Reading the Classics discussion

The question of what is a classic has been brought up several times in this group, specifically with regards to what our group defines as a classic. This is my response that I copied from another discussion thread. I thought we could open it up for discussion. Be reminded that the only firm rule we have in this group is that the book or piece of literature be at least 50 years old.

"As far as defining a classic - that is something even my literature professors could never completely agree on. I would say that a work is a classic if it has at least stood the test of time. That of course can only happen if enough time has elapsed since it was written. That's not to say that books written recently cannot be classics, they just haven't had time to prove themselves worthy of that label.

Another factor in "standing the test of time" is whether or not the work still can hold the interest of the contemporary reader and/or the reader can relate the story to his/her life. For instance, Austen's works are still popular today because her tales are generally love stories involving one or more witty characters (to simplify). But Austen's works are most definitely not applicable nor interesting to everyone, as I am sure there are many classic lovers who detest Austen.

Another important element of what makes a classic a classic is just good writing. Of course, not everyone can agree on just what good writing is or what books are well-written. I, for one, found The Picture of Dorian Gray to be dull and full of unnecessary digressions from the main story. But many here I am sure would argue that Dorian Gray is beautifully written and perhaps one of their favorites.

So basically what I am saying is that the definition of a classic is so very broad and different for everyone that we can't really pinpoint a true definition. Some works, such as those by Dickens and Shakespeare for example, are generally considered by the majority to be classics, while for others the line is a little fuzzy on whether or not they are."

To me a classic is not just a great book but one that sends an important message to the reader; one that can be transferred down to generation after generation or one that can simply help a person in life (a tough situation, etc).

Of all the books I've read (which consists of all sorts of books) I have never been disappointed with the moral and the whole main message behind the writing that the author was trying to tell me. I am constantly reminded to read the classics first for they come very useful later on in life...and I realize now that it is true. :P

Classics. Hmmm. I'd offer that Jenn is right: a classic is a book that's stood the test of time. It can be either light literature (The 39 Steps; The Riddle of the Sands; Three Men in a Boat) or serious literature (Gibbon's Decline and Fall; Crime and Punishment; Madame Bovary). Then there's the matter of taste: each of us has "classics" we dislike or are bored by and some that we enjoy very much. But there's no arguing about taste. Everyone has their personal preferences only some of which can be rationalized.

So really, from my point of view, a classic is a book or story that has stood the test of time in our individual judgments . An example: I understand that there have been millions of admirers of Tristram Shandy. I've never been able to finish the book. To me Sterne's style (and not only in Tristram) is terribly boring. I recognize Tristram as a classic only because so many people have enjoyed it over so long a time period. It's not on my personal list of classics.

At the same time, Moby Dick and The Pickwick Papers are very much valid classics for me. I re-read both of them every two or three years, with continuing and increasing delight. But I'd never insist that they be on someone else's classics list if they don't care for them.

Can I put my (very emotional) reasoning into words? I believe so, though I've never tried. I guess that one of the purposes of this group (correct me if I'm wrong) is to help each of us to refine and deepen our own understandings of our own tastes. Why this book and not that? Why this poem and not that poem? It's rather like focusing an old viewfinder camera.

Rozzer wrote: "... . I guess that one of the purposes of this group (correct me if I'm wrong) is to help each of us to refine and deepen our own understandings of our own tastes. Why this book and not that? Why this poem and not that poem? It's rather like focusing an old viewfinder camera."

Well said Rozzer.

I would add that another purpose for this group, from my perspective, is to broaden our overall knowledge as we both read and discuss the various classics. While it is true that we can learn much from books, we are, as humans, social creatures. I would posit that the social interaction - though somewhat indirect - builds on the foundations of our understanding.

We can learn much from one another based on our individual knowledge and experience. The wisdom of age is not the wisdom of youth; the American cultural experience is not the experience of France; my perspective is not that of others.

One of my pet peeves regarding sites such as Facebook (with apologies to those who use it) is that the majority of social interaction is superficial at best. Finding this group and seeing the more thoughtful dialog is encouraging, and I look forward to having continued conversations as we consume our beverage of choice.

How many of the great writers and thinkers down through the ages have had those conversations over a pipe and a pint that led to the writing of a great book?

I find that I am reading books that I might not otherwise have chosen to read myself, but because they are part of a group read. Then I find that I really do enjoy them. Who knew? I also enjoy the very thoughtful commentaries and dialogue about the books read. They give me much insight that I might not have had on my own. After all, that is one of the reasons for a book club!

