I like this very much. I have been studying Dante (in translation) and I almost think that is now a bit like some of the works you describe in the sense that while it is hugely important for the Western tradition, to most people it will be like something from another world and require some time to get up to speed with the background etc. (A.N. Wilson is good for this.) You *can* just read Dante for the spiritual/emotional message (Mark Vernon is splendid to guide you on that) but then some of it is just .... a bit of a blank and I would guess this is why many people don't make it out of the Inferno. If we want people to take literature seriously we need to be honest with them about what's involved! Reading modern work in translation from Korea, Japan etc is probably the best route for many readers. I didn't think I'd be able to get much purchase on Korean literature, for example (I wanted to after reading Pachinko), but when I read Whale it was wonderful so now I hope to make progress from there.
There's been so much good Korean literature translated lately! I've hardly read any modern Korean works, but I have PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM, and have been meaning to read it for ages
Goethe was moved to write West-Eastern Divan upon reading a translation of the works of the Persian poet Shams al-Din Hafez.
He is said to have remarked "It is to be hoped that people will soon be convinced that there is no such thing as patriotic art or patriotic science. Both belong, like all good things, to the whole world, and can be fostered only by untrammelled intercourse among all contemporaries, continually bearing in mind what we have inherited from the past"
The flip side of this is that the Christian conservative maintenance of the Great Books canon as "Western" requires maintaining a completely incurious understanding of what the West is, why some works are deemed Western. And along with that therefore, a hostility to reading most of those works contextually, often because doing so undercuts the idea that the texts have the universal relevance and meaning attributed to them. (Which then gets denied to non-Western texts on the grounds that contextual knowledge is required to read them.)
Yeah, I wonder if it's either reading him on the family tree of writers like Leo Strauss, who was very influenced by Nietzsche even though he didn't write about him much, or Nietzsche as a Counter-Enlightenment figure (which would be a fair enough reading), or just as the villain of "God is dead". I actually suspect it's the former but that's just a guess.
Outstanding article Naomi. I would love to read the crib sheets you suggest, and for what it's worth, they would definitely push me over the edge into becoming a paid subscriber (broke student that I am)!
I was in middle and high school in a very progressive Bay Area district in the late 00s-early 10s where we read typical canon stuff like The Odyssey and The Great Gatsby and the "diverse" picks were mostly mediocre recent YA-ish novels about being a Mexican immigrant or at a Japanese internment camp or something. When i later got into modernist criticism and discovered Tang poetry and the eastern epics I felt a bit cheated that none of this had made its way into my education. Of course you can't cover all the great world literature in a lifetime, but I would advocate the broad internationalist approach in education at least, if only because it gives people less of an in to criticize the canon for eurocentricity and replace it with their own, worse books.
Excellent as always, Naomi! I hope of course that more people become interested in what they are actually interested in, rather than virtue signaling to assuage their guilt. This kind of thing usually leads to actual engagement with diverse literature, rather than a begrudging acquiescence (I say this from experience!).
I think two issues complicating this are a) the fact that any one individual's readings is necessarily limited to a handful of languages, unless they are some language acquisition savant. This means, in turn, that one's engagement with most literary traditions is through translation, which opens up a lot of questions about what one is actually reading when one reads a translation and what relationship that text has to the original next.
b) the question of cultural appropriation when one deeply engages with and takes influence from another culture.
Most people I know only read fluently in one language anyway. It's very rare for anyone to be able to read high literature in more than one language, so the same issues of translation come up whether you're reading a work that was originally in French or in Sanskrit. That's just the curse of babel
I dont really think cultural appropriation is a big deal! Who does it hurt? Ethnic minorities within ones own linguistic group are the most vulnerable to having their culture taken and exploited (see, Black Americans). But Chinese or Indian or Japanese culture can't really be annexed or ruined by foreign influences so long as those countries remain strong nation states.
I love this post so much, I don't even know where to start!
