Very cool list. Its hard to think of many you didn’t mention. "The Nine Cloud Dream" from Korea is one I'm really intrigued by. It sounds light hearted.
@@Orpheuslament starting my first lap through my complete Golden Bough set soon. it kept staring at me on the shelf so I decided it is this year's big project. I hope your reading life has been rich and fulfilling.
This is such a fantastic list! I have recently been compiling an equivalent list for 'the novel' since Rabelais/Cervantes and was thinking about extending it back through the ages - your hard work has basically saved me the trouble. Thank you! As far as omissions go, well, it's incredibly comprehensive and broad, but unless I'm mistaken there is no African literature after the ancient Egyptians, and I strongly agree with @raphbiss's suggestions, above all with Baudelaire - to put it very crudely, he basically invented the 20th century. I do also think the list is light on the 20th century in general. First, it just produced so much wonderful literature -- although this is pretty simplistic, just think how many more human beings were a) alive, and b) literate in the 20th century relative to any other in the history of mankind! But also I think saying that 'the odds that the greatest author is from the last 100 years is exceptionally low' is a little wrong-headed for more conceptual reasons too. It implies that literature is a kind of competition, and that 'greatness' is a property built into the structure of art that we can simply discover, as if we are measuring the world's longest river. Yes the canon is the canon, and things that have survived for millennia probably do on balance contain substantial literary merit, but what the 'greatest literature' is is only ever interpretable in the context of our own time - the only time we have. What can we know about the world 500 years from today? Literature is life, and it seems a bit of a fool's errand to try to administrate our life's meaning based on such an extremely long-distance reading of the civilizational tea leaves. I think your attitude to the past is really beautiful, but you can't lose sight of the fact that even the beauty you find in the poetry of the ancient Sumerians, or Procopius, or Du Fu, is in some sense because it lights up the world you live in now, and the life that you lead within that world -- now. And the literature of the last 100 years provides you with the highest resolution model of the forces that have shaped that world that you can find. But thank you again.
As for Africa it of course depends on how one categorizes the continent over time. Figures like St. Augustine and ibn Khaldun were born and lived for a substantial time in North Africa but are not very often thought of as African for one reason or another. Some 'classically' African works I have later in the list are the Sundiata - the great Mali epic - and Aniceti Kitereza who wrote a fascinating novel about his childhood in his native language in the mid-20th century. He translated it himself into Swahili and then it was translated by a relative into English. Fascinating work and highly recommend it for your interest in novels. I appreciate your well-thought-out comment and understand where you are coming from. I have thought about the numbers of people and literacy but in the end one is left with the question - "where are all the Shakespeares? where are all the [fill in great writer here]?" It is possible that while we are literate at scale we are also less likely to cultivate literary appreciation or taste to the same degree. Surely we should have hundreds of Shakespeares all over being praised but we obviously don't. Maybe I am being somewhat excessively contrarian to combat the insane self-centeredness of our culture (or any ethnonationalist culture) which doesn't read translated works and especially doesn't read anything from the past - in the end if anything I would rather stretch my understanding of human possibility and beauty by being able to appreciate works from widely varying cultures and times rather than being stuck in my own to a huge detriment. I think that people who look for 'experimental' works in their own language would be amazed with the unintentional experimentality of works written with totally different cultural assumptions but still maintaining deep human universals within them. I just finished reading a biography of Petrarch and within his views of his own time found maybe the closest expression of how I feel about mine. We could be doing much more than we are and the only thing holding us back is ignorance and narrowmindedness. I do think it's valuable to think about what the future would be like because in the end I think it causes one to consider what we should be like now. A global literary canon that is taught and widely appreciated would be so much better than anything we currently have. Thanks again for your thoughts.
@@Orpheuslament On African literature, you're absolutely right, and I was mistaken! Given the admirably comprehensive coverage of other national epics/mythological writing, there could probably be others included (the Kebra Nagast?)... as far as novelists go I also think Achebe should be there, but that would be alongside a host of others from around the world, which leads us back to the second part of the comment... Tbh I think your position is inspiring, and I agree especially with what you say about the value of reading across cultures and languages in a grimly incurious Anglophone monoculture. However I think this perspective also obscures the fact that in other ways our contemporary period (or even the last 100 years) can also be seen as one marked by an unprecedented amount of cultural cross-pollination, in as much as literature produced in that time is produced in an ecosystem of production and reception that is more 'global' and intensively networked than ever before, and which I think has accounted for an enormous amount of creative diversity that is hard to compare with any other period, the repurposing of industrial Western literary forms (the novel above all) by writers from around the world working out of their own extremely distinctive linguistic and cultural traditions has produced an inordinate amount of aesthetic variety in my opinion. Anyway some of this is represented in your list anyway so I won't belabour this point any more! Your reply throws up all sorts of other extremely interesting questions. I will join your Discord and maybe we will end up discussing them further. All the best!
