"Western civilization" vs. "World literature"
When I got into the Great Books (back in 2010) it went without saying that if you were going to create a canon, it should be an international one. You'd have Aristotle, but also Confucius. The Iliad and The Ramayana, Jane Austen and Lu Xun, Daniel Defoe and Lady Murasaki, etc.
The book that formed my understanding of the Great Books had only recently bee…
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