
These are the books, more or less in order my Father chose from his library when I asked for grown up books. I was about 10-year-old.
Conan Doyle's "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" unabridged.
1. The short stories of Guy de Maupassant.
2. Agatha Christie "Ten Little Indians" (I remember reading that during summer)
3. "Les Miserables"
Those books were wedged between school and all the reading required by the Good Sisters.which included poets Wordsworth, Longfellow, Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" and "MacBeth" The Old and New Testaments, et al)
Then about age 14 (1943) a leap into a lot of the war-experience books prevalent at the time : authors I cannot recall
4. "My Three Interview with Hitler"
5. "Guadalcanal Diary"
6. Rickenbacher's survival story "200 (?) Days On A Raft" number of days may be wrong. I'm sure 7 and 8 too were war stories.
9. "Madame Bovary (at about age 16 ... a lesson in morality???)
10. The sonnets of Shakespeare and Lord Byron's poems ....
And I was off and running!
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#33860
06/28/2001 11:38 PM
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Tolkien Ah, yes...Tolkien! Forgive me for forgetting, J.R.R.! (well, back to the ol' drawing board!)  And, here, I've been beseeching children all year to please read the book(s) [The Hobbit and The Trilogy] before you see the movie, because after that your imagination won't belong to you anymore. But after 20 years of music videos I'm afraid I'm meeting with mostly blank stares and that "Aw, I'm just gonna see the movie" gleam in their eyes. [sigh emoticon] The power of the visual has become extreme. (Yeah, as I sit looking a a web page screen!...but it's a linguistic site, so that makes it verbal, right?) Frodo lives!
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#33861
06/29/2001 12:02 AM
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I was lucky that a college acquaintance who owned a bookstore suggested the Hobbit to me.I read to my kids starting perhaps about 1960. I have no way to fix date. My second daughter drew a picture of one of the characters and sent it to Tolkien, who autographed it and sent it back.It was a wonderful reading experience for my kids, and made them more eager to read other books.
But I would never call Tolkien required reading. That was the original topic, let us not forget.
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#33862
06/29/2001 3:30 PM
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Oh! Oh! how could I have forgotten ... a.a.milne and the Pooh books and all the lovely poems.
I still dip into my childhood copy, now and then ... in fact ....if you'll excuse me ...
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#33863
06/29/2001 10:31 PM
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enthusiast
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This is not my ‘list of favourites’.... Rather, it’s a list of those crucial authors without whose work I could not have my current understanding of the language I know and love.
Please take at least a few minutes’ reflection time if you want to join this game, because I am asking a very specific question:
Which 10 authors should be representative of the canon of English literature, consistent with your formative experience?
Guided by the parameters established and my understanding of them I hereby submit my list.
Shakespeare
Austen
Keats
Woolf
Joyce
Dickens
Byron
Shelley
Charlotte Bronte
W. H. Auden
chronist
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#33864
06/29/2001 11:41 PM
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I dunno about "crucial", but "formative"? Hmmm. I lived in a most unusual house with an unusual selection of books. Here are the ones I remember. We'll see if there are ten:
Golding
de Sade
Austen
Heyer
Shakespeare
RL Stevenson
Steinbeck
Schiller
Bronte
Maclean
and many more.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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#33865
06/30/2001 12:55 AM
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canon...consistent with your formative experience
I'm wondering...could there be a bit of the oxymoronic slipping into this? Doesn't canon necessarily negate (or at least stifle) the flexibility, cirumstance, and exploration of the formative experience? Doesn't canonization imply a certain rigidty impossible to achieve within the throes of your formative experience? For instance, I read Shakespeare in school, but I didn't really discover Shakespeare until my 20's. And while I firmly believe his work belongs in the canon of the English language, I can't in good conscience relegate him to my formative experience. However, a personal canon of authors who represent an individual's hallowed halls of English literary influences and shapers is a worthy, attainable, and interesting endeavor. But to reach some sort of consensus through individuation seems to me a noble but unreachable task. Perhaps, mav, it's the choice of wording?...perhaps you're close, but not quite, in what you're looking for here?
