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The Western Literary Canon in Context
An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here
The Western literary canon has come to epitomize the official—and sometimes controversial—list of works that every educated person should know.
Among its more than 3,000 works are the Odyssey, Beowulf, Hamlet, and War and Peace—all of which have stood the test of time to become essential aspects of Western culture and our reading lives. Even if you haven't read some of them, you've undoubtedly heard of them—their mere titles are synonymous with greatness.
But what exactly is the Western literary canon? Why does it contain certain works and not others?
What is its history? What is its future?
Most important: What do particular works in the Western canon tell us about the development of literature and civilization?
You explore these and other thought-provoking questions in The Western Literary Canon in Context, a thorough investigation of more than 30 key works of the Western canon and the critical roles they played—and continue to play—in the development of Western literature. Over the course of 36 lectures, award-winning professor and author John M. Bowers of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas takes you from the formation of the Bible to the postcolonial literature of the late 20th century, revealing the exciting stories behind these classic works and their often surprising connections with one another.
It's an insightful approach that will reshape your thoughts about the evolution of literature and will open your eyes to the hidden dialogue among Western civilization's most cherished and influential authors.
The Western literary canon has come to epitomize the official—and sometimes controversial—list of works that every educated person should know.
Among its more than 3,000 works are the Odyssey, Beowulf, Hamlet, and War and Peace—all of which have stood the test of time to become essential aspects of Western culture and our reading lives. Even if you haven't read some of them, you've undoubtedly heard of them—their mere titles are synonymous with greatness.
But what exactly is the Western literary canon? Why does it contain certain works and not others?
What is its history? What is its future?
Most important: What do particular works in the Western canon tell us about the development of literature and civilization?
You explore these and other thought-provoking questions in The Western Literary Canon in Context, a thorough investigation of more than 30 key works of the Western canon and the critical roles they played—and continue to play—in the development of Western literature. Over the course of 36 lectures, award-winning professor and author John M. Bowers of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas takes you from the formation of the Bible to the postcolonial literature of the late 20th century, revealing the exciting stories behind these classic works and their often surprising connections with one another.
It's an insightful approach that will reshape your thoughts about the evolution of literature and will open your eyes to the hidden dialogue among Western civilization's most cherished and influential authors.
19 pages, Audio CD
First published January 1, 2008
11 people are currently reading
194 people want to read
About the author
John M. Bowers
14 books8 followersDr. John M. Bowers is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He holds a B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and an M.Phil. from The University of Oxford, where he was also a Rhodes Scholar. Before joining the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Professor Bowers taught at the University of Virginia, Hamilton College, the California Institute of Technology, and Princeton University.
Professor Bowers has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center at Bellagio, Italy. Among his many teaching recognitions are a Nevada Regents' Teaching Award.
A widely published scholar, Professor Bowers has written four books, including The Politics of "Pearl": Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II and Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition; more than 30 articles and essays; and entries in the 2006 Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature.
Professor Bowers has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center at Bellagio, Italy. Among his many teaching recognitions are a Nevada Regents' Teaching Award.
A widely published scholar, Professor Bowers has written four books, including The Politics of "Pearl": Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II and Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition; more than 30 articles and essays; and entries in the 2006 Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
June 3, 2020
[3.5] This was lively and engaging, like all Great Courses lectures I've listened to at time of writing. I was glad the lecturer is a medievalist, as survey courses in these commercial lecture series, and general survey history books supposedly covering the year dot to the present often rush through the middle ages and spend 70% of the time on post-1800 - whereas here the most recent times only get about 1/3. However, there were some flaws.
There are too many inaccuracies, and exciting but tenuous connections. It felt more like an academic speculating in the pub, or a conversation between people who graduated years ago. I was thinking of this series as a guilty pleasure when I bought it, but I didn't think it would be one in *this* way: it's fun like some bad history can be, like theories that are a little too much of a stretch. On average, at least every 15 minutes there was something that sounded questionable, that I'd have liked to check, but it would have been too time consuming to follow up each one. (I can't be sure everything I repeat below is correct.)
When I did check, I usually found something slightly off, e.g. In a particularly concrete example, he refers to Benjamin Franklin's great-grandfather who strapped an English Bible under a footstool because it was forbidden to read the Bible in English. This didn't add up chronologically, so I researched it. I found that a) Franklin, in his memoir had referred to his great-great-grandfather and said that it happened during the reign of Mary I (1553-58), and b) the great-great-grandfather was born in 1540, therefore probably had a teenage memory of something his own father or grandfather had done. I sincerely doubt that the lecturer was the first person to take a copy of Moby Dick to Lhasa. (See Seven Years in Tibet for mentions of American goods available there in the 1940s.) Sometimes other sources did partially substantiate, e.g. the Arab world may have got paper from Chinese merchants - though it wasn't imported to Islamic Spain from China.
For comparison, the Great Courses The Black Death by Dorsey Armstrong, which I listened to around the same time as the second half of Bowers on the Western Canon, is meticulous. It's a subject area I know well and Armstrong had clearly checked her information (as well as delivering an interesting set of lectures). Bowers, meanwhile, seems to be extemporising, and I suspected he hadn't closely read some of the books for years. (A few other GR reviewers mention errors about Boethius.) Whilst I enjoyed these lectures, and they did tell me some new things, from a current academic, I'd expect greater accuracy.
Bowers is heavily reliant on Harold Bloom's ideas and 1992 book about the Western Canon, although he is not as conservative or pessimistic as Bloom (which displeased a few hardline conservative reviewers on Audible and Amazon). I'm old enough to remember the controversy about Bloom's book in the 90s; I was a teenager at the time, it helped form my fascination with the canon and especially with canon wars - but I never got round to reading it cover to cover, so Bowers' Bloom-centric approach was initially what I wanted. By the last third of the lecture series, however, this centrist Democrat (I would guess) summarising Bloom began to pall, and I started to wonder how many ideas of his own Bowers had to add. He was always returning to Bloom's ideas about anxiety of influence, the son challenging the father, and the pugilistic sense of competition between canonical writers. I don't mean Bowers should have simply reiterated social justice arguments against the canon. There is tons of material about those freely accessible on Twitter and literary websites. I'd like to hear something different. Personally, I would lean more heavily on other historical conditions and how they affected and produced the canon… y'know, that in Context in the title. It seemed like Bowers only went big on this aspect for the Age of Exploration and post-colonialism. There is hardly anything here about, for example, industrialisation and the creation of the mass audience, although that's integral to why this set of lectures exists, and how the 'Great Books', for a while in the 20th century, were a big deal to Americans.
Bowers was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College Oxford; this was clearly a formative experience for him, and it makes for a few interesting connections - but he brings in other old Merton alumni and tutors more often than he strictly needs to. These include John Wycliffe, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien, they are hardly irrelevant - and some listeners will find it refreshing to hear a fantasy writer like Tolkien so enthusiastically included in the canon. But if, in the second half of the series, you based a drinking game on it, you might pass out, there are so many references to Mertonians.
