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/lit/ - Literature

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20259479 No.20259479 [Reply] [Original]

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

>> No.20259484

>>20259479
racist fucking anglo left out non-western writers. where is pali canon? alone, better than all western phiosophy

>> No.20259492

>>20259484
>racist fucking anglo left out non-western writers
>"THE WESTERN CANON"

>> No.20259499

>>20259479
He has room for six Stevenson novels but nothing by Verne? Does this fatty just hate French people or something? It's because they're skinny isn't it

>> No.20259502

>>20259479
This is better https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/philosophische-fakultaet/fachbereiche/neuphilologie/deutsches-seminar/abteilungen/internationale-literaturen/studium/kanon-weltliteratur/

>> No.20259510

>>20259484
He didn’t leave them out of the world cannon. This book is focused on the west is all

>> No.20259512

There is way, way too much filler on there. What's the point if you're just going to list every successful/influential novel? Make it a reading list.

>> No.20259532

>>20259484
Meds.
>>20259479
He should have got rid of ancient Indian texts and the Quran, they're not Western. Maybe add Tacitus to the Romans? His list seems fine and should be a general guide to the Western classics.

>> No.20259548

>>20259532
Fantastic.

I'm just looking to get a basic footing, really just enough to be able to speak intelligibly on the topic of Lit.

>> No.20259556
File: 245 KB, 1819x937, St Johns College reading list.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
20259556

>>20259512
This, I think this is better but still contains a bit too much bullshit and not enough of the ancients.

>> No.20259578

>>20259556
I think reading really old math and science books is a waste of time desu, it makes the list seem pretentious. Just read a modern book.

>> No.20259609

>>20259548
Now that I saw this list >>20259556, it's better. A lot more succinct and delves into various fields. The ancient Greeks should suffice for the most part as a great foundation.

>> No.20259622

>>20259556
You could narrow it down even further and make a 1-2 year long reading list of the most influential texts ever written, then leave people free to choose their specialty afterward from there.
>The Iliad, Odyssey
>Republic
>The Categories, Physics
>The Bible
>Elements
>Meditations on First Philosophy
>Principia Mathematica
>Social Contract
>Origin of Species
>Kapital
Basically give students an option to choose among a selection of all those books (and others) in this list, but make sure they study the above in depth to understand just how important they are. It's a great list but I can't help but wonder how much students take away from it, that's an enormous amount of content to cover in only four years.

>> No.20259627

>>20259578
The point isn't to memorize formulae like an (Logos forgive me for uttering this word) engineer, it's to understand where the ideas came from and how they developed into what we have today. It's not enough to know the formulas for electric fields and such, you should also know how they were figured out and shared with the rest of the world.

>> No.20259633

>>20259622
Your last three are a waste of time. The only worth they might have is to understand the modern world better, otherwise they're worthless.

>> No.20259634

>>20259622
I didn't attend St John's but I assume they spend all four years reading and discussing those books in depth. I don't think it's like a Harvard or Yale reading list where you're expected to just read it on your own if you're not in the classics or history programs.

>> No.20259644

>>20259633
>Your last three are a waste of time.
They're incredibly important, you could skip Homer or the math but not these
>The only worth they might have is to understand the modern world better
Well, yeah, that's the point. You should understand why our society is set up like it is, why religion is dying in the West and secular humanism is taking its place, and if you don't have some knowledge of Communism you're just ignorant. If you ignore these, you're not an intellectual - you're merely a historian.

>> No.20259695

>>20259644
My point was that they have nothing to offer intellectually. You can get a synopsis of the ideas they present to understand the modern world but I don't think reading them is a necessity especially if you have a good foundation to compare them to. I believe I have a decent understanding of what these ideas represent and have refutations on them without reading their works.

>> No.20259702

>>20259622
>>20259644
Don't read Kapital just to "understand communism". Most communists don't even read it.

>> No.20259754

>>20259702
This. You might as well just read Utopia and explain that people thought they could get there by massively oversupplying goods to the point where they were effectively free. Might lead into an interesting discussion of the oversupply problem and how it destroys capital, but to my knowledge there's not many good books about it.