If you're going to read St. Teresa of Avila, you should consider also St. John of the Cross. They were friends in fact and their works are generally considered as two sides of one coin. You could also consider the early church fathers
Just remembered that you read Spanish. You're in luck. San Juan de la Cruz is considered one of the most poetic writers in the Catholic Church. I'll have to content myself with English translations
Great list! Impressive historical and global scope, especially on the dark ages. Interesting choice with Hofmannsthal - personally, I might have opted for Canetti, Johnson, Benjamin, Weiss or Trakl instead. Considering your love for literature with a modernist vein, I’m a bit surprised by the absence of some more recent authors. No Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Cioran, Deleuze, Derrida, Ponty, Pynchon, McElroy, Gass, O’Brian, Blanchot, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Collobert, Stendhal, Céline, Huysmans, Zola, Perec, Svevo, Gadda, Pavese, Calvino, Márquez, Donoso, Carpentier, Cortázar, Lispector, Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Pavić, Kiš (since Krleza is on the list), Embirikos, Nádas, Krasznahorkai, Hamsun, Hultberg, or Kilpi - just to name a few. That said, I really appreciate the broadness and reach of your list. I was wondering if you had any recommendations for an anthology of Mayan literature (or just the Popol Vuh?).
You make valid points with a handful of the authors you mention but one thing I'm trying to stay strict on for myself is the balance over centuries. If I stack my list with 100 or more modernists then fundamentally that takes away from the other dozens of centuries in which people have written. A few of the authors you mentioned are on a shelf I have dedicated to authors I might add to the list. If you are curious you can find that shelf in my previous video. As for Mayan this is the anthology I am interested in but haven't read yet: www.ucpress.edu/books/2000-years-of-mayan-literature/paper. Thanks for watching.
@@Orpheuslament I’ve watched all your shelving videos and initially thought you might add more authors without taking away from the existing ones. However, I do recall you mentioning the maximum number of shelves you wanted to reach, so in hindsight, it makes sense. As for the anthology, that’s actually the one I was considering too. I was curious if there were any more renowned options out there, but in this case, I’ll stick with it.
Interesting list but... no Schelgel/Novalis, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Nabokov, Pynchon ? I'd add Marguerite Porete and Jacques Derrida (his later literary-adjacent works like Circonfession and the Post Card are some of the most original works produced by the 20th century, and, in my opinion, will most certainly be read in 500 years). Also, Aquinas but not Eckhart ?
Eckhart and Rimbaud are the two I seriously thought over - my thoughts were: Rimbaud wrote a little that was impressive but compared to many other authors on the list I'm not sure and for Meister Eckhart I simply haven't read enough but plan to. Thanks for watching.
Okay just a note, You mentioned a list by Maxmuller especially on the Indian subcontinent. It is very important to note that Max was an orientalist and one of the main architect of the vision of how the east is seen as something pristine, heavenly or sacred. In the same conversation comes colonialism as well. So one must go through that list quite critically which I hope that you do!
You make a fair point but that list (and free pdfs online) is by far the most accessible collection of great works from the Indian and Chinese civilizations and for that reason is indispensible. Many of the works in the series have newer editions that are more carefully translated and presented but many are hard to find or significantly more expensive unfortunately.
By all accounts, your initiative is not uncommon, at least among lit people. I have something similar. I think, in ten years, we will be both funny and pathetic to our future self. If literature means anything to me, it is exactly because of the books written after 1900. They would certainly dominate. Fossils upheld by their historical significance are not that important to me. 'What will remain', since ever, has very little to do with quality, and very much with being inserted in nation/identity forming machine. It is profoundly political and meaningless in any literary sense.
Always nice to see your perspective and add a couple more books to my list. Happy reading, Drake.
Thanks for watching and happy reading to you.
Very cool list. Its hard to think of many you didn’t mention. "The Nine Cloud Dream" from Korea is one I'm really intrigued by. It sounds light hearted.
The Penguin Classics edition of that book is indeed on my shelf and I neglected to add it to the list. Thanks for the reminder.
thank you for this video and the bookshelf tours Drake. Wishing you a Happy New Year!
Thanks Evan, happy holidays and hope you been reading some good books lately!
