Great Books

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (1608)

Coriolanus is the third and last play Shakespeare wrote on Roman history, based on the Plutarch's Lives. In Coriolanus we see Shakespeare's ultimate teaching concerning the political and man's ultimate ends. Man’s attachment to and apprehension of the whole is our highest longing. However, we are too limited to see and properly belong to beings as a whole, so man turns to a smaller whole: the community. Man is a political animal, as per the analysis of Aristotle. Only a beast or a god can live outside of a community. Coriolanus attempts to be both beast-like and god-like in living outside the limits of the community. This attempt ultimately fails. The image of the whole that is our proper home is the "body politic", and Menenius' fable of the belly is an articulation of this. In the play, however, we see the disintegration of the body politic: the parts do not see their belonging together as a whole. While the superior is dependent on the inferior, the inside on the outside, the civilized on the barbarian, the patrician on the plebeian, the performer on the audience, and the man on the woman – and while this dependency works in the opposite direction as well -- the tragedy of Rome in the play is that both sides (Coriolanus and the Plebs) forget this interdependence. We could say that this is a tragedy of the political writ large: i.e., no political arrangement can satisfy human longing which is radically contradictory.

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children (1862)

During the 1860's, Turgenev's Fathers and Children was the most important and widely-read Russian novel. Turgenev was responding to generational changes in the Russian progressive movement of his time. Since the early decades of the 19th Century, there had been progressives in Russia, often called "Westernizers", who wanted to modernize the social and intellectual conditions of their country by adopting liberal, Western ideas. As with so many revolutionary movements, these progressive liberals of the generation of the 1830's and 1840's were to be seen by the more radical generation of the 1860's as being too conservative in wanting to preserve traditional elements of Russian society. Turgenev gives a voice and full articulation of the perspective of each of these generations in the fathers and the children of the title. Notably, in the character of Bazarov, Turgenev presents the figure of the "nihilist" -- one who believes nothing of the old order or traditional authority should be preserved. Bazarov believes only in the truths of science. We come to see, however, man cannot believe in nothing. Bazarov ultimate falls in love with Madame Odintsova, despite his attempts to remain scientifically detached and see her beautiful body as something only fit for a dissecting table (Chapter 15).

Sophocles, Oedipus the King (429 BCE)

Sophocles' tragedy is probably the most influential dramatic work in the Western canon, having formed the basis for Aristotle's famous reflections on the tragic form in his Poetics, which in turn formed a blueprint of sorts for later tragedians. The play presents a thoughtful and moving articulation of the human condition: attempting to make sense of the cosmos through the use of our unaided human reason, but ultimately frustrated by an overpowering fate that cannot be avoided. Oedipus and Jocasta both in their own ways question the validity of oracles, believing that these messages from the gods are either untrue or can be avoided. In this way, Oedipus, that most acute of men, able to solve of the riddle of the Sphinx, is blind to who his own identity.

Anton Chekhov, A Boring Story (1889)

Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) was a Russian dramatist and short fiction writer.     Chekhov’s fiction had a tremendous influence on the fiction of the first half of the Twentieth Century, the fiction of “Modernism”. "A Boring Story" is about the last days of a dying medical professor, Nikolai Stepanovich. During this time, he comes to question the prevailing presuppositions he had concerning the meaning of his life.  

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

This is the most profound work by the most profound literary author since Shakespeare. In this work, his magnum opus, Dostoevsky presents the case for a thorough-going atheism or a nihilism motivated by a human-centered reason in the form of the rational rebellion of Ivan Karamazov. Ivan's tale of "The Grand Inquisitor" is rightly famous as an articulation of this rational nihilism. However, Dostoevsky also presents the complete response to Ivan's rationality gone wild. In the end, the novel affirms a spiritual purpose for humanity, bound by love and responsibility for our fellow humans. The novel ultimately asserts that we are all our brothers' keepers.

Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

More's masterpiece presents many interpretive challenges. I think More's intention comes into focus if we see the work in its entirety a response to Plato's Republic. The Platonic structure of ascent and descent, first commented upon by Eric Voegelin, is reversed in More's work. More's work begins with a descent into the underworld of unjust regimes and then an ascent by means of the articulation of the good regime, Utopia. 

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE)

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is a detailed account and analysis of the fifth-century BCE war between Sparta and Athens and their respective allies. Thucydides has been called the first "scientific historian" as well as the father of the school of "political realism".  My interpretation of Thucydides is largely shaped by that of Leo Strauss.  This interpretation questions both of these aspects of traditional Thucydides scholarship. In relation to the supposedly scientific basis of Thucydides history, the assumption here is that Thucydides follows standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering as well as an analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the deities. However, rather than approach history as a scientific "object" of theoretical reflection, his approach is in fact more “phenomenological”. That is, Thucydides approaches the political phenomena as they arise “for us”.  So too, in terms of his supposed "political realism" -- i.e., that all political and international relations are based on brute self-interest and power relations, not on higher values or ideals --  we can see that in fact his analysis of the causes of the war emphasize the justice or injustice of certain acts in relation to existing treaties, for instance. Rather than reducing the political to power relations, rather than merely side with the position of the Athenians in the "Melian Dialogue", Thucydides carves out a space for a certain "humanity" in political and international affairs.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)

Dostoevsky's novel redefines the genre of the crime novel.  In Dostoevky's novel, the reader knows the perpetrator of the act from the beginning, yet the novel maintains suspense and the reader's attention in relation to the ways in which the consequences of the crime effect the psyche of the murderer, Raskolnikov. The novel explores the consequences of modern nihilism in a profound way.  Dostoevsky was writing within the context of Russian thinking about nihilism. In this context, nihilism consists of the sense that there is no Platonic or Christian "other-world" to anchor truth and meaning.  Raskolnikov commits the murder out of a sense that he is an "uber-mensch" who can stand above the laws of humanity in the wake of this realization of nihilism. However, after the crime Raskolnikov is confronted by his limits. Even if merely human laws could not be seen to constrain him, some sort of mystical, Christian law, represented most clearly by Sonya.