For economics I'd think Bagehot's Lombard Street and Smith's Wealth of Nations would be better. MAYBE also Keynes, but Keynesianism is so deeply flawed I'm not sure it's worth it.

>>20259695
>I believe I have a decent understanding of what these ideas represent and have refutations on them without reading their works.
Red flag. If your time is limited then that might be a valid reason to pass, but if not then it smacks of hubris to think that you can refute an argument you haven't even read. Personally I recognize communism as one of the absolute most cancerous memes in all of human history and deserving of being stamped out with extreme prejudice, but that's because of what keeps happening when avowed communists are given any power at all, not because I found flaws in their arguments.

>> No.20259769

>>20259510
>cannon
Goes boom.

>> No.20259774

Based.

RIP Harold Bloom. We must carry the torch and tell the School of Resentment to burn in hell

>> No.20259775

>>20259754
If you have a foundation to compare something to then it seems unnecessary to participate in their dialectics. For example a Christian would automatically have many problems with any humanist system including Communism. You argue based on fundamental issues not the issues they would bring up about economics or whatever. If you want to read it it's fine, but it isn't a necessity if you've received their ideas through other means. I'm not sure if I've explained it correctly, but go ahead and read it if you haven't been exposed to it at all.

>> No.20259973

>>20259510
>>20259769
Canon*

:L

>> No.20260166

>>20259484
So, is fucking based

>> No.20260170

>>20259774
Based

>> No.20260190

>>20259627
> (Logos forgive me for uttering this word)
HOLY FUCKING KEK

>> No.20260249

>>20259479
HTRAB list > William Durant's 100 books >>>TWC

>> No.20260255

>>20259556
>>20259622
>No Plotinus
Sure just leave out the guy whose Philosophy shaped all Christian, Islamic and Jewish theology that came after him

>> No.20260256

>>20259484
Terrible b8

>> No.20260491

>>20259556
This is not chronological so it's annoying

>> No.20260499

>>20259622
pseud list from a tranny

>> No.20260637

>>20260255
Plotinus is listed in there under sophomore readings you sped

>> No.20260645

>>20260255
I'd put Plotinus on my list, sure. Haven't read him myself yet so I left him off.
>>20260499
So what was it that triggered you? The Marx?

>> No.20260647

>>20259479
>only has one work by Wagner
Bad list.

>> No.20260662

>>20259502
>salman rushdie
>zadie smith
>edward said
>judith butler

>> No.20261116

Western Canon or English Canon? LMAOOOO look at the amount of worthless english authors in this list

>> No.20261130

>>20259484
Obviously biased toward Jewish, Angloids holes, degenerates and leftists. The following people:
>(((Montaigne)))
>Austen (lmao)
>Whitman (faggot)
>Dickinson
>Eliot
>(((Freud))) (this one is the most blatant exemple of this list being biased toward jews)
>(((Proust)))
>(((Woolf))) (honorary jewess)
>(((Kafka)))
>Neruda
>Pessoa
>Beckett
Have no business being ranked among the greatest writers of western literature. There is also some blatant omission such as Racine and Hugo. It looks like French writers have to be partly Jewish to make it to this list.

>> No.20261255

>>20259633
>The only worth they might have is to understand the modern world better
is that not a worthwhile goal?

>> No.20261529

>>20259578
Not necessarily. Lobachevsky developed his form of non-Euclidean geometry by thinking hard about Ancient and early Modern attempts to defend the fifth postulate of Euclid's Elements, and Einstein used an old method of Galileo's for his relativity theorems. Even besides being able to use old insights to inspire or make new ones, you can see how defensible (or indefensible) some famous scientific thoughts were by reading them directly; Galileo used circles for his orbits (which had to be corrected to ellipses by Kepler) because he thought perfect circles were divine. Sometimes you see correct insights that depended on more meagre observations drawn out without the reliance on testing we expect, as with Pascal's work on the weight of water and air.

