Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons

in Books, Language Lessons | January 29th, 2014

I receive weekly reminders of my linguistic ignorance whenever I read anything by authors fluent in Latin. How could I not, whenever Clive James starts to pontificate on the greatness of, say, Tacitus?

“For students acquiring Latin in adult life, the language is most easily approached through those historians who really wrote chronicles — Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Suetonius and Livy — but with the Histories of Tacitus you get the best reason for approaching it at all… What Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne — that his prose is like one continuous epigram — is even more true of Tacitus.”

Fantastic! So, which translation should I read?

“There are innumerable translations but the original gives you [Tacitus]’ unrivalled powers of compression.”

As with Latin classics, so with other Indo-European language texts, including Beowulf, originally in Old English, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in Classical Greek, and the ancient Vedic hymns of the Rigveda, in Sanskrit.

For those willing to take up the challenge of reading these canonic texts in their original form, the University of Texas’ Linguistics Research Center provides an excellent resource. In addition to hosting a multitude of Indo-European volumes in their entirety, the LRC has made 10-lesson crash courses, developed by several UT-Austin academics. Lessons include a brief guide to the alphabet, background knowledge on the language’s development, and a grammar guide, all available for the following languages:

Best of all, lessons are based on seminal texts from each language: Latin lessons rely on Tacitus’ Germania, Livy’s History of Rome, and Virgil’s Aeneid, while Homer, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and Plato’s Republic feature prominently in the Classical Greek classes. Students progress through each lesson by reading the original passages, and using the provided guides to translate them to English.

We’ll be adding these to our growing list of Free Language Lessons (and our list of Free Online Courses), where you can learn over 46 languages, from Arabic to Yiddish.

Note: These links will direct you to pages formatted in Unicode 2. If you’re having trouble reading the texts, head to the Early Indo-European Online lessons site and choose a different encoding in the sidebar.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

via Metafilter

What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’

Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian, the Language of Mesopotamia

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 21 ) |

The Tom Waits Map: A Mapping of Every Place Waits Has Sung About, From L.A. to Africa’s Jungles

in Maps, Music | January 29th, 2014

“And what becomes of all the little boys who never comb their hair? They’re lined up all around the block, on the Nickel over there.” So sings Tom Waits on 1980’s “On the Nickel,” which he originally composed for Ralph Waite’s eponymous feature film, a story of shame, degradation, and good times in the sketchiest part of downtown Los Angeles, through which runs 5th Street — the “Nickel” of the title. That part of town has managed an astonishing cleanup since 1980 (then again, most parts of town have, including the once-seething corner referenced by Heartattack and Vine, the title of Waits’ album from that year) to the point that you’ll now find, just off 5th, the new-wave retro, hipster-friendly Nickel Diner: a favorite eatery of mine, incidentally, but hardly one describable with Waits’ signature rasp, a forcefully resigned instrument tuned to evoke the classically, near-mythologically ragged American life.

Still, you can find the old Nickel on The Tom Waits Map, which marks out all the lyrically identifiable places in Waits’ America, from Minneapolis’ 9th Street (“Hey Charlie, I’m pregnant and living on the 9th street,” goes “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis”) to the state of Idaho (“Danny says we gotta go, gotta go to Idaho, but we can’t go surfing ’cause it’s 20 below,” on “Danny Says”).

We may think of Waits’ artistic persona as a certain lower slice of America made song, but this map, when zoomed out to a global level, reveals references to many exotic lands, as when he sings about “a Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban heels,” from the perspective of a character who “drank with all the Chinamen, walked the sewers of Paris” and of “Radion the human torso, deep from the jungles of Africa.”

The Tom Waits map itself, in fact, comes from an obviously die-hard Swedish fan by the name of Jonas Nordström. As he and the rest of the Waits faithful know, the man doesn’t just speak to an askew sensibility in America; he speaks to askew sensibilities all throughout humanity.

via @sheerly

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Tom Waits’ Classic Appearance on Australian TV, 1979

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Quentin Tarantino & Steve Buscemi Rehearse Scenes for Reservoir Dogs in 1991 (NSFW)

in Film | January 29th, 2014

Think about the actors and directors who stood as pillars of the 1990s “indiewood” movement, and the distinctive images of Quentin Tarantino and Steve Buscemi will surely cross your mind. Both delivered much of interest in that cinematically fruitful decade. Buscemi, whom Roger Ebert deemed “the house act of American independent films,” played highly memorable roles in movies like Alexandre Rockwell’s In the Soup, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion, and the Coen brothers’ Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Tarantino directed three features that need no introduction, the first of which, 1991’s Reservoir Dogs, brought them together. In the clip above, you can watch Tarantino and Buscemi’s videotaped rehearsal sessions, wherein, among other things, they work out their respective characters, the would-be diamond thieves Mr. Brown and Mr. Pink.