Rick wrote: "Rozzer wrote: "... . I guess that one of the purposes of this group (correct me if I'm wrong) is to help each of us to refine and deepen our own understandings of our own tastes. Why this book and ..."

Rick, I agree with every single thing you say other than your final comment: "How many of the great writers and thinkers down through the ages have had those conversations over a pipe and a pint that led to the writing of a great book?"

Would that had been true for all. Perhaps it was for Shakespeare. It certainly was for Pepys. And there's no question that Johnson loved a tavern, though in maturity he didn't drink. For many of the others, alas, then and now, whether English-speaking or any other tongue, I have the strong feeling that those taking up the literature trade are pretty much everywhere terribly solitary people whose works are rather "ms. found-in-a-bottle."

Dolores wrote: "I find that I am reading books that I might not otherwise have chosen to read myself, but because they are part of a group read. Then I find that I really do enjoy them. Who knew? I also enjoy the..."

Absolutely right, Dolores. There's a special challenge, I find, in writing book reviews for the reading of others. I have to think about my own reactions in a much clearer, sharper way than I've ever done before. It forces one to think and consider. And, to me at least, reading set books that I've read before and disliked makes me revisit all my own judgments and frequently change them. Talking/writing about books turns out to be substantially better than just reading them.

Liz wrote: "I've been pondering the books that might have achieved classic status but haven't .... and wondering why. Perhaps answering this question might lead us to pinning down this elusive beast - the clas..."

Well, to me at least, the great majority of whatever people read in a particular time at a particular place is quite current. In other words, works employing and mirroring the cultural conventions with which the reader is most probably familiar. And as those conventions change, which of course they always do, the standard literary currency changes and most past best-sellers fade away. Not that they're without value, no. But they'll no longer generate the kind of publishing profits that they did in their respective hey-days. And they fall by the wayside until some discerning later publisher thinks there's some kind of niche market for them.

But that's ALL different now. Now we have Gutenberg and we have Internet Archive Digital Library and Gallica and whatever. And of course there'll be much more in the future until, quite possibly in our lifetimes, pretty much everything that ever saw print will be available again at any time. Usually for nothing or a very nominal fee.

I guess the direct answer to your question about why this and why not that may well have to do with "endorsed" old literature. If professors all over the world choose to teach this book and not that book, publishers in the past may well have seen those professors' picks as indicating an official endorsement. And when the choices of several professors become general throughout academe, there's no question but that there's a market there. Those (in the past) professors' and publishers' choices would be anointed classics.

But no longer. Now we can choose ourselves. There's no longer a publisher's decision standing in the way of our own decisions as to what to read. So the question with which you began will take on, in the future, a different tone. In the future "classics" will be what we download lots of times, from a list of every single old book, rather than buy in the bookstore or borrow from the library from choices made for us by professors and publishers. No more bottlenecks. And I think that's great.

Liz asks: Why Jane Eyre but not The Professor?

Having read The Professor earlier this year, I can answer you: because The Professor is not very good.

There are a lot of reasons authors' works don't stand the test of time. Sometimes the work is just not that great, like The Professor, minor works from authors who produced much better, or works that were popular in their time for reasons beyond quality, like because the author was a public figure or something. Also, some are too of-their-time and then when that time passes, they are considered old-fashioned. I find works from the Sentimental period ("and then he put his hand to his forehead and swooned" etc.) really hard to read.

Author popularity does sometimes rebound. Like Rozzer says, in the past it has been due to academics taking the lead. Jane Austen fell out of fashion in the late 18th century; it's said that Kipling brought her back with his story "The Janeites" in the 1920s. And it wasn't until the 1950s, at least, that scholars actually began looking at her work and paying it critical attention. Shakespeare has had peaks and valleys in his popularity, too.

Another story: Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (one of the most amazing pieces of American lit ever) fell on hard times late in her life and was pretty much forgotten. Fell out of print, all that. Scholars started passing around photocopied versions of her texts in the 70s and brought her work back to life. Literature is changeful!

I have several "lists" but honestly I have so many groups on there that read various classics that as long as I attempt to more or less keep up with them, I'll get the majority of what I want to read done anyway. There's so many "lists" out there that I'll never get to all of them. My 101 Books to Read Before you Die is taking one small chunk, but that list alone will take us 8 years!