>> No.20261680

>>20259479
>No Claudel
Bad list.

>> No.20261833

>>20259622
>Principia Mathematica
I don't know about that

>> No.20261839

>>20259479
>What do you think about this Jew's opinion
It belongs in the gas chamber

>> No.20261903

>>20261833
Newton's Principia? If you're thinking of the Russell/Whitehead Principia, then totally.

>> No.20261950

>>20259532
>He should have got rid of ancient Indian texts and the Quran, they're not Western.
The Western canon includes works that have inspired Western literature as well like 1001 nights.

>> No.20261978

>>20259512
Which parts do you consider filler?

>> No.20261985

>>20259622
>Principia Mathematica

Too confusing. We use Leibniz's formulation much more, and fluxion notation mainly survives in physics because it's quicker to put a dot over a variable than write d/dt all the time.

>> No.20262508

>>20261130
>>Austen (lmao)
Whats wrong with her?

>> No.20262565

>>20261255
It is, but you live in the modern world and should have already been exposed to their ideas as they shaped the world you live in. If your pursuit is for truth then reading them would be a waste of time. Although this "truth" depends on your worldview that would be shaped by them to begin with if you grew up in the West. It is dangerous for those without a strong foundation to counter their ideas/theories/narratives. Anyway I won't derail the thread any further, just my two cents on the matter.

>> No.20263625

>>20259479
Everyone is tearing it apart but no one can name a better list.

>> No.20263706

>>20263625
Because "lists" for art are pointless, you tasteless faggot

>> No.20263750

>>20263706
Nigga, you're on /lit/. LMFAO

>> No.20263772

>>20261130
The guy is jewish so what did you expect?

>> No.20263865

>>20263750
Just because you like to jerk off to charts of books you'll neve read doesn't mean all of us are the same, retard

>> No.20264102

>>20263865
Nigga, you're on /lit/, stop pretending you read.

>> No.20264110

>>20261130
>There is also some blatant omission such as Racine and Hugo.
Both are on the list. You're evidently illiterate and should keep your mouth shut.

>>20263625
It's not a bad list (or at least not a list of bad books), sure, but what is it for anyway? Is it a list of recommendations? (Too massive to orient oneself in.) Is it a guide to what was influential? (It isn't, there's many great writers on there that had pretty much influence on western literature overall.)
Besides, Bloom himself rejects the list and didn't make an another, better one.

>> No.20264114

>>20259479
I seriously doubt Bloom read more than 40% of the list.

>> No.20264124

>>20264110
>pretty much [no] influence

>> No.20264881

>>20259479

I think a lot of people don't really understand the point of the shortlist (of 26 writers). Like, most people seem to think that the list is meant to be the 26 most essential writers in western history, which it isn't. Every writer is just talked about incidentally to their possessing certain qualities which engender canonicity, and he picked them because they were the ones with which he had the most familiarity, or, because they were relatively easy to write about in such a way as to isolate and illustrate these qualities.

I guess that the mistake is easy to make though, if you only read the wikipedia article and not the actual book.

>> No.20264914

>>20264881

EVERYONE POST THEIR TOP 26

Here's mine (chronological):

1. The Holy Bible
2. Homer
3. Sophocles
4. Plato
5. Aristotle
6. Horace
7. Virgil
8. Ovid
9. Augustine
10. Aquinas
11. Dante
12. Petrarch
13. Montaigne
14. Cervantes
15. Shakespeare
16. Moliére
17. Milton
18. Kant
19. Goethe
20. Wordsworth
21. Melville
22. Dostoevsky
23. Nietzsche
24. Ibsen
25. Joyce
26. Foucault

r8 it

>> No.20264977

>>20262508
Nothing wrong with her, the poster is just a flaming faggot

>> No.20264984

>>20264914
Fuck you ungrateful subhuman

>> No.20264988

>>20264914
Your last three are truly abysmal, specially Foucault. Wordsworth is also a bad pick for a Romantic.