@@Orpheuslament starting my first lap through my complete Golden Bough set soon. it kept staring at me on the shelf so I decided it is this year's big project. I hope your reading life has been rich and fulfilling.
Uncanny. Was just thinking about this today. Can’t wait to see your list
I hope the list is helpful - making it certainly has been helpful for me.
This is such a fantastic list! I have recently been compiling an equivalent list for 'the novel' since Rabelais/Cervantes and was thinking about extending it back through the ages - your hard work has basically saved me the trouble. Thank you! As far as omissions go, well, it's incredibly comprehensive and broad, but unless I'm mistaken there is no African literature after the ancient Egyptians, and I strongly agree with @raphbiss's suggestions, above all with Baudelaire - to put it very crudely, he basically invented the 20th century.
I do also think the list is light on the 20th century in general. First, it just produced so much wonderful literature -- although this is pretty simplistic, just think how many more human beings were a) alive, and b) literate in the 20th century relative to any other in the history of mankind! But also I think saying that 'the odds that the greatest author is from the last 100 years is exceptionally low' is a little wrong-headed for more conceptual reasons too. It implies that literature is a kind of competition, and that 'greatness' is a property built into the structure of art that we can simply discover, as if we are measuring the world's longest river. Yes the canon is the canon, and things that have survived for millennia probably do on balance contain substantial literary merit, but what the 'greatest literature' is is only ever interpretable in the context of our own time - the only time we have. What can we know about the world 500 years from today? Literature is life, and it seems a bit of a fool's errand to try to administrate our life's meaning based on such an extremely long-distance reading of the civilizational tea leaves. I think your attitude to the past is really beautiful, but you can't lose sight of the fact that even the beauty you find in the poetry of the ancient Sumerians, or Procopius, or Du Fu, is in some sense because it lights up the world you live in now, and the life that you lead within that world -- now. And the literature of the last 100 years provides you with the highest resolution model of the forces that have shaped that world that you can find. But thank you again.
As for Africa it of course depends on how one categorizes the continent over time. Figures like St. Augustine and ibn Khaldun were born and lived for a substantial time in North Africa but are not very often thought of as African for one reason or another. Some 'classically' African works I have later in the list are the Sundiata - the great Mali epic - and Aniceti Kitereza who wrote a fascinating novel about his childhood in his native language in the mid-20th century. He translated it himself into Swahili and then it was translated by a relative into English. Fascinating work and highly recommend it for your interest in novels.
I appreciate your well-thought-out comment and understand where you are coming from. I have thought about the numbers of people and literacy but in the end one is left with the question - "where are all the Shakespeares? where are all the [fill in great writer here]?"
It is possible that while we are literate at scale we are also less likely to cultivate literary appreciation or taste to the same degree. Surely we should have hundreds of Shakespeares all over being praised but we obviously don't.
Maybe I am being somewhat excessively contrarian to combat the insane self-centeredness of our culture (or any ethnonationalist culture) which doesn't read translated works and especially doesn't read anything from the past - in the end if anything I would rather stretch my understanding of human possibility and beauty by being able to appreciate works from widely varying cultures and times rather than being stuck in my own to a huge detriment. I think that people who look for 'experimental' works in their own language would be amazed with the unintentional experimentality of works written with totally different cultural assumptions but still maintaining deep human universals within them.
I just finished reading a biography of Petrarch and within his views of his own time found maybe the closest expression of how I feel about mine. We could be doing much more than we are and the only thing holding us back is ignorance and narrowmindedness.
I do think it's valuable to think about what the future would be like because in the end I think it causes one to consider what we should be like now. A global literary canon that is taught and widely appreciated would be so much better than anything we currently have.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
@@Orpheuslament On African literature, you're absolutely right, and I was mistaken! Given the admirably comprehensive coverage of other national epics/mythological writing, there could probably be others included (the Kebra Nagast?)... as far as novelists go I also think Achebe should be there, but that would be alongside a host of others from around the world, which leads us back to the second part of the comment...
Tbh I think your position is inspiring, and I agree especially with what you say about the value of reading across cultures and languages in a grimly incurious Anglophone monoculture. However I think this perspective also obscures the fact that in other ways our contemporary period (or even the last 100 years) can also be seen as one marked by an unprecedented amount of cultural cross-pollination, in as much as literature produced in that time is produced in an ecosystem of production and reception that is more 'global' and intensively networked than ever before, and which I think has accounted for an enormous amount of creative diversity that is hard to compare with any other period, the repurposing of industrial Western literary forms (the novel above all) by writers from around the world working out of their own extremely distinctive linguistic and cultural traditions has produced an inordinate amount of aesthetic variety in my opinion. Anyway some of this is represented in your list anyway so I won't belabour this point any more!