I reckon The Teaching Company know that they have a considerable audience among conservative white Christian Americans. Whilst the company doesn't seem to expect lecturers to be conservative themselves, it seems as if, on European history topics, they expect a Eurocentric focus that would look old fashioned on a current university curriculum. (Topics on Global South countries, or non-Christian religions, get their own separate lecture series, which said white conservatives are probably less likely to buy.) Bowers says at one point that he usually teaches Dante alongside Rumi - the comparative, international approach expected in universities these days. Is there anything more about Rumi in these lectures? Nope. But he still wasn't conservative and proud enough about The Western Canon to please certain reviewers on Audible.
This is largely a fiction canon - plus some philosophy that was especially influential on literature, Aristotle's Poetics, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and Augustine's Confessions - with a bias towards prose fiction once that comes on stream; it's not the version of the western canon that emphasises philosophy and political theory. The arguments (not part of these lectures) for those on the left still to read the latter, non-fiction, canon, especially the political theory, are the most powerful too - it's a way to more deeply understand their political context and the arguments of their opponents, and therefore they should not cede the canon to the right. The fiction canon can be essential to understanding some works of contemporary literature: all those feminist re-tellings of Greek myths published in recent years, for example; and the 2020 International Booker longlist had several novels on it which were openly influenced by classics from the 17th to the 20th century. Bowers doesn't directly address why one may still want to, or should, read the canon - but it's likely that if you're listening to 19 hours of lectures about it for personal interest, you don't need much persuading.
Ironically, the traditionally accepted cultural boundaries of 'the West', of what comprises the 'Western Canon', of course extend further east, and a little south from Europe when going back to ancient times. (One suspects a defining point is 'before Islam'.) Bowers explains Western, in this context, as meaning that descended from the Bible, the Greeks and Rome; the first text that gets a lecture to itself is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which, as he says, was (re)discovered too recently to have been incorporated as fully into the canon as Classical texts (known since the Renaissance or earlier). While Bowers doesn't go into political and social history and ideas a great deal, he does use the history of the book as context for the canon: the Mesopotamians, were, he says, the first known civilisation to make lists of literary works. Their books were lost for so long because they were conquered by the Persians, a power who spoke a different language, who burnt down the royal library at Nineveh. And the idea of a canon emerged from Bible scholarship: from St Eusebius' division into canon versus, the importance of authorship reflected in the New Testament, and the compilation of the Biblical canon into a one volume compendium just as the codex - the physical structure we now think of as a book - was coming into use along with vellum (which was easier to work with and erase mistakes from, and the less adaptable papyrus scrolls were becoming less popular.
Books that survived, and which became canonical, were often classroom texts, Bowers repeats at intervals throughout the lectures, one of the earliest of these, other than the two Homeric epics we still have, being the plays of Euripides. To the Greeks he traces the east-west divide, as both geography (the Bosporus) and idea (their rivalry with the Persians and the Persians as their Other). He sees an association between Western literature and the sea, that this was there from the beginning, and thinks that the English may have found the Greek texts especially resonant because of seafaring. (This seems way too Anglocentric to me.) Other traditions seem to begin here too: the production of Athenian tragedies created an idea of literature as a male competition (as Bloom saw it, and as it still frequently was into the 20th century). Greeks favoured the beginning, middle and end structure which is still normative, and Aristotle's Poetics laid down aesthetic ground-rules for literature that persisted unto the modernists: later, he quotes Virginia Woolf as criticising Ulysses for lack of Aristotelian unity, whilst she ensured that Mrs Dalloway possessed this quality. However, there are some notable differences: for example that ancient societies regarded learning sexual restraint as a key element of manliness and that this was; Bowers cites Gilgamesh; how Odysseus in recounting his adventures minimised the sexual aspects, not just because of Penelope but to seem a better person; and Aeneas and Augustine. This is another one of the sweeping ideas here that is superficially exciting but requires detail and caveats from specialists in particular eras.
Bowers considers Dante's Divine Comedy to be the greatest work in the Western Canon. Its intertextuality also shaped the canon; its Europeanness (he should really have said Christianity) is a legacy of who Dante excluded among his contemporaries; the Hebrew and Arabic poetry of medieval Spain is only now being reclaimed; Rumi's name meant 'Roman' and he would have seen himself as part of the Roman world, the eastern empire. The Divine Comedy is one of a number of landmark works that Bowers describes as great syntheses - some of these more or less end a tradition, like The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost; others begin traditions, like The Decameron and the European novel.
Dante set himself up for greatness as the father of Italian literature or even Christian European literature by placing himself at the centre of his great work, mingling with the ancients. Meanwhile, Chaucer, a century later, made himself the father of English literature by not mentioning predecessors and contemporaries. Many more Old English texts would have been extant in his time, and he would have been able to read them more easily than we could. (How much is known, if anything, about the extent to which educated late medieval men read Anglo-Saxon texts? A question not addressed here.) Due to lack of allusions, the terrible Cotton Library fire of 1731 that destroyed uncatalogued works, and other miscellaneous ravages of time, there is earlier English literature we simply don't know about. Bowers explains that Tolkien was largely responsible for (re)introducing Beowulf and other Old English texts into the English canon, both via scholarship and by sparking popular interest in them through his fantasy novels - something which hardcore fans are likely aware of, but which, for others, gives his literary significance a new dimension.
Bowers places English literature of the age of exploration in a seafaring tradition coming from The Odyssey and Beowulf. (Rather selective - more interesting and offbeat would have been a look at the changing feelings about the coast over centuries, from a place of danger in high medieval times, to the enthusiasm for rugged scenery and sea-bathing that had emerged by the 18th century.) Some more novel points (to me at least) included the observation that for most of history, great writers (e.g. Ovid, Thomas More) were trained in law more than in any other subject, with skills of rhetoric and the creation of legal fictions (hypothetical scenarios) especially relevant. The idea of the 'stealth protagonist' is useful IMO: e.g. Fortinbras as the 'real' hero of Hamlet; one can read it as a Beowulf analogue, in which he successfully sails to another country and takes it over - as Europeans were beginning to do on other continents. Moby Dick is another example of a work like this. The account of the performance of The Tempest on a ship in 1607 off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone, as something to keep the crew occupied, is intriguing; that they went off later to shoot an elephant sounds like something from the 19th century.
Whilst Bowers covers several major European writers after this, including Cervantes, Voltaire and Goethe (and some interesting points are made, including about Cervantes having a tougher life than most classic authors, and the importance of Goethe's Faust not being damned - because both Romanticism and the rise of science valued human overreaching), there is a thread of bardolatry running through, as with Bloom. The influence of Shakespeare, and others authors' reading of him, crops up regularly, and Shakespeare as part of imperialism and the globalisation of English. He relates how Stanley essentially took the canon to Africa, and had to discard books en route, like canon-formation in reverse, until he had only the Bible and Shakespeare, and then just the Bible.