1. I'm doing the year long slow read of War & Peace here on Substack and absolutely loving it. I left an inquiry with Tony of Tony's Reading List proposing that he consider doing the same with Genji, but never heard back
I almost feel that the whole idea of a canon is all-but-exhausted in what is essentially a post-literate society.
Saying this as someone who has read pretty much everything in the Western Canon and quite a few outside it from non-western literature. Also occult and a lot of medieval texts...
But it is literally a lifetime's task! I've been at it for nigh-on 50 years. Any reading list with any pretension to completeness will essentially require a similar time frame.
And then what? You enter a tiny group of people who know what's in Proust or Dostoevsky, and no matter how satisfying it may be to know all that, it's also strangely alienating.
I'm more in favour of a stripped-down canon that consists basically of the Bible and 1001 Nights. Once you know them you are literate in about 90% of literary themes and can pick and choose at your fancy, liberated from a canon to follow.
I'm not sure I agree! I think there's still a route to follow, and that a person can read the authors along that route in about five to ten years, and thus gain a basic sense of what's basically been going on in the West for the last three thousand years.
Thanks, in fact that's relevant to something I almost said before, but didn't, where I'd possibly suggest a film canon to substitute for the literary canon in recognition that we've gone post-literate.
"[Y]ou make that case not just by arguing, with words, that Eastern books should be included in other peoples’ lists—you make it by demonstrating, in your own life and your scholarship, that Eastern books have had a deep influence on you." I think you nailed precisely what I find missing from most attempts to enlarge or diversify the canon. I am ideologically very much on the side of world literature, but my upbringing and experience are fully and exclusively Western civ, and my project, such as it is, has mostly been trying to reconcile being a person who loves that canon but mostly isn't included in it.*
I've stuck to Western civ largely out of habit but also because I decided at some point that I wanted to acknowledge explicitly the culture I came from. None of that is really an excuse for not reading outside it--but again, we have few models for doing so--but then we don't do it, and it becomes a vicious circle.
*My father and godfather once edited a freshman comp reader. It includes exactly one essay by a person of color. It has none by women.
I mean people can only be what they are! If you genuinely love stuff that's outside the canon then that's great. But reading all these Eastern books is a huge time commitment! It takes a lot of energy! I can do it because I don't have a job. Most people have jobs. I think we all know, deep down, that the conservatives are right--it is more important for a Westerner to read Plato than to read Confucius. You just shouldn't be a dick about it.
In the American tradition, the usual examples of statesman/politicians who were also great writers are Lincoln for his speeches and Grant for his memoirs.
Availability of world literature is also a huge factor. Unless one has personally a large amount of money to spend on a copyrighted scholarly translation or have access to a well resourced library, the average reader cannot access most world literature. For the Iliad, for example, one can find both verse and prose translations, plus multiple abridgements and retellings that at least give the basic outlines of the story. But I could only find one affordable translation of the Shahnameh, in a format that mixes verse and prose.
One factor that I have observed driving interest amongst Gen Z in world literature is the nerdy interest in Japanese manga and Korean manhwa. While manga and manhwa are considered light fiction, they are rooted in their respective cultures' literary traditions and mythologies. It may be popular literature that finally increases Western consumption in general of Eastern literature.
I'm sort of curious if this piece is, in an indirect sense, a response to that recent NYT "best books of the 21st century so far" list, because I think the criticism you're making here is very similar to the criticism people are making of it - there's a couple genres of writing that only have one or two representatives on that list (including writing in translation) and there's a sense in which, like... is Claudia Rankine *really* the only poet of the 21st century worth including? Is "Fun Home" *really* the only graphic novel of the 21st century worth including? Or are they there because people decided, welp, we better include *one* poem/comic just to show we think poetry/comics are important literature, and these are the canonical ones?
You could say something similar about The Greatest Albums Of All Time type lists and jazz - I'm pretty sure the best jazz album of all time isn't *actually* "Kind of Blue" BUT it's the consensus "one jazz album to listen to before you die" and most music writers don't actually have deep music knowledge outside pop/rock/R&B so it will show up on every BEST OF list until the heat death of the universe.
