Today’s Comment of the Day was spawned by the post about the fading of cultural memories of important film artists. texaggo4 has his doubts about my concerns, and whether the phenomenon is worth worrying about, or even a problem at all.
I admit, this topic is an unusually intense and personal one for me. It was the reason why I devoted a large portion of my life and creative energy for twenty years to the quixotic challenge of creating and trying to maintain a professional theater company in the Washington, D.C. area devoted to producing American stage works of quality and historical importance that were in danger of falling out of the American stage repertoire entirely, if they were not already forgotten. We proved that many shows thought hopelessly dated or politically incorrect still worked (“The Boys in the Band,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Native Son,” “The Cradle Will Rock”…), found genuine masterpieces that almost nobody knew existed (“Moby Dick Rehearsed,” “Machinal,’ “Marathon 33″…), and lost a fortune on artistic gambles that didn’t pan out, for a wide variety of reasons, including bad management, bad luck, or the unpredictability of show biz. Notable disasters that still give me nightmares include ” “Home of the Brave,'” Mr Roberts,” “A Flag is Born,” “Dear World, and “The Pirate.” We had a devoted and loyal following, and I think we proved our point, but basically didn’t make a ripple despite all that work. (Except perhaps in this case, and maybe that was enough…) Heck, our theater was in a school building, and we couldn’t get any teachers to bring their classes to our shows, even for free.
But then, most of my life has been devoted to futile pursuits. After all, I’m an ethicist…
Here is tex’s Comment of the Day on the post,I Worry About Cary Grant:
What exactly are we asking for here? Facial recognition of the actor and an ability to recollect every great movie ever produced? What’s the goal of Cultural Memory? It cannot be the rote memorization of EVERY SINGLE great artist, producer and creator of art & culture. 1, we’d never have time to get around to memorizing ALL of it, 2, we’d never have time to get around to viewing all of it, 3, we’d never have any time to get around producing new examples of it, 4, we’d never have any time to get around doing anything else that life calls us to do.
The great conversation, as it is called, which is the ongoing “dialogue” between artists of the present with their contemporaries as well as with their predecessors. Artists take the concepts that are explored in the past, the debates had between opposing concepts in the past, and rework them in the present, either shedding light on new angles or re-engaging the old arguments, or bolstering new arguments. This long process of cultural production has produced MILLIONS of individual works and, without a doubt, TENS of thousands of artists. Of those countless producers & performers, we can assume there are many many thousands of individual works that could be called “culturally iconic” or “unique” or “ground breaking” and thousands of artists.
Feeling less well read that I ought to, I compiled a list of what several thinkers considered to be the “Western Canon”: a list of essential books that captured the literary and written philosophy component of this “Great Conversation”, with the goal of plodding through them over my lifetime.
930 books. Just the books.
The authors, as I read their names, certainly had recognizable names and I could probably guess relatively accurately the eras they wrote in. Could I reasonably hold a discussion or even mention some prominent idea found in them? Maybe 10% of that list. With any level of deeper understanding? Less than that.
But what I could do, without those books, is hold a relatively well thought out conversation about the ideas that most of those books were also exploring. Why? Because that is what cultural memory does for us, without being able to hold an in depth idea about a particular work of art, we can still be able to hold in depth ideas about the particular notion that a work of art was exploring. Because cultural memory goes a great way towards preserving, through the Great Conversation, all those ideas and philosophies and beauties and art, without me having to memorize in rote detail the specifics of each work.
930 books, considered essential to grasp the great conversation of *just* Western Culture. How many paintings & painters? How many concertos and composers? How many sculptures? How many plays and playwrights and stage actors? How many buildings and architects? How many movies and directors and actors and screenwriters?
The interesting thing of course, is how the growth of culture has accelerated due to population, communication and technology. Whereas one generation in the 1000s may have produced a half dozen *iconic* culture producers, one generation in the 1500s produced several dozen *iconic* culture producers. One generation in the 1700s, maybe 100. A generation of the 1900s, easily several hundred.
Producers. Multiply that by 10 for iconic works. And I think I’m underestimating.
