Classics and the Western Canon discussion

It is time again to decide on our next read. Here are the nominees in no particular order from The Random Book Generator ™. Feel free to practice your powers of persuasion for about a week before the poll is posted.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque, Erich Maria

Brave New World by Huxley, Aldous

Dead Souls by Gogol, Nikolai

Heart of Darkness by Conrad, Joseph

Phantastes by MacDonald, George

Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Friedrich

Good choices! Going to be hard to decide what to vote for.

Susan wrote: "Good choices! Going to be hard to decide what to vote for."

I would be fine with any of these *except* All Quiet, which is MY Ethan Frome, y'all. (Read it in 10th grade.. felt patronized even then).

On Liberty or Beyond Good and Evil

I will join in no matter what gets picked--those I've already read are worth a re-read. If I had to pick one I least wanted to read, it would be Brave New World, since I've read it twice already, but I'd probably skim along and keep up with the conversation.

Phantastes would certainly be a different kind of choice.

Bryan wrote: "Phantastes would certainly be a different kind of choice. "

That it would be! I've yet to read George MacDonald, and must say I am intrigued by this one.

Work has unexpectedly prevented me from participating in Moby Dick, but I may be able scratch together enough time for this one, especially if the group chooses Phantastes. It's short, and I've read enough MacDonald (including the work in question) that I wouldn't be too worried about falling behind. But that one takes an open mind and a sympathetic heart, no doubt about it.

Actually, I've read most of these, at least in part. I haven't read much Faulkner since my teens, but the lingering impression is positive. Dead Souls is quite good, and the inimitable Nietzsche and Conrad are of course the inimitable Nietzsche and Conrad.

As an historian, I feel Mill's On Liberty would be worthwhile--it's one of the most influential English books of that century, though not perhaps the most logically sound bit of philosophy humankind has produced. I'm indifferent to Huxley and Remarque. Still, overall, this is a rich selection.

There’s something hilarious about seeing John Stuart Mill and Nietzsche on the same list, given the same status as “Western Canon Authors.”

I wish there’s an AI that could guestimate what Nietzsche would tweet if he were still alive and “friends” with JS Mill. (Assuming Nietzsche doesn’t get himself banned first.)

On Liberty.

Somehow I never read Mill - because there seems to be not much fun in something one expects to totally agree with?

On the other hand, On Liberty is less than 100 pages in my edition. And I'm told it's clear and not particularly demanding (as good philosophy should be).

Does that leave room to combine it with one of Mill's other two hits? That is, Utilitarianism or On the Subjection of Women - both also rather slender.

As the Russian, I am biased against some Russian school classics ( I hope you understand me) and Dead Souls is one of them. It is quite good but not worth time I spent on it.
As for On Liberty I should confirm Wendel's guess that is 'not much fun in something one totally agree with.'
I much enjoy reading All Quiet but knew that many do not consider it is worth to be in one list with other books.
I have not read other books on the list but personally hope to participate in Heart of Darcness.

Poor Alexey, so many terrific books must be lost for you -). But surely there are other ways to read than they teach in schools?

I remember Dead Souls (reading it at an impressionable age), as very entertaining, with a strong suggestion of something more profound. I'm in the market for a re-read.

Poll is up:
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/1...

Voting starts on: Sep 19, 2018 12:00AM PDT
Voting ends on: Sep 25, 2018 12:00AM PDT

I would be most interested in:
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Friedrich

I've always wanted to read:
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
... but it seems kind of heavy and demanding coming right after the big novel Moby Dick ...

These two:
Brave New World by Huxley, Aldous
Heart of Darkness by Conrad, Joseph

are books I have read several times and taught in class before. They're great and it could be fun to reread them, but not at the top of my list. "Heart of Darkness" would seem very appropriate after Moby Dick, though.

Ignacio wrote: "Heart of Darkness" would seem very appropriate after Moby Dick, though."

Good point, especially following The Odyssey and Moby DIck!

I am deciding, if Heart of Darkness wins I will try to read it in english, it will be a challenge since I did not understand it tranlated to my first language.

Hello, everyone!

My vote is for Heart of Darkness. Sadly, I'm a new member so my vote only counts as 1.

Dead Souls
Beyond Good and Evil
On Liberty
Brave New World
... are all on my to-read shelf. I've listed them in order of preference.