It's mostly a response to me starting to read the unabridged Mahabharata! I thankfully stayed away from the NYT list discourse! I do think in Great Books lists they need to be centered on the language the list is in. If you look at Le Monde's Best Books of the 20th century list, it includes books no English list would likely include, like Malraux's MAN'S FATE. Similarly, an American list is likely to include, say, Edith Wharton or Willa Cather--who I don't think are necessarily as relevant to people from other countries, since almost every country has their own great realist author that's comparable to Wharton (I.e. Eca de Quieros in Portuguese or Galdos in Spanish or Boleslaw Prus in Polish). The international classics they include in Great Books lists usually _are_ the greatest works of literature from that tradition (the exception being when the greatest writers in a given tradition are lyric poets, who usually don't translate well--i.e. Great Books lists rarely include, say, Rumi or Neruda)--there the question is just, what do you get from reading The Tale of Genji with no outside context? Would someone really enjoy it? I think on the NYT list they prioritized accessibility, so, like, someone who doesn't read much poetry can probably like CITIZEN. But if you were to do that with Japanese literature, you'd likely pick someone like Murakami, rather than Genji.
I like this very much. I have been studying Dante (in translation) and I almost think that is now a bit like some of the works you describe in the sense that while it is hugely important for the Western tradition, to most people it will be like something from another world and require some time to get up to speed with the background etc. (A.N. Wilson is good for this.) You *can* just read Dante for the spiritual/emotional message (Mark Vernon is splendid to guide you on that) but then some of it is just .... a bit of a blank and I would guess this is why many people don't make it out of the Inferno. If we want people to take literature seriously we need to be honest with them about what's involved! Reading modern work in translation from Korea, Japan etc is probably the best route for many readers. I didn't think I'd be able to get much purchase on Korean literature, for example (I wanted to after reading Pachinko), but when I read Whale it was wonderful so now I hope to make progress from there.
There's been so much good Korean literature translated lately! I've hardly read any modern Korean works, but I have PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM, and have been meaning to read it for ages
Hi Henry,
Firstly, I owe you a million thanks for pointing me to Naomi's Substack! Perhaps this could serve as partial repayment
https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/korean-literature-for-beginners/
Mark
Isn't it good! Thanks this looks great!
Goethe was moved to write West-Eastern Divan upon reading a translation of the works of the Persian poet Shams al-Din Hafez.
He is said to have remarked "It is to be hoped that people will soon be convinced that there is no such thing as patriotic art or patriotic science. Both belong, like all good things, to the whole world, and can be fostered only by untrammelled intercourse among all contemporaries, continually bearing in mind what we have inherited from the past"
The flip side of this is that the Christian conservative maintenance of the Great Books canon as "Western" requires maintaining a completely incurious understanding of what the West is, why some works are deemed Western. And along with that therefore, a hostility to reading most of those works contextually, often because doing so undercuts the idea that the texts have the universal relevance and meaning attributed to them. (Which then gets denied to non-Western texts on the grounds that contextual knowledge is required to read them.)
Yes I'm always a bit surprised by how many of these classical Christian academies read Nietzsche. What on earth do they say about him?
Yeah, I wonder if it's either reading him on the family tree of writers like Leo Strauss, who was very influenced by Nietzsche even though he didn't write about him much, or Nietzsche as a Counter-Enlightenment figure (which would be a fair enough reading), or just as the villain of "God is dead". I actually suspect it's the former but that's just a guess.
Outstanding article Naomi. I would love to read the crib sheets you suggest, and for what it's worth, they would definitely push me over the edge into becoming a paid subscriber (broke student that I am)!