William Shakespeare, Henry V (1599)

Shakespeare's writings form the centre of the Western Canon according to Harold Bloom. Henry V is the last play in Shakespeare's second "tetralogy" of English History plays.  Along with the two parts of Henry IV, it is the most comic of Shakespeare's "History" plays.  The play presents the world of Kings and Princes and their concerns  with war and ruling the state along with the world of dissolute lower class characters concerned only with thieving and with drinking. As Henry V himself says, perhaps only "ceremony" separates these two ways of life. The play presents Henry V as the closest embodiment of the ideal ruler that is possible in his mixture of Machiavellian realism with a veneer of religious piety.

Homer, Iliad (ca. 750 BCE)

Homer is the foundational poet of the Western tradition. His epics have had an incalculable influence on later thinkers and writers. The Iliad contains the defining treatment of the Trojan War.  Homer's poem explores in great depth the inter-related themes of war and death.  In the Homeric world, humans find meaning in their lives through honour (time) and glory (kleos). In this light, the distinction between gods and mortals is particularly highlighted by Homer in the Iliad. The ultimate significance of Homer's poem is the way it sheds light on the human condition and the meaning we, in distinction from the gods, can find in finite human existence. 

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)

The subtitle of Eliot's masterpiece is "A Study of Provincial Life". The novel operates as a type of scientific study, while also pointing to the limits of a traditional scientific outlook. Eliot's approach to the "study" of human life is to emphasize the local and particular features of a community. While set in the period leading up to the Reform Act of 1832, the events and movements at the level of national political movements are removed to the far background.  Politics happens at the level of personal relationships within a tight-knit community.  Eliot's real master stroke in the novel is to bring the reader to see the points of view of various characters with whom one originally felt they would be least liable to sympathize. For instance, the reader is even asked to sympathize with Casaubon in Chapter 29. Eliot's moral teaching of sympathetic understanding is unmatched in the novel form.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (55 BCE)

Epicureanism is an ancient Greek philosophy based on the teachings of Epicurus (341 - 270 BCE). It teaches that the greatest good is to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility, freedom from fear (ataraxia) and absence of bodily pain (aponia). Lucretius' On the Nature of Things sets Epicureanism into verse. While falling into oblivion during the Middle Ages, his work was re-discovered in a German monastery in 1417 by a Florentine bibliophile named Poggio Braccionlini. Stephen Greenblatt makes the case, in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012) , that this accidental occurrence had the profound effect of contributing to the re-birth of scientific inquiry in Europe and ushering in the Modern age.  

Virgil, Aeneid (29 - 19 BCE)

The Aeneid is the great national epic of ancient Rome and one of the most important works of literature in the Western tradition. In terms of my own personal favourite works of literature, the Aeneid is probably second only to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Both works evoke a sweeping view of human history, a complexity and depth of literary allusion, and are of the highest poetic quality.

The Aeneid was written in the years 29 – 19 BCE by the Roman poet Virgil.  It describes the adventures of the titular hero, Aeneas, who overcomes monumental challenges to fulfil his destiny of founding the Roman people. In this way, the epic provides a “foundation myth” for the Roman people and celebrates the greatness of their achievements.

Over the last 2000 years, the Aeneid has been used as a pagan bible, a Latin style manual, a moral allegory, and a document of European unity. It retains its enduring power to move the soul as few other works in the history of literature can.

As such, the Aeneid has a secure spot on my list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western Canon.  

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67)

Tristram Shandy is perhaps the most idiosyncratic work in the Western canon. Sterne’s work defies all generic distinctions and seems to purposefully frustrate the reader’s expectations for a storyline or for an overall point or moral. The novel seems to have no plot in the conventional sense of the term. It proceeds, rather, as a random sticking together of events and stories that bear in one way or another on Tristram's unhappy life.  Amid the chaos of the narrative form and the endless digression, Sterne’s ultimate message seems to be one of humility and patience

Ultimately, however, the design of the novel, or lack thereof, means that the reader is left helplessly adrift in the seemingly meaningless shifts of events. I have therefore demoted this novel from its original standing in the list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western Canon.  The work does provoke a thoughtful reflection on ultimate questions, however. Thus, it retains its place, of course, on my list of 1001 Great Books of the Western Canon.

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Defoe’s novel is an oscillation between a search for a Divine providential meaning in the plights of existence and a more secular interpretation of phenomena.  The essay shows how Crusoe as narrator tries to reflect back on his journey as a sort of spiritual self-discovery; however, his own actions and deepest passions (in the form of his naturalistic interpretation of events on the island as well as his excessive attachment to wealth) undermine this spiritual orientation. This oscillation between the explanatory frameworks offered by Christianity and secular modernity, I assert, make the novel still relevant and powerful for us today.