My college major was, as far as I can tell, unique to my alma mater (Middlebury). It’s called Literary Studies and its closest analogue is the Great Books programs at places like Columbia and St. John’s College. At my college, though, there’s this really big test at the end that lasts eight hours and while I don’t remember any of the questions, I do remember shouting and throwing money at a barista from whom I ordered two cups of coffee at the four-hour mark during the test.
The major is based on a 44-author reading list that is something of a world canon. It was created a while ago (I think in the ’80s) and has only been updated once, when the newly-founded Japanese department added its choice of authors to the list. According to the old guard who is responsible for the list, it will never be changed; of course it is an arbitrary and problematic list and any attempt to edit it would inevitably end with a well-intended but misguided implosion. Well-intended, because the list fails to account for more than a handful of thinkers who aren’t dead, white, and male; simply, this is not the full spectrum of human thought. Then again, no list ever would be and that’s missing the point of the major. There are plenty of programs that do cultural criticism with all sorts of texts, canonical and otherwise, and that is surely a worthwhile endeavor. But this major wants to focus exclusively on big, beautiful ideas in something of a vacuum. Cool, I say.
The list was not made by a single authority who could envision it as an all-encompassing project, thus compensating for a lack of female authors in the Greek and Latin selections, say, with a little splurge in the Americans. Instead it was made piecemeal, each language department picking three authors and their representative works however they liked. (The only exception is the Spanish-language authors, of whom there are five — one play each by three different Golden Age dramatists and then two other writers.) The departments were, however, encouraged to achieve some kind of balance between drama, poetry and fiction. There is also a “Background Readings” list that I completely ignored.
Apologia aside, let’s have some fun. Despite my deep and undying affection for it, the list made some funny choices for itself and that makes for amusing guessing games. I do, however, promise the list is more thoughtful and useful than the catalogue of paranoia and libertarianism that the Modern Library compiled a while ago under the aegis of a “Reader’s Choice” list.
Guess away in the section below, and we’ll give away a very, very cool prize to whomever gets the most right (don’t cheat though, be cool).
- Who is the only woman on the list?
- Who are the two essayists (an American and an ancient)?
- Which novel that Oprah recommended for her “Summer of Faulkner” wasn’t similarly esteemed by the English department and with which Faulkner novel was it replaced?
- Which mammoth German play were we told to only read the fifth act of? Which mammoth novel did we only have to read a third of?
- There are two histories, one comedy, one romance and five tragedies chosen to represent Shakespeare. Guess.
- Who joins Milton and Shakespeare representing the British authors? (Remember, just one more.)
- Melville or Hawthorne? Camus or Baudelaire? Dickinson or Emerson? Moliere or Racine? Euripides of Aeschylus? Kafka’s or Ovid’s Metamorphosis?
- Who is the only South American?
We’ll post the answers and announce our winner on Friday morning. We’re going to announce it on Monday! Keep guessing! Here are the answers!
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Emerson and Lucretius
- Oprah had As I Lay Dying and they have Absalom, Absalom!
- Faust (we only had to read a fifth of Faust pt. 2, which I had always considered a separate play, but kind of isn’t. So, obviously just Faust will do, though we did have to read all of that). The book is Remembrance of Things Past.
- Histories: Henry IV pt. I and II; Comedy: As You Like It; Romance: The Tempest (Romance in the tight, shakespeare-scholar sense, which might have caused some confusion); Tragedy – Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra (the most underrated of all Shakespeare plays).
- Wordsworth
- Melville, Baudelaire, Emerson, Moliere, Aeschylus, Ovid’s
- Borges
Our winners are commenters Blazes Boylan and Matthew (a tie!). We’ll be in touch shortly about sending you the prize which is… either a brand new edition of Tarzan of the Apes with a preface by Thomas Mallon, or A Princess of Mars with an introduction by Junot Diaz. Thanks to everyone who participated! The full reading list is below.
Primary List
Homer, Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus, Oresteia; Prometheus Bound
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Antigone; Oedipus at Colonus
Vergil, Aeneid
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe
Dante, The Divine Comedy; The Letter to Can Grande
Boccaccio, Decameron
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author; Rules Of The Game; Henry IV; It Is So (If You Think It So)
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville
Calderón, Life Is A Dream
Lope de Vega, Sleepwell (Fuente ovejuna)
Borges, Ficciones
Moliere. Tartuffe; Don Juan; The Misanthrope
Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; selections from the literary and art criticism
Proust, Swann’s Way; The Past Recaptured
Goethe, Faust, Part One and Act Five from Part Two.
Kafka, The Trial; The Castle; Amerika
Mann, Tonio Kröger; Death in Venice; The Magic Mountain
Wang Wei, The Poetry of Wang Wei, ed. Pauline Yu; Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei, ed. Wai-lim Yip (Grossman Pub.); The Poems of Wang Wei, trans. G.W. Robinson (Penguin Books) Also see: James Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry.
Cáo Xuegin (Ts’ao Hsueh-ch’in), Dream of the Red Chamber (C.C. Wang trans., abr.); The Story of the Stone (David Hawkes, trans.: Vols. I, II and–if available-III); also see: Liu Wu-chi, An Introduction to Chinese Literature, pp. 237-246; C.T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, intro. and chap. VII; Jeanne Knoerle, S.P., The Dream of the Red Chamber.
Lu-Xùn (Lu Hsun), Complete Short Stories (Indiana UP). Also see: C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957, pp. 3-54; T.A. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies of the Leftist Literary Movement in China: articles on Lu Xún; Milena Dolezelova, “Lu Xún’s ‘Medicine’: in Merle Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era; William A. Lyell, Jr., Lu Hsun’s Visions of Reality.
Gogol, The Inspector General; “The Nose”; “The Overcoat”; “Notes of a Madman”; Dead Souls.
Dostoevsky, The Double; Notes from Underground; Crime and Punishment (Norton Critical Ed.); The Devils; The Brothers Karamazov (Norton Critical Ed.)
Tolstoy, The Cossacks; War and Peace ; (Norton Critical Ed.); Anna Karenina (Norton Critical Ed.); The Death of Ivan Ilych.
Shakespeare, As You Like It; Hamlet; Othello; King Lear; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra; The Tempest; Henry IV, 1 & 2.
Milton, Lycidas; Comus; the sonnets; Paradise Lost
Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”; “Michael”; “Resolution and Independence”; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”; The Prelude ; “Elegaic Stanzas”; Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Joyce, Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
Emerson, Nature; “The American Scholar”; “The Divinity School Address”; Essays: First and Second Series
Melville, Moby-Dick; “Bartleby the Scrivener”; Billy Budd; “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and letters to Hawthorne.
Faulkner, Light in August; The Sound and The Fury; Absalom, Absalom!
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (tr. E. Seidensticker). The Diaries (tr. R. Bowring).
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Four Major Plays (tr. D. Keene): The Love-Suicides of Sonezaki; The Battle of Coxinga; The Uprooted Pine; The Love-Suicides of Amijima.
Natsume Soseki, Kokoro (tr. E. McClellan).
Background Readings
Plato, Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Symposium; Republic
Aristotle, Poetics
Old Testament, Genesis; Exodus; Ecclesiastes; Psalms; Job; Song of Songs
New Testament, Matthew; John;Revelation; Epistle to the Romans
Rousseau, Confessions; Social Contract; Discourse on Inequality; Discourse on the Origins of Languages; Letter to D’Alembert
Darwin, The Origin of Species
Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; selections from Capital
Freud, The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis; The Interpretation of Dreams; Civilization and its Discontents
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