Your reply throws up all sorts of other extremely interesting questions. I will join your Discord and maybe we will end up discussing them further. All the best!
@@christopheredwards4012The Kebra Nagast looks fascinating - thanks for mentioning it.
discord.gg/8jyzRRN3
Here is a link to join the discord!
If you're going to read St. Teresa of Avila, you should consider also St. John of the Cross. They were friends in fact and their works are generally considered as two sides of one coin. You could also consider the early church fathers
Just remembered that you read Spanish. You're in luck. San Juan de la Cruz is considered one of the most poetic writers in the Catholic Church. I'll have to content myself with English translations
On another note, I have more optimism regarding Tarkovsky and his lasting legacy
Great list! Impressive historical and global scope, especially on the dark ages. Interesting choice with Hofmannsthal - personally, I might have opted for Canetti, Johnson, Benjamin, Weiss or Trakl instead. Considering your love for literature with a modernist vein, I’m a bit surprised by the absence of some more recent authors. No Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Cioran, Deleuze, Derrida, Ponty, Pynchon, McElroy, Gass, O’Brian, Blanchot, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Collobert, Stendhal, Céline, Huysmans, Zola, Perec, Svevo, Gadda, Pavese, Calvino, Márquez, Donoso, Carpentier, Cortázar, Lispector, Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Pavić, Kiš (since Krleza is on the list), Embirikos, Nádas, Krasznahorkai, Hamsun, Hultberg, or Kilpi - just to name a few. That said, I really appreciate the broadness and reach of your list. I was wondering if you had any recommendations for an anthology of Mayan literature (or just the Popol Vuh?).
You make valid points with a handful of the authors you mention but one thing I'm trying to stay strict on for myself is the balance over centuries. If I stack my list with 100 or more modernists then fundamentally that takes away from the other dozens of centuries in which people have written. A few of the authors you mentioned are on a shelf I have dedicated to authors I might add to the list. If you are curious you can find that shelf in my previous video.
As for Mayan this is the anthology I am interested in but haven't read yet: www.ucpress.edu/books/2000-years-of-mayan-literature/paper.
Thanks for watching.
@@Orpheuslament I’ve watched all your shelving videos and initially thought you might add more authors without taking away from the existing ones. However, I do recall you mentioning the maximum number of shelves you wanted to reach, so in hindsight, it makes sense. As for the anthology, that’s actually the one I was considering too. I was curious if there were any more renowned options out there, but in this case, I’ll stick with it.
What biography on Petrarch? I've been trying to find one.
@@billpoole8541 The one by Ernest Hatch Wilkins which is excellent.
@Orpheuslament thank you
How can we join your discord?
@@senna0001 discord.gg/gMpZ8TMh
Here is an invite!
I might have missed them but The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and The Golden Ass by Apuleius
I do indeed have Boccaccio on the list but not Apuleius. Thanks for watching.
Interesting list but... no Schelgel/Novalis, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Nabokov, Pynchon ?
I'd add Marguerite Porete and Jacques Derrida (his later literary-adjacent works like Circonfession and the Post Card are some of the most original works produced by the 20th century, and, in my opinion, will most certainly be read in 500 years).
Also, Aquinas but not Eckhart ?
Eckhart and Rimbaud are the two I seriously thought over - my thoughts were: Rimbaud wrote a little that was impressive but compared to many other authors on the list I'm not sure and for Meister Eckhart I simply haven't read enough but plan to.
Thanks for watching.
Okay just a note, You mentioned a list by Maxmuller especially on the Indian subcontinent. It is very important to note that Max was an orientalist and one of the main architect of the vision of how the east is seen as something pristine, heavenly or sacred. In the same conversation comes colonialism as well. So one must go through that list quite critically which I hope that you do!
You make a fair point but that list (and free pdfs online) is by far the most accessible collection of great works from the Indian and Chinese civilizations and for that reason is indispensible. Many of the works in the series have newer editions that are more carefully translated and presented but many are hard to find or significantly more expensive unfortunately.
By all accounts, your initiative is not uncommon, at least among lit people. I have something similar. I think, in ten years, we will be both funny and pathetic to our future self.
If literature means anything to me, it is exactly because of the books written after 1900. They would certainly dominate. Fossils upheld by their historical significance are not that important to me. 'What will remain', since ever, has very little to do with quality, and very much with being inserted in nation/identity forming machine. It is profoundly political and meaningless in any literary sense.