I was just at the Tucson Book festival and at the Penguin booth I got a FREE softcover book of all the Penguin classics. I would have paid for it. I love it. It's free on Amazon as a Kindle download. "Penguin Classics A Complete Annotated Listing"

The problem is that the term "classic" is really too broad. It's even used for some cars.

Not to mention that in its pure academic sense, "classics" means Greek and Roman civilization, history, and literature. If you study the classics at university, that's what you'll be studying.

A perhaps somewhat narrower term is "Great Books." In his lectures for the Teaching Company on the great books, Rufus Fears says that a great book possesses four qualities:

- It deals with a great theme (love, war, faith, etc.)
- It is written in noble language
- It speaks across the ages
- It speaks to us as individuals

I'm not sure I go along with "noble" language, but I do think a great book should be writing that is appropriate to a great theme.

For me, perhaps the most meaningful "definition" comes from Mortimer Adler's work on "The Great Conversation." He sees the great books as constituting a great conversation about the great issues of life, starting back in early Greece and continuing as authors read and respond the writings and thoughts of earlier writers and thinkers.

There have been numerous attempts to specify what books qualify as classics or great books.

Adler was Editor in Chief of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series, in two editions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bo...

There is the Harvard Classics (Five Foot Shelf of Books) and the accompanying Harvard Shelf of Fiction.
http://www.bartleby.com/hc/

There is the Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, a book I really enjoy and go back to over and over.
The Lifetime Reading Plan
(The list of books found here is NOT in the order he suggests reading them.)
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/82...

There is Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

There are several colleges, perhaps most notably St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, which follow a curriculum of reading the Great Books. Their reading lists can be considered a very carefully thought out list of the books which have been most instrumental in shaping Western thought.
This the reading for the twice-a-week evening seminars:
http://www.sjca.edu/academic/readlist...
More specialized works in science, mathematics, music, and language (all students take two years of Greek and two years of French) are read in the small tutorials (usually of about 15-18 students).

No list of classics or great books will ever be complete, and it is doubtful that any two people will agree completely on which works should and should not be included. But there is a core of works, which I suggest would include any book that is included in at least three (and perhaps we can bring that down to two) of the above sources, or of other credible sources that I have not mentioned.

I should add to my comment above that there are a number of publishers who publish books that they consider classics. These include the Oxford World Classics, the Penguin Classics, the Everyman library, the Barnes and Noble Classics, the Modern Library Classics, the Norton Critical Editions, the Loeb Classical editions, and perhaps others. Books that appear in more than one of these lists should are certainly worthy of at least considering for one's definition of classics.

When talking about classics, we should also keep in mind that the splintering of knowledge into many multiple shards is a fairly recent development. For example the term "scientist" as a person who concentrates his or her learning on science didn't come into existence until about 1834. Up until then, all the branches of science (anatomy, biology, zoology, geology, physics, chemistry, and on and on) were subsumed under the term "natural philosophy." Philosophy encompassed all disciplines of learning, not just what we think of as philosophy today, and an educated person was expected to have read in almost all disciplines of learning, to read Greek and Latin, to have an understanding of literature, science, mathematics, art, architecture, history, philosophy, ethics, religion, everything that a "lover of wisdom" would be expected to be interested in. A Renaissance scholar would be completely befuddled by a modern college catalog with its vast array of potential majors and dozens of departments barely speaking to each other.

This is why many of the Great Books lists include works not just in literature, which I think many people automatically think of when they think of classics, but also works in many other disciplines, all of which historically an educated person was expected to have at least read the major works of.

a book that breaks boundaries, wasn't afraid to be arrested due to their artistic expression, a book that improves and educates your understanding about certain lifestyles and believes. a book that changes your life. new ways to look at literature etc etc etc

Thanks for all the great information, Everyman!

Joy wrote: "There's value in much of what I read, even the "brain candy" plays a part. "

There is indeed. As with almost everything in life, a mixture is best. I just like to make sure that there are plenty of classics in the mix, so that for me, the lighter works (authors like P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer, the classic era mystery writers, and many others) are the leaven to the wheat and bran of the classics -- and even then I like to mix the lighter classics -- Austen, Trollope, for example -- with the serious classics -- Homer, Plato, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Bleak House, and other books I try to read ever five to ten years.

But you're also right that there's no benefit in coming up with a grand plan that's only a theory and never gets carried out. (Though it's good to reach high, too.)

Joy wrote: "And I saw The Lifetime Reading Plan at my local indie bookstore but wasn't ready to commit because I didn't know anything about the author. I may see if my library has that and what I think."

I definitely encourage you to do so.