I think you are placing an incredible burden on the current generation to preserve *semi-iconic* works and producers that had a very personal impact for your generation, but given a few centuries of time may or may not be seen as truly impactful on the Great Conversation. Think of the half-dozen *iconic* producers of the 1000s AD. There certain were a hundred other producers who were either *semi-iconic* or just plain copy cats or failures. The generation of the 1100s AD didn’t remember THOSE guys. Only the *truly* iconic ones.
I get the impetus to remember as much as possible, but I don’t think the effort should get in the way of follow-on generations adding to the culture by encumbering them with such a load of nostalgic movie-watching that they cannot produce themselves.
I think the real root of your concern isn’t that certain icons are unrecognizable or that the current generation doesn’t have an ability to discuss the ideas of a particular movie and why that particular movie is unique. I think the real problem is the current generation doesn’t WANT to have those conversations nor is it capable of discussing the ideas independent of the works of art. Nor is it capable of gleaning out what IS important about those iconic movies if it ever did get around to watching it.
I think what is missing is not the watching of those movies, but teaching the generation to simultaneously WANT to appreciate older art forms AND to be able to understand the “language” and “grammar” of those older art forms in order to have the *ideas* conversation to contribute to the Great Conversation.
I can’t continue, this has been too much of a stream of consciousness monologue. I wanted to explore the role of the Democratization of Art due to production and communication technology and it’s role in diluting GOOD art while simultaneously, on occasion, producing GREAT art. I wanted to explore the role of education and “culture leaders” in selecting what ought to be seen as GREAT art (and their general failure at doing so). And several other topics.
But I guess we’ll just have to settle with my focus on this being too much of a burden on the modern generation to REMEMBER every last detail of the previous generation’s artistic output. I think the burden is on the generation that wants remembrance fight its own personal attachment to many works and really cull out what IS iconic from what is just semi-iconic. And focus on the excellent contributions.
Ethics Alarms 
I can’t continue, this has been too much of a stream of consciousness monologue. I wanted to explore the role of the Democratization of Art due to production and communication technology and it’s role in diluting GOOD art while simultaneously, on occasion, producing GREAT art. I wanted to explore the role of education and “culture leaders” in selecting what ought to be seen as GREAT art (and their general failure at doing so). And several other topics.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Great comment, and a really good point of view to bring up. Tough I’m not even sure that a generation deciding what is iconic is possible. It’s a messy mismash, because if you look at any time period you have works that are iconic and influential, works that are influential but not iconic (the quote about The Velvet Underground only selling 30,000 albums, but everyone who bought one started a band,) and works that are popular at the time but neither influential nor iconic.
And on top of that, different eras often go back in history and pick up things that had fallen out of fashion or didn’t have much to say to people at the the time they were published, but in a new situation they seem new and daring and exciting and they become iconic of an era to people generations after the fact.
So, it’s really impossible to say at any given time “THESE are the works that people need to see!” I’m a huge believer in cultural literacy, but cultural literacy shifts as new works are added and old ones are forgotten or rediscovered.
If I recall, Jack pointed out that most people know Jimmy Stewart from It’s a Wonderful Life because of its association with Christmas, which is true. But it’s equally true that most people couldn’t tell you the plot of any ballet other than The Nutcracker for the same reason. Was The Nutcracker the most popular ballet when it was produced, or the best ballet ever? Was it the one that 19th century ballet goers would have picked out and promoted as iconic? Probably not. We just wander around all December humming “DUT-dada-da-da-da-DA-da-da.”
But it’s worth noting that every December hundreds of thousands of people actually sit down and watch a ballet. (Not to mention that sales of those tickets prop up ballet companies across the country.)
So, it kind of boils down to, you take what you get.
