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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 275 |
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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Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Joined: Jun 2000
Posts: 724
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jun 2000
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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And poor maverick doesn't know what "required" means.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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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Carpal Tunnel
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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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