I'm looking forward to this poll's winner!

Hi. I'm also new to this group. I've been following along with you all on Moby Dick and am ready for a shorter read this time around. I too only have one vote (understandable) but it will take a bit of thought. Some great books on this list.

Also, is the Random Book Generator a real thing or an inside joke?

Rafael wrote: "I am deciding, if Heart of Darkness wins I will try to read it in english, it will be a challenge since I did not understand it tranlated to my first language."

Looks like the group is conspiring to make you read it in English. 😬

Welcome to the group, Lavan and Jenny! The RBC is apparently real, but I get confuse about what is real all the time, if they make me read Nietzsche, I’m going to scream.

Since it looks like Phantastes has a reasonable chance of winning, and I may be the only one here who's read it, let me add some thoughts that may be helpful:

George MacDonald lacked many of the qualities we associate with great writers. His protagonists (except when they're children) are usually bland, his plots meander, to put it mildly, and he's got Victorian sentimentality in spades. But his work was an inspiration for many of the greats of 20th-century fantasy in part because he effectively synthesized Romanticism, the fairy-tale tradition, and a joyful (if eccentric) spirituality. Phantastes blends lyrical imagery with German Romantic philosophy and Christian allegory. Reading a MacDonald book for the first time, depending on how sympathetically you approach it, can be just passingly odd or a life-changing experience. Having read much of MacDonald's major work, I don't know how to express it better than to say he exudes goodness like no other author I can think of. He is utterly earnest, and at the same time his writing has more layers of meaning than casual readers tend to give him credit for.

If this sounds appealing to anyone, regardless of whether or not the group chooses his book, I would suggest checking out his shorter and more concentrated works, such as his fairy-tale The Golden Key, before tackling Phantastes.

Welcome to the group Lavan and Jenny.

The Random Book Generator™ is just a silly name we give to the very real processes the moderators use to randomly select books from the to read shelf.

Some use https://www.random.org/ to generate 10 numbers that we apply to the to read bookshelf; yes that means we count them out. Some export the to read list into a spreadsheet and perform two or three random sorts and take the top 8-10 entries. So the Random Book Generator™ is not a real thing, but the book selection process truly is random with the caveat that the moderators reserve the right to tweak the list slightly, as required.

Thank you David & Lia. Looking forward to the read.

Thank you kindly for the warm welcome, Lia and David!

Rex, you've piqued my curiosity about Phantastes!

I have some time, so I'll plan on joining the discussion for any of the following:

-On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
-All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
-Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
-Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

It's easier for me to talk about dense colloquial SOC works offline because the style merits a different kind of discussion than what I'd give to the other choices, so I'll probably wait it out if it comes down to Faulkner.

It does look like Heart of Darkness is a good margin over everything else on the polls. If this comes out on top, would anyone be interesting in pairing it with the Chinua Achebe essay?

Lia wrote: "Looks like the group is conspiring to make you read it in English. 😬"

I think so. haha

Lia wrote: "I get confuse about what is real all the time, if they make me read Nietzsche, I’m going to scream..."

I hope you guise have got your earplugs ready-to-hand!

Lia, I've heard of people who like Nietzsche and hate Heidegger, but I've never heard of anyone who liked Heidegger not liking Nietzsche.

Whoa, I didn’t say I like Heidegger!

I suspect Heidegger was Ph.D (permanently-head-damaged) from reading Nietzsche, and wrote under the influence of N.

Christopher wrote: "Lia, I've heard of people who like Nietzsche and hate Heidegger, but I've never heard of anyone who liked Heidegger not liking Nietzsche."

Here I am.

I am not a great fan of Heidegger. But my pencil has left a mark almost on every page when I read Heidegger and Nietzsche usually made me yawn.

Must I confess? I will confess. My reading schedule is already packed, but I knew I would not pass up a chance to read Nietzsche with this group, I’m already sure it’s going to be amazing. So that comment was mostly in jest. (Though I did selfishly hope you guys might elect to read Nietzsche at another time when I’m not as ... tied up.)

I can’t say I was ever “bored” reading Nietzsche, though reading Heidegger did make Nietzsche more palatable to me. Heidegger’s interpretation of the Greeks seems a little more “insightful” to me than Nietzsche’s “antics,” but I didn’t read Nietzsche very closely, and I was pretty provoked (as I’m sure he intended to), so it’s probably too soon to tell.