Before Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino had attempted only the incomplete My Best Friend‘s Birthday. Before shooting what would become his first finished movie for real, he put together mock-ups of these scenes at the Sundance Institute Director’s Workshop and Lab, which then subjected them to frank evaluations from a rotating panel of veteran filmmakers. As much as we enjoy his acting, let’s not forget his own contributions as a director; his 1996 debut Trees Lounge, in which he also stars, easily ranks among the finest products of that era’s independent cinema. And as for Tarantino’s own subsequent forays into acting… well, nobody can argue that they don’t entertain.

via Biblioklept

My Best Friend’s Birthday, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

Kansas City Confidential: Did This 1952 Noir Film Inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs?

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Documentaries on the Making of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

in Music | January 29th, 2014

Pink Floyd had to find its way again after founding singer Syd Barrett had a mental breakdown and left the band in 1968. The new group became introspective, exploring a range of effects and soundscapes that increasingly trended toward (or invented) New Age music. For example the opening instrumental, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)” from 1975’s Wish You Were Here sounds for all the world like Vangelis. At this point in their career, the band seemed like it would be perfectly at home scoring sci-fi films, which—given the golden age of far out space-glam futurism that was the 1970s—I consider a wonderful thing. What this also means however, is that Wish You Were Here is an album short on songs, featuring only five properly listed, though the first and last tracks are over ten minute long rock operettas.

Musically, it’s a tremendously accomplished piece of work, lush and expansive but curiously restrained. The centerpiece, “Have a Cigar”— surely a precursor of bitter showbiz rant disguised as double concept album, The Wall—is in fact sung by a ringer, Roy Harper. (The only other time the band featured a guest vocalist was on the soaring, wordless “Great Gig in the Sky” from the previous album, Dark Side of the Moon.) Though the collaboration was a fluke—Harper simply happened to be recording in the next studio over—his presence seems essential in hindsight. The band were big fans of Harper’s, an eccentric folk singer who has released 22 albums to date. It’s easy to see why. He’s like a psychedelic British Neil Young, an artist whom, I would argue, sometimes has a lot in common with Pink Floyd, such as a willingness to release albums almost fully composed of extended jams.

Wish You Were Here was written around the song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” an extended jam broken into two extended sequences that bookend the album. The song is about their tragically befuddled former singer, and the album has some of the saddest lyrics in the band’s oeuvre, which I suppose says quite a lot (I attended many an adolescent party where someone—yes, sometimes that someone was me—picked up the acoustic guitar and led a maudlin singalong of the title track.) Fans of the band will need no further persuading to watch the above documentary about the making of Wish You Were Here, but if my touting doesn’t sway you, consider it then a rare opportunity to see some of the most talented musicians of the twentieth century at work, shining even into their very English older years (though rarely in the same room), with a dignity and dedication that is difficult to find in modern pop music. I say this with full awareness of how cranky it may sound, but so be it. They don’t make bands like this anymore.

People do still occasionally make records like Pink Floyd’s, especially like 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon—which more or less perfected the sound of space rock—but no one has ever made one so perfectly realized. And yet if asked to choose between that album and Wish You Were Here, I could not do it. They are far too different in their approaches. In the Making of Dark Side of the Moon documentary above, Roger Waters characteristically says that Dark Side was made at a time when the band “still had a common goal—that is to become rich and famous.” And for all its acid satire of wealth and fame and its often morbid themes, it’s the sound of a band full of youthful self-confidence and ambition, where the follow-up’s orchestral pieces speak of deeper and sadder realms.

The songs on Dark Side of the Moon were partly finished live as the band debuted experimental versions of the songs in a 1972 tour, and the album’s success the following year saw the band realize their dreams. Pink Floyd became a stadium act overnight. One can imagine the toll the Dark Side of the Moon touring took on the band, who—despite their renown for stage spectacles—have always seemed like very retiring individuals, except for the frequently grandiose Waters.