>> No.20265137

>>20264988
Commie faggot

>> No.20265395

>>20259479
I would replace Freud with Nietzsche

>> No.20265803

>>20259479
I trust /lit/ top 100 lists and that's where I started.

>> No.20265812

>>20261130
>Woolf
Not only honorary jewish, the soul of a jew as well.

>> No.20265989

>>20259502
No Pindar, Thykydides, Plato, Ibsen, Ovid but not Horatio. This is worse than Blooms list

>> No.20267120

>>2026498

what would u put instead? post urs

>> No.20267153

What do you guys think of the reading list given in Adler's How to Read a Book?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book#Reading_list_(1972_edition)

>> No.20267644

>>20264914
1 - 11 just like yours
12. Chaucer
13. Cervantes
14. Shakespeare
15. Descartes
16. Milton
17. Kant
18. Goethe
19. Melville
20. Dostoevsky
21. Tolstoy
22. Nietzsche
23. Proust
24. Kafka
25. Joyce
26. McCarthy

>> No.20267813

>>20267644
>26. McCarthy
Holy shit

You can't get more reddit than that.

>> No.20267951
File: 170 KB, 720x934, 1558206496508.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
20267951

>>20259479
I'm tired of these jewish-curated lists that push christcuckery, wahmen, liberalism and other degenerate ideas. What is the TRVE ARYAN western cannon?

>> No.20268004

>>20259479
>all those selected poems
Come on. Poetry can't possibly be that essential to the Western canon.

>> No.20268038

>>20267951
The only remains of your LARPagan "religion" was completely drafted by a Christian. You have zero connection to your gods.

>> No.20268048

>>20267951
Varg Vikernes: Irminsûl by Varg Vikernes

>> No.20268139

>>20268004
Until like the 18th-19th century, literature pretty much was synonymous with poetry.

>> No.20268159

>>20259479
My issue with Bloom's list is that he is specific about the translations, and all the translations he picks are shit tier.

>> No.20268180

>>20268038
Your sworn enemy kills your entire family and all trace of them. Do you try to join his family and pretend they're your own and you were his brother all along, or do you get away from or kill him and start your own family again? You'd have to be psychotic to choose the former.

>> No.20268189

>detaching bhagavad gita from mahabharata
the fuck he knows

>> No.20268577

>>20264914
>>20267644
Decent picks up to 20.

>> No.20268908

>>20267153
Eh, it's alright. I'd question Gibbon, Marx, and Lenin. Eventually all these lists become 95% the same and arguments are more about who's been left off the list than about who's on the list because you've captured the cream of the crop already. Coming at the problem another way, most adults today haven't read even five works from these lists, and that's after school purportedly forces them to read like ten. At some point (coughcough 1910) our schools lost the plot and stopped educating students. Now they school the children and it's not good.

>> No.20268948

>>20259479
I actually tried reading this book. I read the chapters on Shakespeare, Dante, and Woolf. It was pleasant to see someone heaping earnest praise on writers, instead of the usual cynical jabs or at best ironic praises you see more commonly. However, it was so fluffy, I have honestly no idea what he was talking about for the most part. He talked about the strangeness of Dante. The ability to stretch a character of Shakespeare. The observational power of Woolf. But aside from those broad statements, I'm not sure I have any other takeaway... I'm not a big literary criticism guy in the first place, so a little out of my ballpark here; maybe it's just not possible to get more specific without referencing a particular text? Regardless, an entertaining read, and surely serves as a good reading list at the very least.

>> No.20269007

>>20264914
>>20267644
Good job faggots, your list managed to be even worse than his.

>> No.20269094

>>20267153
It's worse and also written by a jew. Is there even a list like that which isn't made by a Jew?