I have issues with Nietzsche’s nakedly bombastic and provocative style — no doubt an intellectually brave thing to do in a tidy, neat, disciplined, self-important, stifling, efficient German University, but I grew up rolling my eyes at trolls throwing everything at me to gain attentions and reactions on social media, these days my reflex is to filter out polemical, deliberately bombastic, cajoling trolls. So the reactionary distaste is real (especially given his polemics on women), but I would never say Nietzsche is boring.

Some people hate Nietzsche, some people love Nietzsche. He is sometimes poetic, often bombastic, and almost always provocative. There aren't many who find him boring. Rebarbative, maybe. Boring, no. His method is deliberately unsystematic, which sets him apart from Heidegger, and he is far easier to read, though maybe not easier to understand.

I hope you will all give Beyond Good and Evil a shot. I think it will inspire a lively conversation.

So Nietzsche won the poll?

Bryan wrote: "So Nietzsche won the poll?"

It was a tie.

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/1...

So nobody won. Or Nietzsche and MacDonald both won.

I’m not even mad anymore. The greatness of this event is just ... just beyond me.

This will give me time to track down some copies. I believe my dad might have a copy of Phanstastes that he'd loan me.

(How fantastic is that: a) that my dad has a copy and b) that we find each other 'book-loan-worthy')

Dollars to doughnuts he's got the Nietzsche too.

Bryan wrote: "So Nietzsche won the poll?"

Yes! Nietzsche has willed himself to the top of the poll!

But also... No.

Lia is right -- after the votes were weighted, it was a tie. Rather than holding a runoff, we have decided to read both Beyond Good and Evil AND Phantastes.

I'll be posting the reading schedule and preliminary threads for BGE in a few days. My apologies for the proleptic comments above -- I thought the announcement had already been made. In any case, the next read has been posted on the home page for the group.

I have to buy this one. Should I stick with the Penguin Classics translation? Does it matter?

From the comments above I should have posted the results here instead of just in the poll comments.

As you can see it was a tie in the weighted votes so to avoid a runoff we will read both. The moderators hope you approve of their decision to read Beyond Good and Evil first starting October 10th, followed by interim reads over the holidays, and then Phantastes, starting around Jan 2, 2019.

There were several factors that went into this decision.
1. It was a very close vote and we do not want to hold a run-of vote this late as some people may need the time to acquire the books.
2. We do not wish to span a read over the holidays. Beyond Good and Evil is a longer read and gives us a better schedule for interim reads over the holidays.
3. Unforeseen moderator availability issues (mine) to moderate Phantastes.

W R Book (W=weighted vote, R=raw vote)
18 8 Phantastes (Starting around JAN 2, 2019)
18 7 Beyond Good and Evil (Starts OCT 10, 2018)
7 5 Heart of Darkness
5 5 On Liberty
1 1 The Sound and the Fury
1 1 Dead Souls

The rest of the schedule to the first of the year looks like this.
Starting Dates:
SEP 26 Interim Read
OCT 10 Beyond Good and Evil
DEC 12 Holiday interim reads - 3 weeks.
JAN 2 Phantastes

David wrote: "From the comments above I should have posted the results here instead of just in the poll comments.

As you can see it was a tie in the weighted votes so to avoid a runoff we will read both. The mo..."

Thanks for sharing here. I didn’t think to check the poll comments for the results

MacDonald and Nietzsche! That actually sounds like fun. Contemporaries, both with controversial ideas and stylistic approaches, but about as different from one another as could be imagined. I enjoy both, and the juxtaposition strikes me as positively serendipitous.

I recently referred to Nietzsche as possibly my favorite author whom I believe was wrong about everything.

I would still encourage people warming up to or curious about Phantastes to pick up one of the fairy-tales he wrote for children, like The Golden Key.

Jenny wrote: "I have to buy this one. Should I stick with the Penguin Classics translation? Does it matter?"

The "classic" translator of Nietzsche into English is Walter Kaufmann. I don't read German and I'm far from being a Nietzsche expert (though I am getting better at spelling "Nietzsche") so I can't say if it's the best, but it's at least well respected.