Waters has taken a lot of flack for his part in the longstanding animosity between himself and co-leader, guitarist David Gilmour, but seeing him mastermind Dark Side of the Moon—through retrospective interviews mainly—reminds us of what an enormous talent he had. Speaking of retiring personalities, Waters, for a time the band’s primary lyricist, penned the unforgettable line, “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” from “Time”—a line cribbed from Thoreau but that could have been written by Evelyn Waugh or Somerset Maugham, says guitarist Nigel Williamson. It’s a “description of the English character,” says Williamson, that “permeate[s] the whole record, and indeed the whole of Pink Floyd’s career.”

H/T and thanks goes to @BrainPicker for sending the top film our way.

Dark Side of the Rainbow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wizard of Oz in One of the Earliest Mash-Ups

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live in the Ruins of Pompeii (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Brief History of Sampling: From the Beatles to the Beastie Boys

in Music | January 29th, 2014

Jonny Wilson, otherwise known as Eclectic Method, has made an art of “splicing together music, TV and film and setting it to high-energy dance beats.” He has also become something of a digital curator of pop culture. In the video above, Wilson presents:

A video remix journey through the history of sampling taking in some of the most noted breaks and riffs of the decades. A chronological journey from the Beatles’ use of the Mellotron in the 60s to the sample dense hiphop and dance music of the 80s and 90s. Each break is represented by a vibrating vinyl soundwave exploding into various tracks that sampled it, each re-use another chapter in the modern narrative.

The audio track can be downloaded over at SoundCloud. If you dig this brief bit of musical history, you won’t want to miss some of the related items below.

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6-Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sampling Revolution

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

David Foster Wallace Talks About Literature (and More) in an Internet Chatroom: Read the 1996 Transcript

in Books, Technology | January 28th, 2014

Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) series, where users get the chance to pose questions to the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen King, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, provides a surprisingly simple way to interact with celebrities. Before Reddit’s arrival in 2005, however, real-time exchanges between your garden-variety Internet user and famous personalities were occasionally conducted in Internet chatrooms. One such early case appears to be a chat between the readers of WORD Magazine and David Foster Wallace (read 30 of his essays free online), which seems to have taken place in May of 1996.

If AMAs are an orderly, if vast, Q & A session, this chat is more like a boozy group meeting with your favorite English lit professor in a smoky bar. (Read the transcript here.) Wallace, using the handle “dfw,” is on a refreshingly level field with the other chat participants, and the conversation naturally drifts from one topic to another. Things, as they often do, begin with a bit of banter:

dfw: I’ve had some unpleasant nicknaames and monikers in my time, but nobody’s ever hung “fosty” on me before.

Keats: You know, I still think it should be spelled Fostie, or Fostey.
Keats: Fosty looks too much like “Frosty” and “sty” to me.

Keats: And makes me think of eyeballs packed in ice.

dfw: “Sty” as in an impacted eyelash or a pigpen, you mean?

Keats: Yeah. Is that what a sty as in “sty in your eye” is?

Marisa: I used to think the word “sty” was pronounced “stee”.

Keats: I had no idea exactly, just an unpleasant feeling about it.

dfw: Yes. Massively painful and embarrassing, too. Like a carbuncle on the exact tip of your nose — that sort of thing.

Keats: I used to think the word “trough” was pronounced “troff.”

Keats: You know, I happen to have a carbuncle on the tip of my nose right now.

Keats: Except it’s not a carbuncle, it’s more like a welt. It’s still embarrassing.

dfw: In my very first seminar in college, I pronounced facade “fakade.” The memory’s still fresh and raw.

Soon, things take a turn for the serious, and readers begin to ask Wallace about irony:

dfw: I don’t think irony’s meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

Marisa: Why are people afraid to be seen as naive and sentimental?

dfw: Marisa: I think that’s a very deep, very hard question. One answer is that commercial comedy’s often set up to feature an ironist making devastating sport of someone who’s naive or sentimental or pretentious or pompous.

Keats: I’m starting to see a lot of irony in Hollywood and in advertising, but its function seems to be to let them talk out of both sides of their mouths.

dfw: Keats: advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively).