More novel inclusions are The Charterhouse of Parma, and to a British reader at least, a New England/Puritan/outsider tradition. Bowers mentions that Tolstoy disliked the Aristotelian paradigm, and instead saw himself as being like Homer; he intended to be accidental and arbitrary in the manner that Henry James famously criticised. The distinctively Russian holy fool archetype means that characters such as Pierre and Myshkin are more positive than their equivalents in Western Europe, like Fabbrizio in Charterhouse. He suggests that Haji Murad - which he considers a very great book - challenges Edward Said's idea of orientalism.
Continued below in comment field.
There are too many inaccuracies, and exciting but tenuous connections. It felt more like an academic speculating in the pub, or a conversation between people who graduated years ago. I was thinking of this series as a guilty pleasure when I bought it, but I didn't think it would be one in *this* way: it's fun like some bad history can be, like theories that are a little too much of a stretch. On average, at least every 15 minutes there was something that sounded questionable, that I'd have liked to check, but it would have been too time consuming to follow up each one. (I can't be sure everything I repeat below is correct.)
When I did check, I usually found something slightly off, e.g. In a particularly concrete example, he refers to Benjamin Franklin's great-grandfather who strapped an English Bible under a footstool because it was forbidden to read the Bible in English. This didn't add up chronologically, so I researched it. I found that a) Franklin, in his memoir had referred to his great-great-grandfather and said that it happened during the reign of Mary I (1553-58), and b) the great-great-grandfather was born in 1540, therefore probably had a teenage memory of something his own father or grandfather had done. I sincerely doubt that the lecturer was the first person to take a copy of Moby Dick to Lhasa. (See Seven Years in Tibet for mentions of American goods available there in the 1940s.) Sometimes other sources did partially substantiate, e.g. the Arab world may have got paper from Chinese merchants - though it wasn't imported to Islamic Spain from China.
For comparison, the Great Courses The Black Death by Dorsey Armstrong, which I listened to around the same time as the second half of Bowers on the Western Canon, is meticulous. It's a subject area I know well and Armstrong had clearly checked her information (as well as delivering an interesting set of lectures). Bowers, meanwhile, seems to be extemporising, and I suspected he hadn't closely read some of the books for years. (A few other GR reviewers mention errors about Boethius.) Whilst I enjoyed these lectures, and they did tell me some new things, from a current academic, I'd expect greater accuracy.
Bowers is heavily reliant on Harold Bloom's ideas and 1992 book about the Western Canon, although he is not as conservative or pessimistic as Bloom (which displeased a few hardline conservative reviewers on Audible and Amazon). I'm old enough to remember the controversy about Bloom's book in the 90s; I was a teenager at the time, it helped form my fascination with the canon and especially with canon wars - but I never got round to reading it cover to cover, so Bowers' Bloom-centric approach was initially what I wanted. By the last third of the lecture series, however, this centrist Democrat (I would guess) summarising Bloom began to pall, and I started to wonder how many ideas of his own Bowers had to add. He was always returning to Bloom's ideas about anxiety of influence, the son challenging the father, and the pugilistic sense of competition between canonical writers. I don't mean Bowers should have simply reiterated social justice arguments against the canon. There is tons of material about those freely accessible on Twitter and literary websites. I'd like to hear something different. Personally, I would lean more heavily on other historical conditions and how they affected and produced the canon… y'know, that in Context in the title. It seemed like Bowers only went big on this aspect for the Age of Exploration and post-colonialism. There is hardly anything here about, for example, industrialisation and the creation of the mass audience, although that's integral to why this set of lectures exists, and how the 'Great Books', for a while in the 20th century, were a big deal to Americans.
Bowers was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College Oxford; this was clearly a formative experience for him, and it makes for a few interesting connections - but he brings in other old Merton alumni and tutors more often than he strictly needs to. These include John Wycliffe, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien, they are hardly irrelevant - and some listeners will find it refreshing to hear a fantasy writer like Tolkien so enthusiastically included in the canon. But if, in the second half of the series, you based a drinking game on it, you might pass out, there are so many references to Mertonians.
I reckon The Teaching Company know that they have a considerable audience among conservative white Christian Americans. Whilst the company doesn't seem to expect lecturers to be conservative themselves, it seems as if, on European history topics, they expect a Eurocentric focus that would look old fashioned on a current university curriculum. (Topics on Global South countries, or non-Christian religions, get their own separate lecture series, which said white conservatives are probably less likely to buy.) Bowers says at one point that he usually teaches Dante alongside Rumi - the comparative, international approach expected in universities these days. Is there anything more about Rumi in these lectures? Nope. But he still wasn't conservative and proud enough about The Western Canon to please certain reviewers on Audible.
This is largely a fiction canon - plus some philosophy that was especially influential on literature, Aristotle's Poetics, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and Augustine's Confessions - with a bias towards prose fiction once that comes on stream; it's not the version of the western canon that emphasises philosophy and political theory. The arguments (not part of these lectures) for those on the left still to read the latter, non-fiction, canon, especially the political theory, are the most powerful too - it's a way to more deeply understand their political context and the arguments of their opponents, and therefore they should not cede the canon to the right. The fiction canon can be essential to understanding some works of contemporary literature: all those feminist re-tellings of Greek myths published in recent years, for example; and the 2020 International Booker longlist had several novels on it which were openly influenced by classics from the 17th to the 20th century. Bowers doesn't directly address why one may still want to, or should, read the canon - but it's likely that if you're listening to 19 hours of lectures about it for personal interest, you don't need much persuading.
Ironically, the traditionally accepted cultural boundaries of 'the West', of what comprises the 'Western Canon', of course extend further east, and a little south from Europe when going back to ancient times. (One suspects a defining point is 'before Islam'.) Bowers explains Western, in this context, as meaning that descended from the Bible, the Greeks and Rome; the first text that gets a lecture to itself is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which, as he says, was (re)discovered too recently to have been incorporated as fully into the canon as Classical texts (known since the Renaissance or earlier). While Bowers doesn't go into political and social history and ideas a great deal, he does use the history of the book as context for the canon: the Mesopotamians, were, he says, the first known civilisation to make lists of literary works. Their books were lost for so long because they were conquered by the Persians, a power who spoke a different language, who burnt down the royal library at Nineveh. And the idea of a canon emerged from Bible scholarship: from St Eusebius' division into canon versus, the importance of authorship reflected in the New Testament, and the compilation of the Biblical canon into a one volume compendium just as the codex - the physical structure we now think of as a book - was coming into use along with vellum (which was easier to work with and erase mistakes from, and the less adaptable papyrus scrolls were becoming less popular.