I will post the translation thread in a few days and hope to get more helpful feedback there.

Thomas wrote: "Jenny wrote: "I have to buy this one. Should I stick with the Penguin Classics translation? Does it matter?"

The "classic" translator of Nietzsche into English is Walter Kaufmann. I don't read Ger..."

I am going to go out on a limb and declare the public domain translation by Helen Zimmern to be 'adequate for most purposes.'

Beyond Good and Evil

(although maybe we will discover some 'howlers' in the course of this discussion)

Kaufmann may have had a case to make against SOME of the early 20th C. translators, but I have found that many have been unfairly disparaged.

Thank you Thomas and Christopher.

Rex wrote: "MacDonald and Nietzsche! That actually sounds like fun. Contemporaries, both with controversial ideas and stylistic approaches, but about as different from one another as could be imagined. I enjoy..."

Project Gutenberg has The Golden Key, The Light Princess and other of MacDonald’s fairy tales for online reading here: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1...

They also have Beyond Good and Evil as both an efile and audio file. ( I didn’t check the translator since I’ll probably go with Kauffman version)

Thomas wrote: "Yes! Nietzsche has willed himself to the top of the poll!

But also... No."

Pffff. Nietzsche does not strive for the top of the poll; only the Englishman does that.

Susan wrote: "Project Gutenberg has The Golden Key, The Light Princess and other of MacDonald’s fairy tales for online reading here: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1...."

Thank you, Susan.

Anyone planning to read the Kaufmann translation may want to take a look at the Modern Library's huge Basic Writings of Nietzsche The Kindle edition is $3.99. You might even want it as a "second opinion" on another translation.

The omnibus contains Kaufmann's translations of The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo; also a collection of aphorisms from some of his other books.

Kaufmann used to be the "gold standard" for Nietzsche in English, but others have more recently been translating the books, with results some consider superior to Kaufmann.

I encountered the Hollingdale (Penguin) and the Kaufmann (originally Vintage) translations in High School, so there may be some nostalgia/familiarity factor in my preference for them. Not to mention the price issue....

I might get access to a copy of the 2001 translation by Judith Norman, in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series (which includes a half-dozen or so translations of Nietzsche so far). If so, I will certainly consult it.

I haven't been able to call it up on Goodreads, but Amazon offers it, and there is a Kindle edition, which is even available for rent, if you can't afford the full price at the moment. See: https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Prel...

(The copy I think I can borrow will be free, but I will keep this in mind if I find I decide I want one of my own.)

I’ve looked at the J. Norman briefly, I have also used Kaufmann and Hollingdale in the past (I didn’t finish reading either) along with some commentaries.

I’ve heard people say that Kaufmann is a bit of a Nietzsche-apologist, and his translation is not as provocative — though I assure you I was pretty provoked reading it anyway.

Their point seems to be that Kaufmann tries to make it sound more palatable than the original. For example, Kaufmann (and Norman as far as I can tell) translate Nietzsche as saying “woman” when Hollingdale used the word “wench” — implying Nietzsche meant to be disrespectful and provocative, and Kaufmann is somehow whitewashing that.

Not speaking German, I can’t tell which one is more accurate, every translation is an interpretation, so I defer to the judgment of you wiser elders.

-the wench

Project Gutenberg's translation of Beyond Good and Evil is by Helen Zimmern.

Lia wrote: "I’ve looked at the J. Norman briefly, I have also used Kaufmann and Hollingdale in the past (I didn’t finish reading either) along with some commentaries.

I’ve heard people say that Kaufmann is a..."

One of the complaints about Kaufmann is that his Nietzsche is, philosophically, and maybe personally, too much like Kaufmann: as displayed at length in his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (which at one time was the go-to book for novice readers of Nietzsche; the introduction by Horstmann to the J. Norman translation doesn't mention it in a short list of helpful books).

On the other hand, Nietzsche had a considerable, perhaps formative, influence on Kaufmann, and some of his own books on other topics seem to reflect it. So it cuts both ways.

Another objection is that, although a native speaker of German, Kaufmann did not have the technical skills of a trained Germanist, and failed to recognize distinctly later-19th-century usages, as against those of earlier and later periods. This may be true, but I've never been given an actual example of it -- and couldn't judge it anyway.