A few random thoughts on this (unlike Tex’s thoughtful cogitation):
At age sixty-six, I’m still trying to make my way through my junior to senior year of high school recommended reading list. Remember those? I finished all of “Recapturing Lost Time,” or, as it was called when I was in high school, “Remembrance of Things Past.” It probably took me at least three years. I’m a slow reader and three pages of good literature are about all I can absorb in a sitting. I’m reading Dostoyevsky now. Finished “The Idiot” and am nearly done with “The Brothers Karamozov.” I’ve read “War and Peace.” My personal conclusions: Proust is tremendous, beats James Joyce all to hell, Dostoyevsky is down right strange and Tolstoy is kind of boring. I’ve re-read a lot of Henry James and T.S. Eliot. They both strike me as being fairly preposterous now that I’ve lived a life myself. So what have I learned? Beats me. But I guess I feel a little cultured.
Having graduated from college in 1973 and living in New Haven, CT I remember shopping in a little neighborhood grocery store one afternoon. There was no Muzak. Instead, a small plug-in radio sat on top of one of the aisles of stock. The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” came on the radio. The five or ten people in the store automatically began grooving to the music. Which I thought was kind of funny given the fact we’d spent our high school years making fun of our parents for liking Glenn Miller or Frank Sinatra. Clearly, we were, even at that early stage, becoming our parents.
Driving around my daughter and her eighth grade classmates in the late ’80s, one of the girls asked the car, “Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”
After a forty year hiatus, I went back to taking piano lessons at age fifty. I’ve been at it for seventeen or so years. Am I getting much better? Who knows. Is it a great way to commune with the giants of classical music? Yes. Am I a natural? No. But it’s a nice way to spend time. Does it make any more sense than playing golf? Not sure but I did quit golf after fifteen years or so to go back to the piano.
My forty year old son just informed me he recently watched “The Great Escape” with his nine year old son, saying, “I could never get [my wife] to watch it with me but she did birth me a son who would. Next: ‘The Godfather.'” To which my reaction was “Isn’t the Godfather a little violent?” Of course, my son was famous for saying to his grandmother, when she asked him. age eight, whether the James Bond movies he liked to watch on the Betamax were “a little too violent and sexual,” replied casually, “Sometimes I like a little sex and violence.”
I guess my conclusion is I’m not as downbeat as Jack. Half the world’s below the fiftieth percentile so lots of people aren’t going to give a rat’s ass about Cary Grant. And as Tex articulates, there’s a heck of a lot to familiarize one’s self with. Nor am I a progressive who thinks humankind is always getting better. It’s not. I’m more an Old Testament/Hebraic guy who has come to believe every generation has to make its own mistakes and learn its lessons the hard way. Lord knows we’re really good at worshiping any number of golden calves.
In any event, I guess I’ll just keep plodding through the big time literature and music. Lord knows why. It’s a fairly futile exercise. But in the long run, we’re all dead. ‘C’est la vie,’ say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
“Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” just sent me to the hospital. Thanks a bunch.
Hah! Hard to make that stuff up, isn’t it? Out of the mouths of twelve year-olds…
Doubly ironic insofar as once Lennon and McCartney parted ways, they both became saccharine and ineffective. How many pop songs are worse than “Band on the Run?” You’d probably say, “Imagine” is certainly one.
My classically trained pianist friend/piano teacher has always claimed it was the classically trained George Martin that was the real driving force behind the success and significance of The Beatles.
“Catalyst” is the best term, I think.
“I guess my conclusion is I’m not as downbeat as Jack. Half the world’s below the fiftieth percentile so lots of people aren’t going to give a rat’s ass about Cary Grant. And as Tex articulates, there’s a heck of a lot to familiarize one’s self with. Nor am I a progressive who thinks humankind is always getting better. It’s not.”
The thing is, I generally share Jack’s lament as it pertains to people being illiterate about culture, art, and ideas in general. I don’t know if I share the lament as it pertains to exactly what needs to be remembered. I know this: we currently aren’t remembering enough or internalizing enough to pass on a rich culture to the next generation, but I don’t know if we aren’t remembering enough film works or dance works…
Hello there Tex. Did you compile the reading list in a form that you could share here?
Here
Apology:
It’s long. It’s a compilation of several source’s notion of essential or great reading. It was a start, so maybe it has left out some works that should be included, maybe it has some items that aren’t better than clap-trap. But I think it’s a good survey illustrating my concerns I raise in the post.