Books that survived, and which became canonical, were often classroom texts, Bowers repeats at intervals throughout the lectures, one of the earliest of these, other than the two Homeric epics we still have, being the plays of Euripides. To the Greeks he traces the east-west divide, as both geography (the Bosporus) and idea (their rivalry with the Persians and the Persians as their Other). He sees an association between Western literature and the sea, that this was there from the beginning, and thinks that the English may have found the Greek texts especially resonant because of seafaring. (This seems way too Anglocentric to me.) Other traditions seem to begin here too: the production of Athenian tragedies created an idea of literature as a male competition (as Bloom saw it, and as it still frequently was into the 20th century). Greeks favoured the beginning, middle and end structure which is still normative, and Aristotle's Poetics laid down aesthetic ground-rules for literature that persisted unto the modernists: later, he quotes Virginia Woolf as criticising Ulysses for lack of Aristotelian unity, whilst she ensured that Mrs Dalloway possessed this quality. However, there are some notable differences: for example that ancient societies regarded learning sexual restraint as a key element of manliness and that this was; Bowers cites Gilgamesh; how Odysseus in recounting his adventures minimised the sexual aspects, not just because of Penelope but to seem a better person; and Aeneas and Augustine. This is another one of the sweeping ideas here that is superficially exciting but requires detail and caveats from specialists in particular eras.
Bowers considers Dante's Divine Comedy to be the greatest work in the Western Canon. Its intertextuality also shaped the canon; its Europeanness (he should really have said Christianity) is a legacy of who Dante excluded among his contemporaries; the Hebrew and Arabic poetry of medieval Spain is only now being reclaimed; Rumi's name meant 'Roman' and he would have seen himself as part of the Roman world, the eastern empire. The Divine Comedy is one of a number of landmark works that Bowers describes as great syntheses - some of these more or less end a tradition, like The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost; others begin traditions, like The Decameron and the European novel.
Dante set himself up for greatness as the father of Italian literature or even Christian European literature by placing himself at the centre of his great work, mingling with the ancients. Meanwhile, Chaucer, a century later, made himself the father of English literature by not mentioning predecessors and contemporaries. Many more Old English texts would have been extant in his time, and he would have been able to read them more easily than we could. (How much is known, if anything, about the extent to which educated late medieval men read Anglo-Saxon texts? A question not addressed here.) Due to lack of allusions, the terrible Cotton Library fire of 1731 that destroyed uncatalogued works, and other miscellaneous ravages of time, there is earlier English literature we simply don't know about. Bowers explains that Tolkien was largely responsible for (re)introducing Beowulf and other Old English texts into the English canon, both via scholarship and by sparking popular interest in them through his fantasy novels - something which hardcore fans are likely aware of, but which, for others, gives his literary significance a new dimension.
Bowers places English literature of the age of exploration in a seafaring tradition coming from The Odyssey and Beowulf. (Rather selective - more interesting and offbeat would have been a look at the changing feelings about the coast over centuries, from a place of danger in high medieval times, to the enthusiasm for rugged scenery and sea-bathing that had emerged by the 18th century.) Some more novel points (to me at least) included the observation that for most of history, great writers (e.g. Ovid, Thomas More) were trained in law more than in any other subject, with skills of rhetoric and the creation of legal fictions (hypothetical scenarios) especially relevant. The idea of the 'stealth protagonist' is useful IMO: e.g. Fortinbras as the 'real' hero of Hamlet; one can read it as a Beowulf analogue, in which he successfully sails to another country and takes it over - as Europeans were beginning to do on other continents. Moby Dick is another example of a work like this. The account of the performance of The Tempest on a ship in 1607 off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone, as something to keep the crew occupied, is intriguing; that they went off later to shoot an elephant sounds like something from the 19th century.
Whilst Bowers covers several major European writers after this, including Cervantes, Voltaire and Goethe (and some interesting points are made, including about Cervantes having a tougher life than most classic authors, and the importance of Goethe's Faust not being damned - because both Romanticism and the rise of science valued human overreaching), there is a thread of bardolatry running through, as with Bloom. The influence of Shakespeare, and others authors' reading of him, crops up regularly, and Shakespeare as part of imperialism and the globalisation of English. He relates how Stanley essentially took the canon to Africa, and had to discard books en route, like canon-formation in reverse, until he had only the Bible and Shakespeare, and then just the Bible.
More novel inclusions are The Charterhouse of Parma, and to a British reader at least, a New England/Puritan/outsider tradition. Bowers mentions that Tolstoy disliked the Aristotelian paradigm, and instead saw himself as being like Homer; he intended to be accidental and arbitrary in the manner that Henry James famously criticised. The distinctively Russian holy fool archetype means that characters such as Pierre and Myshkin are more positive than their equivalents in Western Europe, like Fabbrizio in Charterhouse. He suggests that Haji Murad - which he considers a very great book - challenges Edward Said's idea of orientalism.
Continued below in comment field.
September 30, 2023
"The Western Literary Canon in Context" is a solid lecture series delivered by medievalist John M. Bowers. The texts that are highlighted and the framing of many of the lectures are deeply influenced by the work of Harold Bloom and Bowers' fondness for Tolkien (and other Inklings or those with connections to Merton College). The difference is that Bowers tries to make his commentary less "traditionalist" and elitist than Bloom's, which makes for an accommodationist's perspective on the Western Canon. This is a bit cowardly but is probably acceptable to most of the people who end up consuming such a course (intellectually curious, well-meaning liberals and bookish Christians).
The big issue with the accommodationist approach is that there are inevitably omissions that are not justified to the audience. To the unsuspecting or untutored audience member these omissions will go unnoticed. From an educational perspective, this is vaguely insidious. So while this series provides fairly robust coverage of ancient texts, it is short on poetry, entirely ignores Romanticism, and marginalizes American, French, German, and Russian contributions (no Whitman, Emerson, Twain, Dickinson, etc). It also ignores all theoretical works after the Renaissance that were culturally influential (No Coleridge, Rousseau, Johnson, Montaigne, Freud, etc). However, I generally like the framework of the canonical aspirant trying to erase or transmute the influence of literary forefather. This is best substantiated for Chaucer, Dante, and Eliot.
The course also ends without any real commentary on more recent developments in the Western Canon except discussion of post-colonial literature ("The Empire Write Back"). We end with Woolfe, Joyce, Tolkien, and Rushdie. However, there's not really a critical look at the record of post-colonial literature and whether it adds substantially to our understanding of human intellectual and aesthetic experience. Tolkien's project is probably better substantiated despite obviously not being literature so much as a popular reclamation, a backfilling of the vacuum of Anglo-Saxon mythopoetic production.
So what I am getting around to saying, is that there is minimal reckoning with the politically motivated assault on the Western Canon that emerged in the 1960s or what the future holds. I guess this series can be forgiven that as it was assembled at a low point in the canon wars in 2008. Economic and international concerns dominate public discourse and Obama's hope & change message had ensnared Millennials and young Gen Xers. However, from the perspective of 2020s, where the Western Canon appears deeply interred (Less than 50 total English majors at Harvard), it striking the tone of this series is so nonchalant.
The big issue with the accommodationist approach is that there are inevitably omissions that are not justified to the audience. To the unsuspecting or untutored audience member these omissions will go unnoticed. From an educational perspective, this is vaguely insidious. So while this series provides fairly robust coverage of ancient texts, it is short on poetry, entirely ignores Romanticism, and marginalizes American, French, German, and Russian contributions (no Whitman, Emerson, Twain, Dickinson, etc). It also ignores all theoretical works after the Renaissance that were culturally influential (No Coleridge, Rousseau, Johnson, Montaigne, Freud, etc). However, I generally like the framework of the canonical aspirant trying to erase or transmute the influence of literary forefather. This is best substantiated for Chaucer, Dante, and Eliot.