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#33866
06/30/2001 2:14 AM
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I think by lifting the formative list to canonical heights we drop a lot of personal choices and end up with a list that contains not many surprises (in my case none).
I think that is what Mav wanted - it makes it easier to consolidate the different lists into one.
Lewis Carrol
Harper Lee
Jane Austen
Somerset Maugham
Emily Bronte
Dickinson
Yeats
Wilde
Shakespeare
(Chronological order)
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#33867
06/30/2001 4:39 AM
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mav, you got a lot of protests on this one but I for one thank you for bringing it up. It's making me think in a way I've never thought before [watch out, world  ] I'll come back with my list after a weekend of reflection. I *do know, from the way you stated your canonical question, that Lewis Carroll would have to be among the top ten - he showed me how to play with language, and that it was OK to do so, once you got the rules down.
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#33868
06/30/2001 12:51 PM
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And like Cato ending each speech with "Cathargo delenda est" I reiterate: None of the lists seem to fit Maverick's request for REQUIRED reading lists. They are all choices of favorites few of which should be required reading.
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#33869
06/30/2001 1:28 PM
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but I'm with Whitman. I see a dichotomy between a required canon and formative experience. unless we're supposed to be talking about the ideal formative experience, all we can do is describe our experience.
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#33870
06/30/2001 2:04 PM
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And poor maverick doesn't know what "required" means.
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#33871
06/30/2001 3:01 PM
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I'm sure that we all understand that "canon" means a sanctioned or accepted, most solemn and unvarying, authoritative, accepted by and as rule, list of The Works of Great Literature, but. what I (for example) actually read to get here is something else entirely. <shrug>
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#33872
06/30/2001 3:31 PM
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tsuwm > what I (for example) actually read to get here is something else entirely.
Oh so true, tsuwm ... This task is impossible for me at any rate ...
After a day and a half's thinking I have books and authors swirling through my dreams, asking why and *how I could have forgotten them. --St. Theresa of Avila and St. John were very annoyed about my forgetting "The Seven Mansions Of The Soul" then along came Paramahansa Yogananda (sp?)smiling regretfully that I'd neglected to mention his writings which gave me a new perspective.
Somerset Maugham and Oscar Wilde were quite miffed ... the The Brontes were forgiving in a po faced way. Then Lewis Carroll invited me to tea to discuss my list but I was dragged away by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet (which seemed promising) until Pearl Buck showed up with Robert Service in tow and I was only starting that conversation when Damon Runyon dropped in only to be run off by Will Shakespeare and Lord Byron (me-o-my but George Gordon was handsome) who had to give way to Winston C's booming query as to why he hadn't gotten a mention ......
Help me somebody!
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#33873
06/30/2001 4:57 PM
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May I then claim to be the only person on the board who knows what "required" means?
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#33874
06/30/2001 5:43 PM
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since that's so obviously a rhetorical question, let me ask another of you, bill. [take it to a separate thread if you like] what did *you read that added to *your formative experience (however you define that)?
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#33875
06/30/2001 6:11 PM
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May I then claim to be the only person on the board who knows what "required" means?Of course we know what required means, but required and personal invariably conflict. It's against human nature to conform to all standards. Rules are made to be broken. But if we want authors that would be absolutely required, I need only to delve into my last two years of high school English (American Lit. and British Lit.) and decide on the 10 that were considered the most fundamentally important for the formation of a proper English education. Here's probably the most likely list and their most important works: Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, sonnets) Donne (Holy Sonnet 10, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Meditation 17) Coleridge (Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner) Shelley (Frankenstein) Poe (The Raven, other creepy stories) Conrad (Heart of Darkness) Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath) Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984) Miller (The Crucible) And we probably still won't agree.