Wallace also drops a few mentions of some of his favorite authors:

DaleK: Mr. Wallace, I’m curious…who among current novelists do you find the most interesting?

dfw: Dalek — DeLillo, Ozick, R. Powers, AM Homes, Denis Johnson, David Markson, (old) JA Phillips and Louise Erdrich.

While we can’t conclusively confirm that this was indeed the real DFW conducting the chat, it’s hard to deny that “dfw” sounds very much like the author. Certainly, the complete exchange is as much fun to read for its mid-90s internet chatroom nostalgia as it is for Wallace’s thoughts on irony, Infinite Jest, and the sound of one hand clapping. The whole transcript is available here.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library

The David Foster Wallace Audio Archive: A Little Gift For the Novelist’s 50th Birthday

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Pete Seeger Tells the Story Behind “We Shall Overcome”

in History, Music | January 28th, 2014

Like nearly all folk songs, “We Shall Overcome” has a convoluted, obscure history that traces back to no single source. The Library of Congress locates the song’s origins in “African American hymns from the early 20th century” and an article on About.com dates the melody to an antebellum song called “No More Auction Block for Me” and the lyrics to a turn-of-the-century hymn written by the Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia. The original lyric was one of personal salvation—“I’ll Overcome Someday”—but at least by 1945, when the song was taken up by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., it was transmuted into a statement of solidarity as “We Will Overcome.” Needless to say, in its final form, “We Shall Overcome” became the unofficial anthem of the labor and Civil Rights movements and eventually came to be sung “in North Korea, in Beirut, Tiananmen Square and in South Africa’s Soweto Township.”

Pete Seeger—who passed away yesterday at the age of 94—has long been credited with the dissemination of “We Shall Overcome,” but he was always quick to cite his sources. Seeger heard the song in 1947 from folklorist Zilphia Horton, music director at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk Center who, Seeger said, “had a beautiful alto voice and sang it with no rhythm.” As he told NPR recently, his touches were also those of other singers:

I gave it kind of ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump. It was medium slow as I sang it, but the banjo kept a steady rhythm going. I remember teaching it to a gang in Carnegie Hall that year, and the following year I put it in a little music magazine called People’s Songs. Over the years, I remember singing it two different ways. I’m usually credited with changing [‘Will’] to ‘Shall,’ but there was a black woman who taught at Highlander Center, a wonderful person named Septima Clark. And she always liked shall, too, I’m told.

According to Seeger in the interview above—conducted by Josh Baron before a 2010 performance—the person most responsible for “making it the number one song back in those days” was the Music Director of the Highlander Folk Center, Guy Carawan, who “sent messages to the civil rights movement all through the South from Texas to Florida to Maryland.” Carawan “introduced this song with a new rhythm that I had never heard before.” Seeger goes on to describe the rhythm in detail, then says “it was the hit song of the weekend in February 1960…. It was not a song, it was the song all across the South. I’ve found out since then that the song started off as a union song in the 19th century.”

In this particular interview, Seeger takes full credit for changing the “will” to “shall.” Although it was “the only record [he] made which sold,” he didn’t seek to cash in on his changes (Seeger shared the copyright with Zilphia Horton, Carawan, and Frank Hamilton). As you can easily see from the numerous eulogies and tributes popping up all over (or a quick scan of the “Pete Seeger Appreciation Page”), Seeger deserves to be remembered for much more than his sixties folk singing, but he perhaps did more than anyone to make “We Shall Overcome” a song sung by a nation. And as he tells it, it was song he hoped would resonate worldwide:

I was singing for some young Lutheran church people in Sundance, Idaho, and there were some older people who were mistrustful of my lefty politics. They said: ‘Who are you intending to overcome?’ I said: ‘Well, in Selma, Alabama they’re probably thinking of Chief Pritchett.; they will overcome. And I am sure Dr. King is thinking of the system of segregation across the whole country, not just the South. For me, it means the entire world. We’ll overcome our tendencies to solve our problems with killing and learn to work together to bring this world together.

Via Blank on Blank

94-Year-Old Pete Seeger Sings “This Land is Your Land” at Farm Aid

Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occupy Wall Street

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The “Western Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

in Books, Education, Literature | January 28th, 2014

I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Bloom’s reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called “Canon Wars,” likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher Allan Bloom. That Bloom was himself no ideologue, writes Jim Sleeper; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and “an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.” Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values, The Closing of the American Mind, became a textbook of the neoconservative right.