The course also ends without any real commentary on more recent developments in the Western Canon except discussion of post-colonial literature ("The Empire Write Back"). We end with Woolfe, Joyce, Tolkien, and Rushdie. However, there's not really a critical look at the record of post-colonial literature and whether it adds substantially to our understanding of human intellectual and aesthetic experience. Tolkien's project is probably better substantiated despite obviously not being literature so much as a popular reclamation, a backfilling of the vacuum of Anglo-Saxon mythopoetic production.
So what I am getting around to saying, is that there is minimal reckoning with the politically motivated assault on the Western Canon that emerged in the 1960s or what the future holds. I guess this series can be forgiven that as it was assembled at a low point in the canon wars in 2008. Economic and international concerns dominate public discourse and Obama's hope & change message had ensnared Millennials and young Gen Xers. However, from the perspective of 2020s, where the Western Canon appears deeply interred (Less than 50 total English majors at Harvard), it striking the tone of this series is so nonchalant.
February 24, 2018
Fascinating thematic views manifest across centuries and across genres. For many of the authors not the books I've read, or that I would have chosen, but he makes excellent points for selecting those specific works. Of those i've previously read, it gives me a lot to go back and look for (no quiz pressure).
I had slacked off on listening to some of the discs as my commute has gotten longer and more wearying; Its even tougher now that I no longer have the CD player....
I've only read brief passages of most of the books so far, but it adds glorious heft to my post-retirement to- do list (at least into the next millennium)....
I had slacked off on listening to some of the discs as my commute has gotten longer and more wearying; Its even tougher now that I no longer have the CD player....
I've only read brief passages of most of the books so far, but it adds glorious heft to my post-retirement to- do list (at least into the next millennium)....
August 28, 2020
Bowers is a great lecturer, who eruditely weaves stories around the well regarded works of canonical literature and I thoroughly enjoyed every one of the lectures. But, for me, it would have been vastly improved if more time had been allotted to individual works rather than covering as many of them and in as little a time as possible, which leaves you feeling almost as if having eaten only half a meal as the lecture ends. My only complaint. Other than that this is one of the best ones by TGC.
November 2, 2024
A terrific course! LitHum without reading!
August 12, 2020
The lecturer confers the love for literature very nicely.
September 5, 2021
*****Caveat emptor! Hey, did you notice that capital letter at the beginning of my sentence? Capital letters were originally carved on the sides of capitol buildings, and that’s why the letters are angular. Speaking of buildings, ancient Greek tragedies were performed in the Theatre of Dionysus, built in the shadow of the Acropolis in Athens. Greek tragedies were originally only the chorus, set to music. Plato said that the well-educated man was one who had been well-trained in the chorus, which required coordinated movement, and coordinated movement is how the Athenians defeated the Persians! Also there were no women playwrights in ancient Greece, but it didn’t have to be that way - Japan had women writers! Sei Shonagon wrote the Pillow Book, and Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji. [Never mind that this irrelevant reference is 1500 years later than the era I’m comparing it to in Greece! Surely if I veer around wildly enough and drop enough literary allusions and catchphrases, you won’t notice all my tenuous claims, absurd contradictions, and historical inaccuracies!] Speaking of women, Virginia Woolf wrote a book imagining if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister in Elizabethan England! Back to ancient Greece, the word tragedy is related to the word goat, so the Greek tragedies were really the ‘goat’ plays - the scapegoat plays!*****
Guys, this course is so, so awful. I cannot fathom how there are any happy customers, or how this guy doesn’t get laughed out of any room. The first half-dozen lectures that I listened to are all presented in the wild stream-of-consciousness manner of the paragraph above, and he indeed says all of those things (except Caveat emptor, which is my friendly advice to you).
I chose this course because I love both history and literature, so I thought it would be right up my alley. However I think if you’re a history nerd, you will HATE this dressed-up pile of drivel. This guy makes all sorts of claims that he never backs up with any evidence. He bounces around wildly, making assertions that could be interesting, but instead of elaborating or giving relevant examples, he throws heaping handfuls of random non sequiturs at you. Maybe some listeners enjoy all the trivia, but you should be aware that plenty of it is flat-out wrong. He says so much weird stuff that it would take ages to fact-check it all. Other reviews have given their own examples, and here are just three of the problems that convinced me to quit listening:
1. In his lecture on the ancient Greek tragedies, Bowers makes several breathtaking leaps of logic (in the span of, oh, a minute or less), saying that the earliest Greek tragedies were originally all chorus set to music, and Plato said that the educated man was well-trained in the chorus, and the unified action of their training in choral singing and dancing was why the Athenians defeated the Persians! WTF. No. Literally everything is wrong with that entire hot mess of an argument.
2. In the same lecture Bowers says there were no women playwrights, but "it didn’t have to be that way - Japan had women writers" (actual quote!), and mentions two Japanese women and the books they wrote. That’s it, no elaboration on how that could possibly be relevant - but anyway, since I’d never heard of those writers and I like being introduced to new books, I wrote down their names and looked them up later. These two Japanese writers lived circa 1000 AD! They are not relevant to a discussion of Greece in the 5th century BC! (Besides, what I learned about them completely contradicts Bowers' odd statement. They were, unsurprisingly, very much anomalies of their time and place, in which virtually no women were literate.) Bowers might as well have said, “Look, I can name a very old book from Japan, so I must know things! Lots of things! Now quick, look over here!”
3. Bowers claims that "anyone" in ancient Greece could write a trilogy for the Dionysia, therefore "everyone in the audience really knew the craft and technique of tragedy from the inside" (astonishingly, a direct quote from both the lecture and the Course Guidebook, p. 24). Instead of supporting this claim in any way, he tosses out an irrelevant reference to Olympic wrestling matches, just to stay on-brand. I mean, of course those claims are ridiculous, do I need to spell it out? Obviously even the premise is false - only adult male citizens who could read and write in Greek could enter, a very small percentage of the population - and of course it does not follow that just because they could theoretically attempt to write a play, that “everyone in the audience really knew the craft and technique of tragedy from the inside.” Geez man, just go home. While you’re there, maybe read the Greek philosophers, this time with an effort to absorb their lessons on logic and argument, rather than merely grasping for trivia.
So far I have listened to four other Great Courses professors, and fortunately all of those were excellent. I heartily recommend any of them as a far better use of your time:
- Gregory Aldrete (Ancient, Roman, and Military History)
- Elizabeth Vandiver (Classical History and Literature)
- Dorsey Armstrong (Medieval Literature)
- Jennifer Paxton (Medieval History)
Guys, this course is so, so awful. I cannot fathom how there are any happy customers, or how this guy doesn’t get laughed out of any room. The first half-dozen lectures that I listened to are all presented in the wild stream-of-consciousness manner of the paragraph above, and he indeed says all of those things (except Caveat emptor, which is my friendly advice to you).
