Is there a literary canon of books everyone who considers himself educated or maybe civilized should read? I mean, everyone reads Pookie and the Moonlight Vularoo, but what about the stuff teachers put on assigned reading lists?
D.G. Myers talks about personal Best Of lists here, saying the idea of books everyone should read is a quaint throwback to the 20th century. “If literature is no longer a part of every civilized American’s cultural inheritance, you can thank your English teachers, who gladly coughed up their authority over it,” he writes.
Myers also culls together a list of top authors according to how much has been written about them by scholars. Henry James and William Faulkner top the list.
I think a better title question is “Should there be a list of books everyone who considers himself educated or maybe civilized should read?”
This gets at the heart of the canon wars that took place in academia in the 1980s, which is the question of “who gets to define that list?”
Because the canon used to purport to be an encompassing of That Which Is Right And Good, but as the advocates for diversity argued, That Which Is Right and Good often translated to That Which Fits the Perspective of Those in Power, and wasn’t actually tied to Truth, but to a particular perspective.
The downside of this reasoning is the unfortunate (and all too common, to my opinion) conclusion that “there is no truth,” a fallacy that forgets the physical reality of the world around us, and the role of enlightenment thinking in modern ethics.
(As to the prominence of Literature in school children’s lives, my wife the English teacher laments that she isn’t allowed to teach whole novels because she must spend so much time teaching kids to take the ACT and ISAT.)
For myself, a matrix of important books would work much better as a canon than a single list. By having an heterogeneous yet interconnected network of works considered important for a variety of reasons, and encouraging students to engage with a diverse selection of those, we can cultivate a critical and thoughtful perspective while avoiding the problems a narrowly defined canon presents.
But wouldn’t a matrix be a list essentially? Are you saying authors would be recommended instead of their specific works? That would lead, I’d think, the occasional poor selection (either the obtuse work or the underdeveloped work that the student shouldn’t be struggling through).
Still, you have a good point on the lists being bound by a privileged perspective. We had that recent post about New Yorkers dominating the book review channels. But I think the perspective criticism is mostly reactionary though, don’t you? They are criticizing the groupthink that may have contributed to a literary canon by a reactionary groupthink that decries anything they say smells of tradition or moral decency as the perspective of the powerful.
Back in the eighties I was a college dropout who decided to become educated on his own. Toward that end I found a list of the top Oxford World Classics and began reading through that list. I loved Dicken’s ability to develop characters and the insight he displayed into the human persona. I grew weary of Victor Hugo’s manipulation of my emotions and found Moby Dick rather cumbersome, wondering how it made it onto the list. Overall though, it was an enjoyable journey. Unfortunately, I no longer have the list.
Here’s a massive list, 739 titles, from Oxford University Press.
I should add that I eventually did earn a BS when I was 40 and and MDiv at 44. However, I consider that process as credentialing more than education.
Over the years I went through many phases in my reading. After reading about half of the Dickens canon I discovered Alexsandr Solzenhitzn and read everything but his Red Wheel trilogy. I started August 1914 half a dozen times but bogged down and abandoned it every time. Then I moved into the British spy novels by John LeCarre and Len Deighton. From there I found light fluff escapism in Louis L’Mour westerns. Somewhere along the line I mixed in a most everything by Leon Uris, James Herriot, Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde and John Grisham. I still try to mix in some classics. After two years of stopping for thoughtful contemplation every few pages I’m down to the last ten pages of Augustine’s Confessions.
Since I tend to put on a few hundred miles a week, much of my current reading is actually books on tape I listen to in the car. I checked out Phantom of the Opera from the library yesterday. I also fill my mp3 player full of Librivox.org audiobooks to play while driving around through the car’s radio via a cassette adapter, currently a bunch of George MacDonald novels. In my wife’s van we are in the middle of the Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers, using that to fill our 45 minute drive into town for Homeschool Coop every Monday.
Getting back to the book list idea, our homeschool uses Sonlight curriculum in part because it is literature based. Their reading lists have exposed my kids to a wide range of books from world history such as an adaptation of the stories of 1,000 nights to modern missionary biographies to virtually every Newberry medal winner of the past 90 years.
I think everyone’s forgetting the important point here:
Why is this “list of top authors” (so-called) limited to American authors? Yeah, there’s some good writers–but American literature is only a few hundred years old, for the most part.
Any list that categorically disqualifies Dickens, Doestoevski, Chaucer, Voltaire, Virgil, Dante, &c. seems pretty darn suspect.
Well, the original question the three men answered for the fun of it was to pick ten American novels they most wished they had written. I don’t understand why Lolita was chosen unless it occurs in America or is uniquely American in nature (which would br my guess) because Nabokov was Russian.
But to your point, I think we usually choose American novels because we’re American, don’t you?