/lit/ - Literature

>>22221489
Nice.
I'm reading The Third Reich and it's enjoyable, not as good as The Savage Detectives.

Just picking up Nietzsche or Joyce or Hegel and reading him out of the blue seems like a waste of time. Same with basically every other great of the last few centuries.

For one these guys all had great classical educations, so without reading the classics you simply won't understand their references or be on the same wavelength.

They read all the great European works up through the medieval and Renaissance ages into the present.

They writing was heavily grounded in the historical context of their culture, so you need to know history.

They were writing in response to or building off the works of thinkers who came immediately before or were contemporary to them.

And they were often commenting on social or political issues that were taking place currently, so not being aware of those things also is necessary.

So it seems to me to really understand the greats one would have to spend years before building the necessary foundations of knowledge.

Do you agree? If you were to build such a curriculum, a groundwork to accomplish this, what would it look like?