I chose this course because I love both history and literature, so I thought it would be right up my alley. However I think if you’re a history nerd, you will HATE this dressed-up pile of drivel. This guy makes all sorts of claims that he never backs up with any evidence. He bounces around wildly, making assertions that could be interesting, but instead of elaborating or giving relevant examples, he throws heaping handfuls of random non sequiturs at you. Maybe some listeners enjoy all the trivia, but you should be aware that plenty of it is flat-out wrong. He says so much weird stuff that it would take ages to fact-check it all. Other reviews have given their own examples, and here are just three of the problems that convinced me to quit listening:
1. In his lecture on the ancient Greek tragedies, Bowers makes several breathtaking leaps of logic (in the span of, oh, a minute or less), saying that the earliest Greek tragedies were originally all chorus set to music, and Plato said that the educated man was well-trained in the chorus, and the unified action of their training in choral singing and dancing was why the Athenians defeated the Persians! WTF. No. Literally everything is wrong with that entire hot mess of an argument.
2. In the same lecture Bowers says there were no women playwrights, but "it didn’t have to be that way - Japan had women writers" (actual quote!), and mentions two Japanese women and the books they wrote. That’s it, no elaboration on how that could possibly be relevant - but anyway, since I’d never heard of those writers and I like being introduced to new books, I wrote down their names and looked them up later. These two Japanese writers lived circa 1000 AD! They are not relevant to a discussion of Greece in the 5th century BC! (Besides, what I learned about them completely contradicts Bowers' odd statement. They were, unsurprisingly, very much anomalies of their time and place, in which virtually no women were literate.) Bowers might as well have said, “Look, I can name a very old book from Japan, so I must know things! Lots of things! Now quick, look over here!”
3. Bowers claims that "anyone" in ancient Greece could write a trilogy for the Dionysia, therefore "everyone in the audience really knew the craft and technique of tragedy from the inside" (astonishingly, a direct quote from both the lecture and the Course Guidebook, p. 24). Instead of supporting this claim in any way, he tosses out an irrelevant reference to Olympic wrestling matches, just to stay on-brand. I mean, of course those claims are ridiculous, do I need to spell it out? Obviously even the premise is false - only adult male citizens who could read and write in Greek could enter, a very small percentage of the population - and of course it does not follow that just because they could theoretically attempt to write a play, that “everyone in the audience really knew the craft and technique of tragedy from the inside.” Geez man, just go home. While you’re there, maybe read the Greek philosophers, this time with an effort to absorb their lessons on logic and argument, rather than merely grasping for trivia.
So far I have listened to four other Great Courses professors, and fortunately all of those were excellent. I heartily recommend any of them as a far better use of your time:
- Gregory Aldrete (Ancient, Roman, and Military History)
- Elizabeth Vandiver (Classical History and Literature)
- Dorsey Armstrong (Medieval Literature)
- Jennifer Paxton (Medieval History)
January 22, 2022
Довгенька мандрівка тим каноном вийшла. Довга ніж я думав))) Насправді я б назвав це Британським літературним каноном, але багато в чому він співпадає із західним каноном. Лектор цікаво й популярно розповідає про ключові літературні твори від найдавніших часів до сьогодення. Він великий фанат Толкіна, часто його згадує й останній твір про який він розповідав був Володар перснів. Загалом класно. Англійська виразна й зрозуміла (слухав у аудіо).
November 6, 2024
Truly excellent course giving a lot of historical context and explanation for each book.
The list of books in the canon will become my guide to cover wholes in my reading.
The list of books in the canon will become my guide to cover wholes in my reading.
November 21, 2024
My first course listened to by Professor Bowers. His speaking voice is very good, and he says a lot of interesting things. The real drawback is that it is a little unorganized in its structure. The overachieving theme is to show how great western works fit together in a worldwide conversation. And that is what Bowers delivers. However, as he's giving you this, he is constantly making references to other things, which makes it feel a bit scattershot. He's a big fan of Tolkien, so I think that he refers to Tolkien in every single lecture (or close to it).
So if you like rapid fire, constant comparisons to other things, and don't mind having a linear conversation all the time, this may be just the thing for you. The choices of works that are included are similar to other literary courses in the Great Courses catalogue. I'm way tired of hearing lectures on Joyce's "Ulysses" and T.S. Eliot's poetry, as they are covered frequently in other courses. Nice to have "Consolation of Philosophy" and "Charterhouse of Parma" included, since I hadn't experienced lectures on those yet. The History of World Literature by Professor Voth, Classic Novels by Professor Weinstein and Great Figures of the Western Literary Tradition by a variety of professors are the other courses which have some similar content, in case you were wondering.
So if you like rapid fire, constant comparisons to other things, and don't mind having a linear conversation all the time, this may be just the thing for you. The choices of works that are included are similar to other literary courses in the Great Courses catalogue. I'm way tired of hearing lectures on Joyce's "Ulysses" and T.S. Eliot's poetry, as they are covered frequently in other courses. Nice to have "Consolation of Philosophy" and "Charterhouse of Parma" included, since I hadn't experienced lectures on those yet. The History of World Literature by Professor Voth, Classic Novels by Professor Weinstein and Great Figures of the Western Literary Tradition by a variety of professors are the other courses which have some similar content, in case you were wondering.
October 7, 2019
Engaging , interesting, memorable. It did bring the context and the canon in that context like it promised. Would have given 5 stars, it really was that good, if I had not discovered that the professor had probably not read Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, since he said that Boethius called for the ancient gods and not the christian one. Reading Boethius now (inspired by Bowers) I very much encounter the one god, next to a few ancient ones.
March 28, 2018
I liked it because it gave me some good ideas for other books to read.
March 27, 2019
A relatively self-aware analysis of why people don't think the Western Canon be like it is, but it do.
August 1, 2021
The literary canon is a list of books considered “must-reads” not only by scholars and professionals but also by the population. The Western literary Canon includes books from ancient Greek to the modern days. Therefore, it is impossible to cover the vast list of books in a course adequately.
In this course, Prof. Bowers naturally focuses on a subset of the canon list. And he chooses a unique angle: people instead of books. The professor did not get into details about all the books. In fact, I know very little about most of the books he discussed and do not feel I know more after the lectures.
On the other hand, I learned much about the authors as people and the system of the literary canon. The professor talks not only about the life story and unique characteristics of the authors but also about how they are related. A typical author follows some kind of literal tradition, particularly the general structures of literary works established in Greek times. Some authors innovate within the confine of the structure, while others experiment outside of the boundary, for example, by combining storytelling with poetry. The authors relate to each other in other ways. Contemporary authors may interact personally by learning from and competing with each other. An author leverages and reuses styles, skills, and storylines from previous authors. An author may also comment on other authors through the characters in their work.