Though Harold Bloom wished to distance himself from culture war polemics, he has unapologetically practiced what Allan Bloom preached, teaching the Canonical “great books” of literature and religion and opposing all manner of critics on the left, whom he lumps together in the phrase “the School of Resentment.” Bloom’s 1973 The Anxiety of Influence has itself exerted a major influence on literary studies, and best-selling popular works, like 1998’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have kept Harold Bloom’s name in circulation even when scholarly citations of his work declined. In 1994, Bloom re-affirmed his commitment to the Canon with The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a fierce sortie against his so-called “School of Resentment” adversaries and a work University of Minnesota professor Norman Fruman called a “heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities.” (Hear Bloom discuss the book with Eleanor Wachtel in a 1995 CBC interview.)

The Western Canon is tightly focused on only 26 authors, but in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical. For all of Bloom’s ornery defensiveness, his list is surprisingly inclusive, as well as—for Fruman—surprisingly idiosyncratic. (Bloom later disavowed the list, claiming that his editor insisted on it.) Like a classical philologist, Bloom divides his Canon into four “ages” or periods: The Theocratic Age (2000 BCE-1321 CE); The Aristocratic Age (1321-1832); The Democratic Age: 1832-1900); and The Chaotic Age (20th Century). You can view the complete list here. Below, we’ve compiled a very partial, but still sizable, excerpt of texts from Bloom’s list that are available online through the University of Adelaide’s ebook library. For all of the unpopular positions he has taken over the past few decades, Bloom’s immense erudition, expansive intellect, and sincere commitment to the humanities have never been in question. As a distinguished exemplar of a fading tradition, he is an invaluable resource for students and lovers of literature.

A: “The Theocratic Age”

The Ancient Greeks

Homer (ca.800BC): Iliad; Odyssey.
Hesiod (ca.700BC): Works and Days; Theogony.
Sappho (ca.600BC)
Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC): Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians; Suppliant Women.
Sophocles (c. 496-c. 405 BC): Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra; Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes.
Euripides (480 or 484-406 BC): Cyclops; Heracles; Alcestis; Hecuba; Bacchae; Orestes; Andromache; Medea; Ion; Hippolytus; Helen; Iphigenia at Aulis.
Aristophanes (ca. 446 BC – 385 BC): The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen.
Herodotus, 485–420BCE: The Histories.
Thucydides, ca.460 BCE: The Peloponnesian Wars.
Plato, c.427-c.347 BCE: Dialogues.
Aristotle, 384–322 BCE: Poetics; Ethics.

Hellenistic Greeks

Menander, ca. 342–291 BC: The Girl from Samos.
Plutarch, 46–120: Lives; Moralia.
Aesop (620 – 560 BC): Fables.
Petronius, c.27-66
The Romans Terence, 195/185–159 BC The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law. Lucretius, 98?–55 BCE The Way Things Are. Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 BCE On the Gods. Horace, 65-8 BCE Odes; Epistles; Satires. Catullus (c.84 B.C. – c.54 B.C.) Attis and Other Poems. Virgil (70-19 BC) Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics. Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD) Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca.4 BCE–65 CE Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens. Petronius, c.27-66 Satyricon. Apuleius, c. 123/125-c. 180 The Golden Ass.

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

Augustine of Hippo, 354–430: City of God; Confessions.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220: Parzival.
Chrétien de Troyes, 12th cent: Yvain: The Knight of the Lion.
Beowulf (ca.800)

B: “The Aristocratic Age”

Italy

Dante (1265 – 1321): The Divine Comedy; The New Life.
Petrarch, 1304-1374: Lyric Poems; Selections.
Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375: The Decameron.
Matteo Maria Boiardo, 1440 or 41-1494.: Orlando Innamorato.
Lodovico Ariosto, 1474-1533: Orlando Furioso.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527: The Prince; The Mandrake, a Comedy.
Benvenuto Cellini, 1500–1571: Autobiography.
Tommaso Campanella, 1568-1639: Poems; The City of the Sun.
Spain

Miguel de Cervantes, 1547-1616

Don Quixote; Exemplary Stories.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, 1600–1681

Life is a Dream; The Mayor of Zalamea; The Mighty Magician; The Doctor of His Own Honor.