I was in middle and high school in a very progressive Bay Area district in the late 00s-early 10s where we read typical canon stuff like The Odyssey and The Great Gatsby and the "diverse" picks were mostly mediocre recent YA-ish novels about being a Mexican immigrant or at a Japanese internment camp or something. When i later got into modernist criticism and discovered Tang poetry and the eastern epics I felt a bit cheated that none of this had made its way into my education. Of course you can't cover all the great world literature in a lifetime, but I would advocate the broad internationalist approach in education at least, if only because it gives people less of an in to criticize the canon for eurocentricity and replace it with their own, worse books.
What school distinct!? Yeah I speak at Bay Area schools a lot, and they do seem to read a lot of YA novels about being in the Japanese internment.
Excellent as always, Naomi! I hope of course that more people become interested in what they are actually interested in, rather than virtue signaling to assuage their guilt. This kind of thing usually leads to actual engagement with diverse literature, rather than a begrudging acquiescence (I say this from experience!).
Thanks for this.
I think two issues complicating this are a) the fact that any one individual's readings is necessarily limited to a handful of languages, unless they are some language acquisition savant. This means, in turn, that one's engagement with most literary traditions is through translation, which opens up a lot of questions about what one is actually reading when one reads a translation and what relationship that text has to the original next.
b) the question of cultural appropriation when one deeply engages with and takes influence from another culture.
Most people I know only read fluently in one language anyway. It's very rare for anyone to be able to read high literature in more than one language, so the same issues of translation come up whether you're reading a work that was originally in French or in Sanskrit. That's just the curse of babel
I dont really think cultural appropriation is a big deal! Who does it hurt? Ethnic minorities within ones own linguistic group are the most vulnerable to having their culture taken and exploited (see, Black Americans). But Chinese or Indian or Japanese culture can't really be annexed or ruined by foreign influences so long as those countries remain strong nation states.
I love this post so much, I don't even know where to start!
1. I'm doing the year long slow read of War & Peace here on Substack and absolutely loving it. I left an inquiry with Tony of Tony's Reading List proposing that he consider doing the same with Genji, but never heard back
https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/tony-and-the-tale-of-genji/
2. For more Japanese literature, check out Alison Fincher
https://readjapaneseliterature.com/
3. I've had Nine Cloud Dream on deck for awhile, but sounds like it's time to dive in
4. If you are looking for some modern Shah-Nameh, I can't recommend The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk highly enough
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/september/red-haired-woman-orhan-pamuk
Looking forward to checking out The Lifetime Reading Plan.
As always, Thanks!!!
Thank you! I really liked Nine Cloud Dream! Orham Pamuk has definitely been on my list for a while too
I almost feel that the whole idea of a canon is all-but-exhausted in what is essentially a post-literate society.
Saying this as someone who has read pretty much everything in the Western Canon and quite a few outside it from non-western literature. Also occult and a lot of medieval texts...
But it is literally a lifetime's task! I've been at it for nigh-on 50 years. Any reading list with any pretension to completeness will essentially require a similar time frame.
And then what? You enter a tiny group of people who know what's in Proust or Dostoevsky, and no matter how satisfying it may be to know all that, it's also strangely alienating.
I'm more in favour of a stripped-down canon that consists basically of the Bible and 1001 Nights. Once you know them you are literate in about 90% of literary themes and can pick and choose at your fancy, liberated from a canon to follow.
I'm not sure I agree! I think there's still a route to follow, and that a person can read the authors along that route in about five to ten years, and thus gain a basic sense of what's basically been going on in the West for the last three thousand years.
Hard to say, as a lit major I slammed most of the Western canon in a very short time but my real understanding of it only came much later.
I looked at your movie reviews by the way and you have very good taste! I love FIRST BLOOD and THE ASSISTANT =]
Thanks, in fact that's relevant to something I almost said before, but didn't, where I'd possibly suggest a film canon to substitute for the literary canon in recognition that we've gone post-literate.
Yeah, that sounds like Mortimer Adler. Even where wrong he was pontificating. Vale Morty, you are still missed in this world.