For some authors, the professor does not focus on a particular work on the canon list. Instead, he examines a collection of works from the author and traces the evolvement of the author’s views and styles. Some authors are also accomplished philosophers and activists. These backgrounds help us better understand their works.
On a bigger picture, the professor traces the evolvement of Western literature development. It started in ancient Greek and spread to Rome and Arab countries. The Latin language literature was heavily influenced by its Greek roots and Christianity. After the Renasant movement and the emergence of nation-states, Western literature was more diversified. Together with the rise of Briton’s industrial power, works in the English language became popular and even dominating in Western literature. At the same time, the “outsider” writers in Russia, America, and the colonies provide unique contributions to the Western literary traditions.
In addition to authors as central players, the course also describes other gatekeepers in the canonization process, including publishers, reviewers, and school teachers (including librarians). They play important roles in deciding whether a work is included in the canon. The course offers a limited discussion about the readers, such as how works involving homosexuality were received over time. However, it seems the readers are not an essential part of the gatekeepers; canonization is not a popularity contest. In fact, popularity may work against a work, as in the cases of “Lord of Rings” and “Don Quixote.”
As the professor said, canonization is a process of exclusion: one needs to decide what not to include, which is much more difficult than picking excellent works. As time goes, some works fall out of the canon list. Unfortunately, the professor did not provide more discussion of the exclusion process. For example, he could have explained why some great American authors such as Mark Twain and Hemingway are not included in his canon list, although he mentioned these authors multiple times in providing context and comparison.
Overall, this is an excellent course for “the rest of us” to get a glimpse of the literature world. The reader does not need extensive knowledge of the works discussed. However, going through the lectures provides an overview of Western literature and a framework for future studies.
In this course, Prof. Bowers naturally focuses on a subset of the canon list. And he chooses a unique angle: people instead of books. The professor did not get into details about all the books. In fact, I know very little about most of the books he discussed and do not feel I know more after the lectures.
On the other hand, I learned much about the authors as people and the system of the literary canon. The professor talks not only about the life story and unique characteristics of the authors but also about how they are related. A typical author follows some kind of literal tradition, particularly the general structures of literary works established in Greek times. Some authors innovate within the confine of the structure, while others experiment outside of the boundary, for example, by combining storytelling with poetry. The authors relate to each other in other ways. Contemporary authors may interact personally by learning from and competing with each other. An author leverages and reuses styles, skills, and storylines from previous authors. An author may also comment on other authors through the characters in their work.
For some authors, the professor does not focus on a particular work on the canon list. Instead, he examines a collection of works from the author and traces the evolvement of the author’s views and styles. Some authors are also accomplished philosophers and activists. These backgrounds help us better understand their works.
On a bigger picture, the professor traces the evolvement of Western literature development. It started in ancient Greek and spread to Rome and Arab countries. The Latin language literature was heavily influenced by its Greek roots and Christianity. After the Renasant movement and the emergence of nation-states, Western literature was more diversified. Together with the rise of Briton’s industrial power, works in the English language became popular and even dominating in Western literature. At the same time, the “outsider” writers in Russia, America, and the colonies provide unique contributions to the Western literary traditions.
In addition to authors as central players, the course also describes other gatekeepers in the canonization process, including publishers, reviewers, and school teachers (including librarians). They play important roles in deciding whether a work is included in the canon. The course offers a limited discussion about the readers, such as how works involving homosexuality were received over time. However, it seems the readers are not an essential part of the gatekeepers; canonization is not a popularity contest. In fact, popularity may work against a work, as in the cases of “Lord of Rings” and “Don Quixote.”
As the professor said, canonization is a process of exclusion: one needs to decide what not to include, which is much more difficult than picking excellent works. As time goes, some works fall out of the canon list. Unfortunately, the professor did not provide more discussion of the exclusion process. For example, he could have explained why some great American authors such as Mark Twain and Hemingway are not included in his canon list, although he mentioned these authors multiple times in providing context and comparison.
Overall, this is an excellent course for “the rest of us” to get a glimpse of the literature world. The reader does not need extensive knowledge of the works discussed. However, going through the lectures provides an overview of Western literature and a framework for future studies.
December 31, 2023
The Great Courses are called that for a reason. For those that are truly lovers of literature, this is an absolute must read/listen to.
A course on the literary canon is never either complete, nor set in stone. One of the truisms taught in this course is that for a particular work to become a part of the canon, it is taught in school curriculums. Without this, no matter the quality of the writing, it is unlikely to become a part of the canon. What may make the curriculum is also closely allied with political and social views which are popular at the time.
Everyone will have their own particular favorites which will not make the canon, and for this reason, any listing of "great works" will forever be controversial. For example, in the 1970's and 1980's Irving Wallace one of the most popular and successful authors, earning great public acclaim, without regard to any critic's view. Now, 40 years later he is almost completely forgotten, and it is not certain how many of his books are even still in print. Today one of the most powerful authors, displaying true mastery of his craft, is Michael D. O'Brien, author of Island of the World, and the Children of the Last Days series. His work is destined to remain largely unknown because in his works the Catholic Church looms large. Many of his books, for this reason, do not even make it into public libraries, much less a classroom.
It is highly unlikely that all those who love literature and reading will like all of the books as set forth in this course. While I have read many of the works, there are others which do not spark the slightest interest, except that their presence on the list shows how we are shaped by history. Indeed, one gets the impression that even Professor John M. Bowers doesn't necessarily like all of them, but understands how or why they must be included on the list.
It reminds one of the book collector who collects first editions of famous works, but never reads them. To him the value is in their rarity or notoriety or popularity, and has little, if anything, to do with their value as good writing or literature. For example, having read Uncle Tom's Cabin, I personally came away thinking it was poorly written, but it looms large in history for the time in which it was written and the impact it had on society at that time.
Enjoy this course, and let it add to your reading list and expand your understanding of history and writing.
A course on the literary canon is never either complete, nor set in stone. One of the truisms taught in this course is that for a particular work to become a part of the canon, it is taught in school curriculums. Without this, no matter the quality of the writing, it is unlikely to become a part of the canon. What may make the curriculum is also closely allied with political and social views which are popular at the time.
Everyone will have their own particular favorites which will not make the canon, and for this reason, any listing of "great works" will forever be controversial. For example, in the 1970's and 1980's Irving Wallace one of the most popular and successful authors, earning great public acclaim, without regard to any critic's view. Now, 40 years later he is almost completely forgotten, and it is not certain how many of his books are even still in print. Today one of the most powerful authors, displaying true mastery of his craft, is Michael D. O'Brien, author of Island of the World, and the Children of the Last Days series. His work is destined to remain largely unknown because in his works the Catholic Church looms large. Many of his books, for this reason, do not even make it into public libraries, much less a classroom.
It is highly unlikely that all those who love literature and reading will like all of the books as set forth in this course. While I have read many of the works, there are others which do not spark the slightest interest, except that their presence on the list shows how we are shaped by history. Indeed, one gets the impression that even Professor John M. Bowers doesn't necessarily like all of them, but understands how or why they must be included on the list.