I must amend my claim in my post about also needing to memorize a ton of playwrights, because the list includes significant plays & playwrights as well.
The number 930 is inaccurate. I cannot say which direction it is inaccurate as I cleaned up the list of duplicates I also noticed several lines that mention being compendiums of works.
“Isn’t the Godfather a little violent?”
You’s want violent? Goodfellas, HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” “Deadwood,” “The Sopranos?” Fuggeddaboudit!
One of the most violent movie scenes I ever saw was in “Revenge,” after Tibey Mendez (Anthony Quinn [The Eskimo?]) found out his “pal” (Kevin Costner’s Jay Cochran) had been schtupping Miryea (the tres comely Madeleine Stowe)
Trigger Warning: NSFW!!
“The five or ten people in the store automatically began grooving to the music.”
“Aural Sex” is the auditory equivalent to a ”secret handshake,” am I right?
That’s one ugly movie.
Paul, I used to think “Goodfellas” (Bang. Bang, Bang. “Die fucker!”) was a few magnitudes more violent than “The Godfather.” But upon seeing “The Godfather” recently, I’ve been rethinking that. “The Godfather” is brutal. Maybe the lush cinematography disguises it. There are probably more people killed on screen in “The Godfather” than in “Goodfellas.” Is there a movie body count website?
”Is there a movie body count website?”
‘Bout a 1000 of ’em.
Try this one, Godfather & Goodfellas didn’t even make the Top 15.
You’ll be surprised at a couple of them, especially the 1st Place.
https://screenrant.com/deadliest-movies-highest-body-count-kills/
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‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
John Galsworthy
The Forsyth Saga
John Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
John Keats
Poems and Letters
John Locke
A Letter Concerning Toleration
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
John Millington Synge
Collected Plays
John Milton
Areopagitica
Complete poems written in English
English Minor Poems
Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems;
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Samson Agonistes
Tractate of Education
John Ruskin
Modern Painters
The Queen of the Air
The Stones of Venice
Unto This Last
John Stuart Mill
Autobiography
Considerations on Representative Government
On Liberty
Utilitarianism
John Webster
The Duchess of Malfi
The White Devil
John Woolman
The Journal of John Woolman
Jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver’s Travels
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
Lord Jim
Nostromo
The Secret Agent
Under Western Eyes
Victory
Joseph Lister
On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery
Juan Valera
Pepita Jimenez
Karel Čapek
R.U.R.
War with the Newts
Karl Barth
The Word of God and the Word of Man
Karl Marx
Capital
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Kate Chopin
The Awakening
Katherine Mansfield
The Short Stories
Kelvin
The Tides
The Wave Theory of Light
Knut Hamsun
Hunger
Pan
Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Leo Tolstoy
A Confession
Anna Karenina, part 1
Anna Karenina, part 2
Ivan the Fool
Short Novels
The Cossacks
The Power of Darkness
War and Peace
Lewis Carroll
Complete Works
Lodovico Ariosto
Orlando Furioso
Louis Pasteur
Scientific papers
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
Lucretius
On the Nature of Things
The Way Things Are
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations
Luigi Pirandello
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Machiavelli
The Mandrake, a Comedy
The Prince
Maksim Gorky
Autobiography
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past: “Swann in Love”
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations
Marcus Tullius Cicero
On the Gods
Marguerite de Navarre
The Heptameron
Maria Edgeworth
Castle Rackrent
Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Complete Short Stories
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog
Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger
Pudd’nhead Wilson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
The Devil’s Racetrack
Martin Heidegger
What Is Metaphysics?