England and Scotland

Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca.1343-1400)

The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Malory, 1430-1471

Le Morte D’Arthur.

Thomas More, 1478-1535

Utopia.

Philip Sidney, 1554-1586.

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry.

Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599

The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems.

Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593

Poems and Plays.

Thomas Nashe, 1567-1601

The Unfortunate Traveller.

William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

Plays and Poems.

John Donne, 1572-1631

Poems; Sermons.

Ben Jonson, 1573-1637

Poems, Plays, and Masques.

Francis Bacon, 1561–1626

Essays.

Robert Burton, 1577–1640

The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Thomas Browne, 1605–1682

Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus.

Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679

Leviathan.

Herrick, Robert, 1591-1674

Poems.

Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678

Poems.

John Ford, 1586-ca.1640

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

John Webster, c.1580-c.1634

The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi.

Izaak Walton, 1593-1683

The Compleat Angler.

John Milton, 1608-1674

Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica.

John Aubrey, 1626–1697

Brief Lives.

Samuel Butler, 1612-1680

Hudibras.

John Dryden, 1631-1700

Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays.

Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745

A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver’s Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems.

Alexander Pope, 1688-1744

Poems.

John Gay, 1685-1732

The Beggar’s Opera.

James Boswell, 1740-1795

Life of Johnson; Journals.

Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784

Works.

Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Edmund Burke, 1729–1797

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France

Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774

The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751–1816

The School of Scandal; The Rivals.

William Cowper, 1731-1800

Poetical Works.

Defoe, Daniel (1661?-1731)

Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year.

Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761.

Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison.

Henry Fielding, 1707-1754

Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.

Tobias Smollett, 1721-1771

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random.

Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.

Fanny Burney, 1752-1840

Evelina.

France

Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592

Essays.

Francois Rabelais, 1494?-1553?

Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1549

The Heptameron.

Jean de La Fontaine, 1621-1695

Fables.

Molière, 1622-1673

The Misanthrope; Tartuffe; The School for Wives; The Learned Ladies; Don Juan; School for Husbands; Ridiculous Precieuses; The Would-Be Gentleman; The Miser; The Imaginary Invalid.

Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662

Pensées.

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 1712–1778

The Confessions; Émile; La Nouvelle Héloïse.

Voltaire, 1694-1778

Zadig; Candide; Letters on England; The Lisbon Earthquake.

Germany

Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1466–1536

In Praise of Folly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832

Faust, Parts One and Two; Dichtung und Wahrheit; Egmont; Elective Affinities; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Poems; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering; Italian Journey; Verse Plays; Hermann and Dorothea; Roman Elegies; Venetian Epigrams; West-Eastern Divan.

Friedrich Schiller, 1759-1805

The Robbers; Mary Stuart; Wallenstein; Don Carlos; On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature.

C: “The Democratic Age”

Italy

Giovanni Verga, 1840-1922

Little Novels of Sicily; Mastro-Don Gesualdo; The House by the Medlar Tree; The She-Wolf and Other Stories.

France

Victor Hugo, 1802-1885

The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems; Les Misérables; Notre-Dame of Paris; William Shakespeare; The Toilers of the Sea; The End of Satan; God.

Gautier, Théophile, 1811–1872

Mademoiselle de Maupin; Enamels and Cameos.

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850

The Girl with the Golden Eyes; Louis Lambert; The Wild Ass’s Skin; Old Goriot; Cousin Bette; A Harlot High and Low; Eugénie Grandet; Ursule Mirouet.

Stendhal, 1783-1842

On Love; The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma.

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880

Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education; Salammbô; A Simple Soul.

George Sand, 1804-1876

The Haunted Pool.

Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867

Flowers of Evil; Paris Spleen.

Guy de Maupassant, 1850-1893

Selected Short Stories.

Emile Zola, 1840-1902

Germinal; L’Assommoir; Nana.

Scandinavia

Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1906

Brand; Peer Gynt; Emperor and Galilean; Hedda Gabler; The Master Builder; The Lady from the Sea; When We Dead Awaken.

Great Britain

William Blake, 1757-1827

Complete Poetry and Prose.

William Wordsworth, 1770–1850

Poems; The Prelude.