It reminds one of the book collector who collects first editions of famous works, but never reads them. To him the value is in their rarity or notoriety or popularity, and has little, if anything, to do with their value as good writing or literature. For example, having read Uncle Tom's Cabin, I personally came away thinking it was poorly written, but it looms large in history for the time in which it was written and the impact it had on society at that time.
Enjoy this course, and let it add to your reading list and expand your understanding of history and writing.
May 5, 2022
These were a fun series of lectures, very interesting and enlightening.
This was actually a project of mine. When I picked these lectures up, I made an effort to read every book listed in advance. A huge project that. Fortunately, I had read a number of them already. There were some I didn’t read all of. I didn’t look at every one of the Greek tragedies and I certainly didn’t read all of Plato’s Dialogues. That just wasn’t going to happen. Still, I read a good sampling including The Republic.
I feel like I’m a better more knowledgeable person for having survived the Western Literary Canon, or at least the portion of it discussed in these lectures. I can honestly say I didn’t love all of it, or even most of it. Seriously, a lot of these books were an absolute trial. I suppose they were meant to be character-building.
I’m kind of sick of books that require interpretation. I have yet to meet a symbol or reference that truly makes a lousy book good or the lack of which makes a good book bad. All that stuff is fine and dandy, but I’ll always be a read for pleasure guy and good stories are good stories. End of story.
Anyway, it was a fun project and these lectures made it even more worthwhile. I have other classics on my radar that I can read at my leisure now that I have no great project driving me.
These lectures are enjoyable and highly recommended.
Now I’m going to go and read a book that no one is ever going to study in school just for the sheer joy of it.
This was actually a project of mine. When I picked these lectures up, I made an effort to read every book listed in advance. A huge project that. Fortunately, I had read a number of them already. There were some I didn’t read all of. I didn’t look at every one of the Greek tragedies and I certainly didn’t read all of Plato’s Dialogues. That just wasn’t going to happen. Still, I read a good sampling including The Republic.
I feel like I’m a better more knowledgeable person for having survived the Western Literary Canon, or at least the portion of it discussed in these lectures. I can honestly say I didn’t love all of it, or even most of it. Seriously, a lot of these books were an absolute trial. I suppose they were meant to be character-building.
I’m kind of sick of books that require interpretation. I have yet to meet a symbol or reference that truly makes a lousy book good or the lack of which makes a good book bad. All that stuff is fine and dandy, but I’ll always be a read for pleasure guy and good stories are good stories. End of story.
Anyway, it was a fun project and these lectures made it even more worthwhile. I have other classics on my radar that I can read at my leisure now that I have no great project driving me.
These lectures are enjoyable and highly recommended.
Now I’m going to go and read a book that no one is ever going to study in school just for the sheer joy of it.
December 25, 2024
For many years I have been interested in reading through the Western Literary Canon. The problem is that the canon is always changing, and different people have different ideas of what it actual is. I have read most of the authors covered in this course but not all of the books. Most of them are by dead white men. My three favorite writers fall into that category - James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Charles Dickens. I Have read many books by women, but I have spent a lot of time with the big three. Because I am not an academic, and I don’t teach classes about literature, I don’t feel responsible for liking the writers I like. I am sure my preferences have limited my reading experiences but I don’t believe that I should dictate what anyone else reads or have anyone tell me what to read. That being said, this year I have been much more open to suggestions by family and friends. When someone suggests a book I read it so we can discuss it together. I feel that my taste in books is fairly broad and that I am willing to try most writers. When I was a child, I had very strong preferences and dislikes. I did not like books about settlers or cowboys. I could not tell you why. I am sure many of my friends would say that when it comes to books I am opinionated. Fair enough, but I think I am a little better than my father. He made absolute pronouncements about books, music, and art. There was no arguing with him. When it came to books he was usual right!
October 8, 2023
How books are chosen for the Western Cannon
This presentation is not so much of the books themselves; even though there may be some in-depth discussion of parts of each book. What we are looking at is why and how the individual books made the Western Cannon and those that did not.
The presentation takes a little be of getting used to. I have watched other Great Courses presentations where the presenter was more enthusiastic. Professor John M. Bowers looks like he is reading a prompter. However, after you bet over the visuals he knows his stuff.
It is best to have a general knowledge of the individual books before starting this course. However, I was fascinated to learn of the books that got away and now have a much larger reading list.
This package comes with six DVDs and a small 209-page book.
This presentation is not so much of the books themselves; even though there may be some in-depth discussion of parts of each book. What we are looking at is why and how the individual books made the Western Cannon and those that did not.
The presentation takes a little be of getting used to. I have watched other Great Courses presentations where the presenter was more enthusiastic. Professor John M. Bowers looks like he is reading a prompter. However, after you bet over the visuals he knows his stuff.
It is best to have a general knowledge of the individual books before starting this course. However, I was fascinated to learn of the books that got away and now have a much larger reading list.
This package comes with six DVDs and a small 209-page book.
May 8, 2020
I truly enjoyed this course. It's name is a very fair synopsis of what it's going to give you, the context of why this or that work survives to this day in western literally canon and why it is or should be read, instead of just a simple 'it gotta'. I've really enjoyed the sentimental attachment of lector to JRR Tolkien and how Tolkien himself was a scholar who knew and talked of these things. I loved the much needed context he provided in terms of movies, what was and wasn't taught in a classroom.
Great course indeed, sincerely recommend
Great course indeed, sincerely recommend
December 31, 2023
Prof Bowers reviews, discusses and analyzes the outstanding works of western literature. Excellent narration, tons of interesting information starting with the invention of paper, papyrus, vellum, etc
Discusses each of the books in detail. He considers Tolstoy's "Hadji Murad" the greatest story in the Western Canon.
Discusses each of the books in detail. He considers Tolstoy's "Hadji Murad" the greatest story in the Western Canon.
September 13, 2021
Excellent sweep through the literary canon. Knowledgeable and insightful professor with a thorough grasp on subject. Very educational with enjoyable and enlightening tidbits of history and context—sad to see it end, and off to find more courses by this professor.
April 29, 2022
This remarkable course might be the best of the Great Courses I ever listened to, in how the professor brings up historical facts and authors of different times and places to the authors or books he is analyzing.
September 16, 2020
The presenter seems to think his favourite authors should be placed in the western canon. I do not agree: Tolkien, CS. Lewis, Willa Carther?
October 1, 2020
Great reflections on the canonical works I have read, and a plethora of reasons to pick up those I have yet to read.
March 3, 2022
The Great Courses has a few of these orientations in literature and this is the best of the lot.
April 19, 2022
This was so so so good and engaging. Also incredibly informative and gave me a much better sense for when different writers existed in relation to each other than I previously had.
July 12, 2022
Enjoyable and easy to digest
July 2, 2023
Love the way this audiobook/course explains and traces canon. Really helpful and thorough.
December 18, 2023
4.5 stars
January 28, 2024
Insightful and interesting exploration of not just the contents but the shaping of the western canon.
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