Martin Luther
On the Freedom of a Christian
The Ninety-Five Theses
To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Orlando Innamorato
Matthew Arnold
Essays
Poems
Max Planck
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Max Weber
Essays in Sociology (selections)
Menander
The Girl from Samos
Michael Faraday
Experimental Researches in Electricity
The Chemical History of a Candle
The Forces of Matter
Michel de Montaigne
Essays
Miguel de Cervantes
Exemplary Stories
The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha
Mikhail Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time
Narrative Poems
Miles Franklin
My Brilliant Career
Molière
Don Juan
Ridiculous Precieuses;
School for Husbands
Tartuffe
The Critique of the School for Wives
The Imaginary Invalid
The Learned Ladies
The Misanthrope
The Miser
The School for Wives
The Would-Be Gentleman
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron
The Spirit of the Laws
Nathanael West
A Cool Million
Miss Lonelyhearts
The Day of the Locust
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Notebooks
Rappaccini’s Daughter
Tales and Sketches
The Marble Faun
The Scarlet Letter
Nicolaus Copernicus
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
Nicomachus of Gerasa
Introduction to Arithmetic
Niels Bohr
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections)
Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology
Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls
The Complete Tales
The Government Inspector
Oliver Goldsmith
She Stoops to Conquer
The Deserted Village
The Traveller
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
Oscar Wilde
Letters
Plays
The Artist as Critic
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Ovid
Heroides
Metamorphoses
The Art of Love
P. Cornelius Tacitus
The Annals
The Histories
Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Life is a Dream
The Doctor of His Own Honor
The Mayor of Zalamea
The Mighty Magician
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry
Poems
The Cenci
Petrarch
Lyric Poems
Selections
Petronius
Satyricon
Philip Massinger
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Philip Nichols
Sir Francis Drake Revived
Philip Sidney
An Apology for Poetry
Astrophel and Stella
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
Pierre Corneille
Polyeucte
Plato
Apology
Charmides
Cratylus
Critias
Crito
Euthydemus
Euthyphro
Gorgias
Ion
Laches
Laws
Lysis
Meno
Parmenides
Phaedo
Phaedrus
Philebus
Protagoras
Sophist
Statesman
Symposium
The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett)
The Republic
The Seventh Letter
Theaetetus
Timaeus
Pliny the Younger
Letters
Plotinus
The Six Enneads
Plutarch
Moralia
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Ptolemy
Almagest, part 1
R. H. Tawney
The Acquisitive Society
Ralph Waldo Emerson
English Traits
Essays
Journals
Nature
Poems
Representative Men
The Conduct of Life
René Descartes
Discourse on the Method
Meditations on First Philosophy
Objections Against the Meditations and Replies
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
The Geometry
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The Rivals
The School for Scandal
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Two Years Before the Mast
Robert Browning
A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon
Poems
The Ring and the Book
Robert Burns
Poems and songs
Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Herrick
Poems
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Essays
Kidnapped
The Master of Ballantrae
The New Arabian Nights
Treasure Island
Weir of Hermiston
Robert Maynard Hutchins; Mortimer Adler
The Great Conversation
Ronald Firbank
Five Novels
Rousseau
A Discourse on Political Economy
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Émile
La Nouvelle Héloïse
On the Inequality among Mankind
Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar
The Confessions
The Social Contract
Rudyard Kipling
Collected Stories
Complete Verse
Kim
Puck of Pook’s Hill
Saki
The Short Stories
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Butler
Erewhon
Hudibras
The Way of All Flesh
Samuel Johnson
Works
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa
Pamela
Sir Charles Grandison
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poems and Prose
Sappho
Sappho
Seneca
Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
Religious Texts
Judeo-Christianity: Hebrew: Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes
Judeo-Christianity: Christian I (Luke): Luke and Acts
Judeo-Christiniaty: Christian II (Paul): Corinthians I and II and hymns
Islam: Chapters from the Koran
Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita
Buddhist: Writings
Confucian: The sayings of Confucius
Several
Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
Sigmund Freud
A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Civilization and Its Discontents
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Observations on “Wild” Psycho-Analysis
On Narcissism
Repression
Selected Papers on Hysteria
The Ego and the Id
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