"[Y]ou make that case not just by arguing, with words, that Eastern books should be included in other peoples’ lists—you make it by demonstrating, in your own life and your scholarship, that Eastern books have had a deep influence on you." I think you nailed precisely what I find missing from most attempts to enlarge or diversify the canon. I am ideologically very much on the side of world literature, but my upbringing and experience are fully and exclusively Western civ, and my project, such as it is, has mostly been trying to reconcile being a person who loves that canon but mostly isn't included in it.*
I've stuck to Western civ largely out of habit but also because I decided at some point that I wanted to acknowledge explicitly the culture I came from. None of that is really an excuse for not reading outside it--but again, we have few models for doing so--but then we don't do it, and it becomes a vicious circle.
*My father and godfather once edited a freshman comp reader. It includes exactly one essay by a person of color. It has none by women.
I mean people can only be what they are! If you genuinely love stuff that's outside the canon then that's great. But reading all these Eastern books is a huge time commitment! It takes a lot of energy! I can do it because I don't have a job. Most people have jobs. I think we all know, deep down, that the conservatives are right--it is more important for a Westerner to read Plato than to read Confucius. You just shouldn't be a dick about it.
In the American tradition, the usual examples of statesman/politicians who were also great writers are Lincoln for his speeches and Grant for his memoirs.
Availability of world literature is also a huge factor. Unless one has personally a large amount of money to spend on a copyrighted scholarly translation or have access to a well resourced library, the average reader cannot access most world literature. For the Iliad, for example, one can find both verse and prose translations, plus multiple abridgements and retellings that at least give the basic outlines of the story. But I could only find one affordable translation of the Shahnameh, in a format that mixes verse and prose.
One factor that I have observed driving interest amongst Gen Z in world literature is the nerdy interest in Japanese manga and Korean manhwa. While manga and manhwa are considered light fiction, they are rooted in their respective cultures' literary traditions and mythologies. It may be popular literature that finally increases Western consumption in general of Eastern literature.
I'm sort of curious if this piece is, in an indirect sense, a response to that recent NYT "best books of the 21st century so far" list, because I think the criticism you're making here is very similar to the criticism people are making of it - there's a couple genres of writing that only have one or two representatives on that list (including writing in translation) and there's a sense in which, like... is Claudia Rankine *really* the only poet of the 21st century worth including? Is "Fun Home" *really* the only graphic novel of the 21st century worth including? Or are they there because people decided, welp, we better include *one* poem/comic just to show we think poetry/comics are important literature, and these are the canonical ones?
You could say something similar about The Greatest Albums Of All Time type lists and jazz - I'm pretty sure the best jazz album of all time isn't *actually* "Kind of Blue" BUT it's the consensus "one jazz album to listen to before you die" and most music writers don't actually have deep music knowledge outside pop/rock/R&B so it will show up on every BEST OF list until the heat death of the universe.
It's mostly a response to me starting to read the unabridged Mahabharata! I thankfully stayed away from the NYT list discourse! I do think in Great Books lists they need to be centered on the language the list is in. If you look at Le Monde's Best Books of the 20th century list, it includes books no English list would likely include, like Malraux's MAN'S FATE. Similarly, an American list is likely to include, say, Edith Wharton or Willa Cather--who I don't think are necessarily as relevant to people from other countries, since almost every country has their own great realist author that's comparable to Wharton (I.e. Eca de Quieros in Portuguese or Galdos in Spanish or Boleslaw Prus in Polish). The international classics they include in Great Books lists usually _are_ the greatest works of literature from that tradition (the exception being when the greatest writers in a given tradition are lyric poets, who usually don't translate well--i.e. Great Books lists rarely include, say, Rumi or Neruda)--there the question is just, what do you get from reading The Tale of Genji with no outside context? Would someone really enjoy it? I think on the NYT list they prioritized accessibility, so, like, someone who doesn't read much poetry can probably like CITIZEN. But if you were to do that with Japanese literature, you'd likely pick someone like Murakami, rather than Genji.