>> No.20269178

>>20269094
William Durant

>> No.20269226

>>20268948
>But aside from those broad statements, I'm not sure I have any other takeaway
What Bloom wanted you to take away was that the canonical writers (of his selection) are larger than any social institution in regards to their creative power and originality. At the time the book was published, literary criticism went away from the traditional fold which was a study you could describe loosely as "Great People Who Wrote Great Books" and turned more towards impersonal textual analysis with the New Critical School and the deconstructionists. Bloom was a humanist who believed in universal aesthetic value and considered the agonistic tradition of the western canon a testament to its being more than just an historical artifact for cultural theory.

>> No.20269366

>>20259556
Good list

>> No.20269422

>>20269226
>At the time the book was published, literary criticism went away from the traditional fold which was a study you could describe loosely as "Great People Who Wrote Great Books" and turned more towards impersonal textual analysis with the New Critical School and the deconstructionists. Bloom was a humanist who believed in universal aesthetic value
Is that really your takeaway from reading the book? Because if it is, Bloom is a massive liar (I haven't read the whole book myself) and you apparently didn't read much beyond him.
"The Western Canon" was published in 1994. New Criticism was taking off in the 1920s. It was already well-spent by the time the "deconstructionists", poststructuralists started taking centre stage in France and USA in the 1960s-1970s. And Bloom was one of the bigger names of the movement in USA. See his "Anxiety of Influence", which bases the whole concept of the literary canon around Freudian psychoanalytic ideas. He was openly disinterested in the "great people" and their "humanity"; he superimposed the impersonal textual canonical force and anxiety upon the will and character of any individual poet.
Also, this "loose description" of pre-NC criticism is indeed very very loose. As far as criticism as in "reviewing" goes, it was entirely open to negative judgement of all and every writer new or old (people's opinions used to diverge about as much as ours, especially if the writers were not century-old sacred cows), not to mention that it was frequently based not on any universal stylistic and philosophical judgement, but instead deferred to utilitarian and moralistic lens (political, religious, etc.). In the more scholarly domain it also produced a ton of biographical and historical overviews as well as precise linguistic (philological) studies of the writings of the past, with no magical humanism in there.
Bloom's aestheticist and universalist viewpoint is really a fruit of the (post)modernity.

>> No.20269702

>>20269422
>and you apparently didn't read much beyond him
I was just presenting Bloom's purposes as per the preface and the elegaic conclusion of the book. No need to project whatever contempt you have for Harold Bloom onto little old anonymous me. In any case, literature as a whole was being aggressively redefined in a way that terrified Bloom, to the extent that he believed literary studies, at the rate it was going, had no future. Obviously, not all critics before the turn of the century were humanist, but that's no issue at all, considering how he never claimed the opposite. He was never against critical pluralism as a rule; what he was against were students of literature becoming "amateur political scientists, uninformed sociologists, incompetent anthropologists, mediocre philosophers, overdetermined cultural historians" all in the name of social progress under the banner of whatever ideology was trendy. He did not dread people coming to Shakespeare and criticizing his art, or from simply differing with his humanist views on the meanings of certain plays; he himself had severe issues with his comedies. What he dreaded was people abandoning him and other great writers in favor of Alice Walker or other writers of particular minority backgrounds who he didn't find that great.
>Bloom's aestheticist and universalist viewpoint is really a fruit of the (post)modernity
Matthew Arnold was doing it before it was cool.

>> No.20269722

>>20259479
should´ve been renamed as the Anglo-Saxon Canon

>> No.20270181

>>20261130
>>(((Montaigne)))
What?

>> No.20270661
File: 63 KB, 680x555, 1650381182578.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
20270661

I'm high as fuck for the first time in years but I just wanted to say thanks to all you boys for providing me with some very valuable thoughts.

>> No.20270780

>>20270181
His mother family were Portuguese jews, that's a well known fact

>> No.20270796

>>20259754
I dunno I like Keynes more than Smith honestly

>> No.20272071

dont let this die

>> No.20272201
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20272201

for me it's the combined list of 130 "best of" book lists from thegreatestbooks dot org

>> No.20272202

I don't have any

>> No.20272838

>>20259622
>elements
>principia mathematica
>social contract
embarrassing

>> No.20273215

>>20261130
take your meds, retard