Walter Scott, 1771-1832

Waverley; The Heart of Midlothian; Redgauntlet; Old Mortality.

Jane Austen, 1775-1817

Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Mansfield Park; Persuasion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772–1834

Poems and Prose.

Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830

Essays and Criticism.

George Byron, 1788-1824

Don Juan; P oems.

Thomas de Quincey, 1785–1859

Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Selected Prose.

Maria Edgeworth, 1767-1849

Castle Rackrent.

Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810-1865

Cranford; Mary Barton; North and South.

Charles Robert Maturin, 1782–1824

Melmoth the Wanderer.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Poems; A Defence of Poetry.

Mary Shelley, 1797-1851

Frankenstein.

John Keats, 1795-1821

Poems and Letters.

Robert Browning, 1812–1889

Poems; The Ring and the Book.

Charles Dickens, 1812-1870

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; David Copperfield; The Adventures of Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Bleak House; Hard Times; Nicholas Nickleby; Dombey and Son; Great Expectations; Martin Chuzzlewit; Christmas Stories; Little Dorrit; Our Mutual Friend; The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892

Poems.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882

Poems and Translations.

Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888

Poems; Essays.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1830-1894.

Poems.

Thomas Love Peacock, 1785–1866

Nightmare Abbey; Gryll Grange.

Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1881

Selected Prose; Sartor Resartus.

John Ruskin, 1819-1900

Modern Painters; The Stones of Venice; Unto This Last; The Queen of the Air.

John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873

On Liberty; Autobiography.

Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882

The Barsetshire Novels; The Palliser Novels; Orley Farm; The Way We Live Now.

Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898

Complete Works.

George Gissing, 1857-1903

New Grub Street.

Charlotte Bronte, 1816-1855

Jane Eyre; Villette.

Emily Bronte, 1818-1848

Poems; Wuthering Heights.

Anne Bronte, 1820-1849

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863

Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond.

George Meredith, 1828-1909

Poems; The Egoist.

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936

Collected Poems; The Man Who Was Thursday.

Samuel Butler, 1835-1902

Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh.

Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889

The Moonstone; The Woman in White; No Name.

Thomson, James, 1834–1882

The City of the Dreadful Night.

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

Plays; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Artist as Critic; Letters.

George Eliot, 1819-1880

Adam Bede; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

Essays; Kidnapped; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island; The New Arabian Nights; The Master of Ballantrae; Weir of Hermiston.

William Morris, 1834-1896

Early Romances; Poems; The Earthly Paradise; The Well at the World’s End; News from Nowhere.

Bram Stoker, 1847-1912

Dracula.

George MacDonald, 1824-1905

Lilith; At the Back of the North Wind.

Germany

Jakob Grimm, 1785–1863 and Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786–1859

Fairy Tales.

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus), 1776-1822

The Devil’s Elixir; Tales.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900

The Birth of Tragedy; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power.

Russia

Aleksandr Pushkin, 1799-1837

Complete Prose Tales; Complete Poetry; Eugene Onegin; Narrative Poems; Boris Godunov.

Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852

The Complete Tales; Dead Souls; The Government Inspector.

Mikhail Lermontov, 1814-1841

Narrative Poems; A Hero of Our Time.

Ivan Turgenev, 1818-1883

A Sportsman’s Notebook; A Month in the Country; Fathers and Sons; On the Eve; First Love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821-1881

Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed (The Devils); The Brothers Karamazov; Short Novels.

Leo Tolstoy, 1828-1910

The Cossacks; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; A Confession; The Power of Darkness; Short Novels.

Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904

The Tales; The Major Plays.

The United States

Washington Irving, 1783-1859

The Sketch Book.

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851.

The Deerslayers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882

Nature; Essays; Representative Men; The Conduct of Life; Journals; Poems.

Emily Dickinson, 1830–1886

Complete Poems.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864

The Scarlet Letter; Tales and Sketches; The Marble Faun; Notebooks.

Herman Melville, 1819-1891

Moby-Dick; The Piazza Tales; Billy Budd; Collected Poems; Clarel.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849

Poetry and Tales; Essays and Reviews; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Eureka.

Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862

Walden; Poems; Essays.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807–1882

Selected Poems.

Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1913

Collected Writings.

Louisa May Alcott, 1832–1888

Little Women.

Kate Chopin, 1850-1904

The Awakening.

