From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Some Canonical Lists
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 21:23:46 GMT


                                  Saturday, the 15th of August, 1992

Part 1 of 5

Terrance Heath suggested maybe we should look at some canonical
lists, and since I thought it'd be fun to do so, I've gone ahead
and typed some in.

I didn't realize at first how long this project might be,
but maybe it'll help out the chap who was wanting reading lists
as well.

I'm in agreement with Dani Zweig that ``The Canon'' really has
fuzzy boundaries. I'd want to emphasize also (as I think the
various lists that follow make clear) that there are different
canons for different purposes. For instance, there are canons
of recommended books and authors among people who only read
science fiction. In terms of the categories Western Lit
or World Lit or American Lit, I think we must also distinguish between
canonization for purposes of readership, for purposes of scholarship,
and for purposes of pedagogy. They're different. At first I wasn't
going to distinguish scholarship from pedagogy, but while I think
Joyce is much the greater writer than Hemingway, I suspect there's
a practical reason of size and accessibility why Hemingway gets taught
the more, certainly in high school.

With each list that follows, I'll try to editorialize a bit at the end.

**********

List 1: A quote from T.S. Eliot
``Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them, there is no third.''

---

Peremptory, yes? I found this as a jacket blurb on my copy of Ciardi's
translation of Dante. Don't know where it's from.

A personal version of this extreme canonization would be the old
which-ten-books-on-a-desert-island game: I'd want Homer, the Greek
playwrights, Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe and Wagner, actually
(I think of his operas as as much literature as music), and Melville
and Plato and the Bible, and I'm still wondering if I'd want Joyce, too.

**********

List 2:  The Great Books
0. The Bible               (not included in the set, but you're supposed
                            to go read whatever translation you like)
1. The Great Conversation ------- [three volumes of intro and
2. Syntopicon 1     -------------  reference to the set]
3. Syntopicon 2     -------------
4. Homer, _The Iliad_ and _The Odyssey_
5. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, collected plays
6. Herodotus, _The Persian Wars_ and Thucydides, _The Peloponnesian War_
7. Plato, collected dialogues
8. Aristotle, collected works, volume I
9. Aristotle, volume II
10. Hippocrates, collected works and Galen, _On the Natural Faculties_
11. Euclid, _The Elements_, Archimedes, collected works, Apollonius of Perga,
    _Conics_, Nicomachus of Gerasa, _Introduction to Arithmetic_
12. Lucretius, _On the Nature of Things_, Marcus Aurelius, _The Meditations_,
    and Epictetus, _The Discourses_
13. Virgil, _The Aeneid_, _Eclogues_, _Georgics_
14. Plutarch, _Parallel Lives_
15. Tacitus, _The Annals_, _The Histories_
16. Ptolemy, _The Almagest_, Copernicus, _On the Revolutions_, Kepler,
    from the _Epitome_ and _Harmonies_
17. Plotinus, _Enneads_
18. Saint Augustine, _Confessions_, _City of God_, _On Christian Doctrine_
19. Saint Thomas Aquinas, from _Summa Theologica_, vol. I
20. Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. II
21. Dante Alighieri, _The Divine Commedy_
22. Geoffrey Chaucer, _Troilus and Cressida_, _The Canterbury Tales_
23. Nicolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_ and Thomas Hobbes, _Leviathan_
24. Francois Rabelais, _Gargantua and Pantagruel_
25. Michel de Montaigne, _Essays_
26. William Shakespeare, Plays and Sonnets, vol. I
27. William Shakespeare, vol. II
28. William Gilbert, _On the Loadstone_, Galileo Galilei, _Dialogues_,
    William Harvey, _On the Motion of the Heart_, _On the Circulation
    of the Blood_, _On the Generation of Animals_
29. Miguel de Cervantes, _Don Quixote_
30. Sir Francis Bacon, _Advancement of Learning, _Novum Organum_,
    _New Atlantis_
31. Rene Descartes, _Rules for the Direction of the Mind_, _Discourse
    on the Method_, _Meditations on First Philosophy_, and other works,
    Benedict de Spinoza, _Ethics_
32. John Milton, English Minor Poems, _Paradise Lost_, _Samson Agonistes_,
    and _Areopagitica_
33. Blaise Pascal, _The Provincial Letters_, _Pensees_, and other works
34. Sir Isaac Newton, _Principia_ and _Optics, and Christiaan Huygens,
    _Treatise on Light_
35. John Locke, _A Letter Concerning Toleration_, _Secon Essay Concerning
    Civil Government_, _An Essay Concerning Human Understanding_,
    George Berkeley, _The Principles of Human Knowledge_, and
    David Hume, _An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_
36. Jonathon Swift, _Gulliver's Travels_, and Laurence Sterne, _Tristram
    Shandy_
37. Henry Fielding, _Tom Jones_
38. Montesquieu, _Spirit of Laws_, and Jean Jaques Rousseau, _Social
    Contract_ and other works
39. Adam Smith, _The Wealth of Nations_
40. Edward Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, vol. I
41. Edward Gibbon, vol. II
42. Immanuel Kant, _Critique of Pure Reason_, _Critique of Practical
    Reason_, _Critique of Judgment_, and other works
43. American State Papers, _The Federalist_, and John Stuart Mill,
    _On Liberty_, _Representative Government_, _Utilitarianism_
44. James Boswell, _Life of Samuel Johnson_
45. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, _Elements of Chemistry_, Jean
    Baptiste Joseph Fourier, _Analytical Theory of Heat_, and
    Michael Farady, _Experimental Researches in Electricity_
46. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, _The Philosophy of Right_ and
    _The Philosophy of History_
47. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, _Faust_
48. Herman Melville, _Moby Dick_
49. Charles Darwin, _The Origin of Species_ and the _Descent of Man_
50. Karl Marx, _Capital_, and Marx and Friedrich Engels, _The
    Communist Manifesto_
51. Count Leo Tolstoy, _War and Peace_
52. Fyodor Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_
53. William James, _The Principles of Psychology_
54. Sigmund Freud, selected works