The Interpretation of Dreams
The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
The Unconscious
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
Simon Newcomb
The Extent of the Universe
Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt
It Can’t Happen Here
Sophocles
Ajax
Antigone
Electra
Oedipus at Colonus
Oedipus the King
Philoctetes
The Oedipus Cycle
The Trachiniae
Søren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling
Stendhal
On Love
The Charterhouse of Parma
The Red and the Black
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
Tacitus
Germany
Terence
The Eunuch
The Girl from Andros
The Mother-in-Law
Theodor Fontane
Trials and Tribulations
Theodor Storm
The Rider on the White Horse
Theodore Dreiser
An American Tragedy
Sister Carrie
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Genetics and the Origin of Species
Theophile Gautier
Enamels and Cameos
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Thomas á Kempis
The Imitation of Christ
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica
Thomas Browne
Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
Religio Medici
The Garden of Cyrus
Thomas Carlyle
Characteristics
Inaugural Address at Edinburgh
Sartor Resartus
Selected Prose
Sir Walter Scott
Thomas de Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Selected Prose
Thomas Dekker
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
Thomas Hardy
Collected Poems
Far From the Madding Crowd
Jude the Obscure;
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Return of the Native
The Well-Beloved
The Woodlanders
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Thomas Love Peacock
Gryll Grange
Nightmare Abbey
Thomas Malory
Le Morte D’Arthur
The Holy Grail
Thomas Mann
Death in Venice
Thomas More
Utopia
Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveller
Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Thucydides
History of the Peloponnesian War
Tobias Smollett
The Adventures of Roderick Random
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Tommaso Campanella
Poems
The City of the Sun
Victor Hugo
God
Victor Hugo
Les Misérables
Notre Dame de Paris
The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems
The End of Satan
The Toilers of the Sea
William Shakespeare
Virgil
Aeneid
Eclogues
Georgics
Virginia Woolf
Between the Acts
Mrs. Dalloway
Orlando: A Biography
The Waves
To the Lighthouse
Voltaire
Candide
Letters on the English
The Lisbon Earthquake
Zadig
W. B. Yeats
A Vision
Collected Plays
Mythologies
The Collected Poems
Walter Raleigh
The Discovery of Guiana
Walter Scott
Guy Mannering
Old Mortality
Redgauntlet
The Heart of Midlothian
Waverley
Washington Irving
Rip Van Winkle
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Sketch Book
Werner Heisenberg
Physics and Philosophy
Wilkie Collins
No Name
The Moonstone
The Woman in White
Willa Cather
A Lost Lady
My Antonia
The Professor’s House
William Blake
Complete Poetry and Prose
William Cowper
Poetical Works
William Dean Howells
A Modern Instance
The Rise of Silas Lapham
William Faulkner
A Rose for Emily
William Gilbert
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
William Harrison
A Description of Elizabethan England
William Harvey
On the Circulation of Blood
On the Generation of Animals
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
William Hazlitt
Essays and Criticism
William James
Pragmatism
The Principles of Psychology
The Varieties of Religious Experience
William Makepeace Thackeray
The History of Henry Esmond
Vanity Fair, pt 1
Vanity Fair, pt 2
William Morris
Early Romances
News from Nowhere
Poems
The Earthly Paradise
The Well at the World’s End
William Penn
Fruits of Solitude
William Roper
The Life of Sir Thomas More
William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
All’s Well That Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Julius Caesar
King Henry the Fourth, Part 1
King Henry the Fourth, Part 2
King Henry the Sixth, Part 1
King Henry the Sixth, Part 2
King Henry the Sixth, Part 3
King Lear
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Macbeth
Measure for Measure
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello, the Moor of Venice
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Romeo and Juliet
Sonnets
The Comedy of Errors
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
The Life and Death of King John
The Life of King Henry the Fifth
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
The Tragedy of Richard the Third
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter’s Tale
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
William Wordsworth
Poems
The Prelude
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Parzival
Unknown
The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Song of Roland
The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
Utnapishtim
Beowulf
No Ayn Rand in that list…
No Heinlein…
Hm.
That is an amazing list! How fun it would be to discuss some of those titles!
You might be interested in the St John’s Program, here is its reading list:
Click to access Undergraduate_Seminar_Reading_List_Santa_Fe.pdf