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#33876
06/30/2001 6:15 PM
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He asked for a list of required reading not based on reviews in the New York Times Review of Books or the opinions of your secondary school English teacher or your college professors or what you feel you *should have read had you but followed the proper educationally correct regimen but based on *your reading.
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#33877
06/30/2001 6:22 PM
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why do I feel like (suddenly) we're speaking about four different languages here?
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#33878
06/30/2001 6:24 PM
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In college, many courses had required reading. A list would be handed out, and posted in Widener Reading Room.
You did not have a prayer of passing the exam if you did not read those books or articles before indulging in the luxury of reading other things that seemed likely to be valuable to helping you become "well rounded" and intellectually developed.There was no time for pleasurable browsing.
The miserable thing was that some bastards would get to the only available copies and hide them so the rest of us could not find them until they were through with them, and even then they did not always put them back in the proper place.And the profs would not even punch your TS card.
This is why I have such bitter recollections of required reading lists.
And any list of ten books is a obscenity Procrustean bed.
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#33879
06/30/2001 7:53 PM
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Whoa, whoa, people. Dr. Bill, you obviously had a nightmarish time that involved required reading--no wonder the idea makes you bristle! I don't suppose the professors could be bothered to make sure that there were enough copies of a particular book to go 'round, before they assigned it. Tsuwm, you are right: there are different struggles going on here, and not all are necessary. The most obviously unnecessary one is arguing over what maverick meant. We really might benefit from waiting until he can explain for himself, if he chooses. We seem to have gotten on to a track that thinks a 'canon' = 'required'. I am not sure that is the case. Perhaps it might have been more along what this section from Atomica says: "A group of literary works that are generally accepted as representing a field: “the durable canon of American short fiction” (William Styron)." But I don't know. There is also the lack of consensus on what we weregiven to read, vs. what we think we should have beengiven to read. Any list of these, as was said in the beginning, is probably never going to be agreed on. So can we please agree to disagree without getting ugly about it? I find it fascinating, first to know what others were given, and even more, what made the most impact on them. There is also the question of: what had the most impact on us personally, vs. are we trying to make up a list that we think others should be given, to make sure they get the best experience we think they can have? Again, I think we're going to have to wait and see if maverick will enlighten us as to which he was looking for. Anna, I agree that this thread has made me think in ways I haven't before, and I love your point about Carroll.
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#33880
06/30/2001 10:12 PM
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Joined: Mar 2001
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I love the premise of this thread, and thank mav muchly for intitiating it! I wasn't contesting mav's proposal in my "oxymoronic" post, as much as thinking through it out loud... Because this has caused me to call into question the honesty of my original picks, and to take a hard look at their import, impact, and chronology in my life in a more justified and fair-minded manner. I encourage the longevity of this thread!! And I am working on a revamped top-ten list in light of my new self-pespective/appraisal, and will repost it when when comfortable with it after some extra thought (but just ten, I promise!), and perhaps with some short explanantion for the changes. But I agree that it might be interesting to hear mav's reaction if he chooses...but, if not, I will continue to preen my list for future posting. Ironically, (what's that irony emoticon, tsuwm?) I reacted to what I perceived to be a roadblock being thrown up by Dr. Bill with his required implication...because I was looking forward to this thread's survival and lists from folks who haven't yet chimed in! I'll finish with a for all!
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#33881
06/30/2001 10:39 PM
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
The central mission of this Board is to learn words and how to use them.
It seems to me that the most important word in Mav's original post has been ignored.
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#33882
07/01/2001 2:26 AM
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
If Mav wanted us to come up with lists of authors who should be required to be read by all children, then he's doomed to disappointment as far as I'm concerned. However, if it was what we found formative, then my list in the previous post stands, if only because if I fiddled with it I'd be like Wow - torn between umpteen different authors. Bill, we know what required means, I think. We just don't find it a valid term in this discussion.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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