William Dean Howells, 1837-1920

The Rise of Silas Lapham; A Modern Instance.

Henry James, 1843-1916

The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; The Princess Casamassima; The Awkward Age; Short Novels and Tales; The Ambassadors; The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl

Mark Twain, 1835-1910

Complete Short Stories; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Devil’s Racetrack; Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger; Pudd’nhead Wilson; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

William James, 1842–1910

The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism.

D: “The Chaotic Age”

France

Anatole France, 1844-1924

Penguin Island; Thaïs.

Marcel Proust, 1871-1922

Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time).

Albert Camus, 1913-1960

The Stranger; The Plague; The Fall; The Rebel.

Great Britain and Ireland.

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939

The Collected Poems; Collected Plays; A Vision; Mythologies.

George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950

Major Critical Essays; Heartbreak House; Pygmalion; Saint Joan; Major Barbara; Back to Methuselah.

John Millington Synge, 1871-1909

Collected Plays.

George Douglas Brown, 1869-1902

The House with the Green Shutters.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928

The Well-Beloved; The Woodlanders; The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure; Collected Poems.

Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936

Kim; Collected Stories; Puck of Pook’s Hill; Complete Verse.

Housman, A. E., 1859-1936

Collected Poems.

Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924

Lord Jim; The Secret Agent; Nostromo; Under Western Eyes; Victory.

Ronald Firbank, 1886-1926

Five Novels.

Ford Madox Ford, 1873-1939

Parade’s End; The Good Soldier.

Saki, 1870-1916

The Short Stories.

Wells, H. G., 1866-1946

The Science Fiction Novels.

David Lindsay, 1876-1945

A Voyage to Arcturus.

Arnold Bennett, 1867–1931.

The Old Wives’ Tale.

John Galsworthy, 1867-1933

The Forsyth Saga.

Lawrence, D. H., 1885-1930

Complete Poems; Studies in Classic American Literature; Complete Short Stories; Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love.

Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941

Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando: A Biography; The Waves; Between the Acts.

James Joyce, 1882-1941

Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegans Wake.

George Orwell, 1903-1950

Collected Essays; 1984.

Germany.

Franz Kafka, 1883–1924

Amerika; The Complete Stories; The Blue Octavo Notebook; The Trial; Diaries; The Castle; Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms.

Russia.

Maksim Gorky, 1868-1936

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev; Autobiography.

Scandinavia.

Knut Hamsun, 1859-1952

Hunger; Pan.

Czech.

Karel Čapek, 1890-1938

War with the Newts; R.U.R.

Australia and New Zealand.

Miles Franklin, 1879-1954

My Brilliant Career.

Katherine Mansfield, 1888-1923

The Short Stories.

The United States.

Edith Wharton, 1862–1937

Collected Short Stories; The Age of Innocence; Ethan Frome; The House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country.

Willa Cather, 1873-1947

My Antonia; The Professor’s House; A Lost Lady.

Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946

Three Lives; The Geographical History of America; The Making of Americans; Tender Buttons.

Theodore Dreiser, 1871-1945

Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy.

Sinclair Lewis, 1885-1951

Babbitt; It Can’t Happen Here.

Eugene O’Neill, 1888-1953

Lazarus Laughed; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1896-1940

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night.

Nathanael West, 1903-1940

Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.

Of this last Appendix–which ends with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and includes a great degree of diversity–Bloom writes: “I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug’s game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical . . . literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind.” Again, the selections above are very limited. Before you ask, “what about x, y, or z!” see Bloom’s full list here. And if you still do not find authors you believe deserve inclusion in any version of the Western Canon, pick up a copy of Bloom’s book to learn more about his critical criteria.

A decent number of the texts above can also be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

Related Content:

Harold Bloom Recites ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ by Wallace Stevens

Harold Bloom on the Ghastly Decline of the Humanities (and on Obama’s Poetry)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A: “The Theocratic Age”

The Ancient Greeks

Hellenistic Greeks

The Romans

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

B: “The Aristocratic Age”

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Spain

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France

Germany

C: “The Democratic Age”

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France

Scandinavia

Great Britain

Germany

Russia

The United States

D: “The Chaotic Age”

France

Great Britain and Ireland.

Germany.

Russia.

Scandinavia.

Czech.

Australia and New Zealand.

The United States.

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