---
First of all, that's my (old) set, not the new one. It sounds like they
added a few more books, probably edging into the twentieth century a little.

I think this is a beautiful course of books on Western Civ with slight
American seasoning, though I count only three volumes with American
works in them.

They didn't include Voltaire(!), but they explain this as the inability to
reduce Voltaire to one representative volume. Also, there's not one 19th
Century English novelist! Almost no lyric poetry.

The included works end approximately with the 19th Century.

I think this canon is more a ``History of Ideas in Western Civ'' canon,
rather than an aesthetic canon like we've been mainly discussing. But,
I personally like to include works of history, science, and philosophy
when I think of The Canon, so I don't mind this flavor in the least.

A great bit of the set itself I own duplicated in paperback or in
other editions, and especially for things like Homer and the Greek playwrights
and Dante, there are much to be preferred translations, but I really like
owning the set for inclusions like Apollonius of Perga and William Gilbert,
i.e. the stuff I'm not likely to find in any other edition. 

A number of the volumes here I've read a good bit of, at least in other
editions. For instance, I've read 30 out of Shakespeare's 37 plays at one
time or another. But if I only count the books I've read *everything* in,
I've read volumes 0, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, 22, 47, and 48, for
fourteen out of 52 volumes (discount the 3 reference volumes and don't
forget volume 0).

-----

I will take the opportunity to comment on one point in the article
that Terrance typed in regarding the lack of black authors in the new
version of this Great Books set.

The point was where Adler, I think, was quoted saying something
like maybe a black would write a great book in 100 years or so.
The exact wording of the quote is crucial, and if Adler actually
meant this, then I would agree that Adler was saying something
outrageous. Much more consistent with what I think Adler's notion
of a great book is, would be not that a black won't write a great book for
100 years, but that we won't be able to judge if a black has already
written a great book until 100 years passes. The obvious candidates
for canonization---James Baldwin, Richard Wright, etc.---are all in
the too-recent-and-too-politicized-into-current-politics-to-judge
category for Adler's taste, I'll bet.

Given that reporters often don't quote exactly right, and given
the fine line here that separates Adler saying something
outrageous from saying something quite reasonable (reasonable, that is,
within the context of his canonization scheme), I'm wondering
if he's been quoted correctly?

**********
(continued to Part 2)

                  Mike Morris
             (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)