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Professors’ list of Great Books | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6164 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 1 of 40 09 March 2014 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Why is there no Asian languages section?
Also why is the section for English so long compared to others? Is it that the English did write a lot more great books than other people? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4254 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 40 09 March 2014 at 2:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Are you referring too the great books page on Professor Arguelles' website? If so, it looks to me like it was never completed, but there were plans to include many other civilizations.
On a more general note about great anything lists, these can be affected by a ton of different factors such as population, economy, technology, culture, attitude towards preservation, availability to modern day list makers, continued resonance with ideas of modern list makers, etc. So disentangling why any one language has more great works than another on a list is not such a simple task. Edited by YnEoS on 09 March 2014 at 2:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 40 09 March 2014 at 5:24am | IP Logged | ||
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The link is broken, but he does have an Eastern civilization list. You can see all his lists here; the links to them are broken on his page.
The contemporary concept of Great Books was shaped and embraced by several American universities from the 1920s onward. Series like "Great Books of the Western World" come from this background. Hence the skew towards English. I believe the Professor is/was gradually working on addressing this skew, bringing in far more books of similar calibre from far more civilizations, but it is a rather large task. Edited by Volte on 09 March 2014 at 5:25am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4622 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 4 of 40 09 March 2014 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Why are they all so old? Can a book not be "great" if it was written after 1870?
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 40 09 March 2014 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Not to mention the Dutch books he mentioned are nigh-on impossible to read for us. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 6 of 40 09 March 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||
He has a 20th Century Waiting List. Tbe idea there is that historically it has taken some time (100 years) for a book to have stood the test of time before classified as "Great". 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4868 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 7 of 40 09 March 2014 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Aside from the Professor's background, I would think it has to do something with Britain and the US having been and being very influential in many countries. That kind of thing involves importing your culture to all the places you assert your dominance over in one way or another. And the populace is excited to immerse in the media of a dominant country (where production values may also be better). What goes for TV and music I'm sure also goes for Great Books. I'd wager you'd come up with pretty clear results if you measured the consumption of literature originally written in English by people not living in an English-speaking country against the percentage of translated literature read by natives of English-speaking countries.
Compiling a definite literary canon of "more worthy" literature is fraught with many dangers... Personally, I don't believe it should be attempted. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6061 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 40 09 March 2014 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is an interesting thread. I especially liked druckfehler's approach and tarvos' commentary.
I'd just like to add a few things: 1. When I see orthographic errors in the Portuguese language section, it makes me wonder about the overall care in making the list; sorry, I'm just picky that way. 2. Every Empire since dawn of time has achieved greatness by (among other things) having and giving a high cultural image of itself: this is an advantage in the beginning, but it turns into short-sightedness, preventing adaptation; we're seeing this right now, in my humble opinion. 3. That being said, I find these lists useful: when comparing lists (why should I believe in the criteria of a single author?), there are certain books that come up often; for instance, when I see The Great Gatsby in every list, my guess is that it must be a well-written book. ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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