What would be the absolute minimum Western canon? (Less than 20 books.)
>look up st johns college great books program
>read the most well known book from the authors listed
P much that
Moby Dick should be the one American representative.
>>8276291
The Bible
it's gonna involve a lot of "collected works of"
>posting the edition with the shit C3
GET OUT OF MY /lit/! REEEEEEEEEEEEE
>>8276291
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Oresteia
Collected Plays of Euripides
The Oedipus Cycle
Metamorphoses
The Aeneid
The Bible (King James)
Beowulf
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Paradise Lost
The Divine Comedy
Don Quixote
Faust (Goethe)
Arabian Nights
The Canterbury Tales
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Madame Bovary
The Brothers Karamazov
The Complete Works of Franz Kafka
>>8276356
Oh, didn't read closely enough to see the "less than" in OP. Scratch Beowulf, I guess.
>>8276356
>no ulysses
>beowulf
>arabian nights
>aeschylus
naw
>>8276356
>beowulf
Dont make me laugh.
Your list is alright, but way to specifc on the ancients and completely disregards modernism.
Would easily swap beowulf, oresteia, arabian nights and chauser (possibly even aeneid) for joyce and beckett.
>>8276382
>The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Bible
I consider this the non-meme trilogy, the sort of unspoken /lit/ essentials
I think the actual /lit/ trilogy should be Ulysses, Moby Dick, and either Middlemarch or Anna Karenina
>>8276291
just read IJ, that's all you need
>>8276397
>Anna Karenina
It's just a feeling, and I admit I may be biased because it's my preference too, but I think most of /lit/ would put The Brothers Karamazov over Anna Karenina.
The Iliad/The Odyssey
Herodotus' Histories
Thucydides' Peloponnesian War
Aeschylus' Plays
Sophocles' Plays
Dialogues of Plato
Works of Aristotle
The Bible
Aeneid
Plutarch's Lives
Tacitus
Divine Comedy
Canterbury Tales
Montaigne's Essays
Don Quixote
Shakespeare's Plays
Paradise Lost
Faust
>>8276382
i say include Paradise Lost both because it should be included and then it's a nice round 5 items.
>>8276501
too patrician even for me
>>8276501
>absolute minimum Western canon
>11/19 are from antiquity
kek
Have you even read anything written after 1750?
>>8276785
Just an attempt to make the most canonical list I could within the confines of less than twenty. The closer a work is to our time the less stable it's place is in the canon imo. Which isn't to say there aren't plenty of works from the 19th century on that are comparably as good the ones I've listed.
Iliad/Odyssey
Aeneid
The Bible
Divine Comedy
Works of Shakespeare
Goethe's Faust
Ulysses
And we're done.
There are a LOOOOOOT of deserving works but between these 7 you have the foundation for well over 50% of the rest of the canon.
>>8276844
To add, among these I'm least certain about the Aeneid.
I also considered adding something along the lines of Dead Souls.
Why no...
>Canterbury Tales
Its influence is limited and is more of an anomaly within the Middle English Tradition
>Beowulf
More interesting historically/linguistically than literary-ly.
>Paradise Lost
Monolithic on its own but reliant (as much as he tried to deny it) on Dante and Shakespeare. Doesn't have the same level of influence. Again, this is all relative to our super constrained criteria.
>Other Greeks/Romans
Too scattered. No one work beyond Iliad/Odyssey are as monumental as any of the ones included above. Taken in aggregate they're immensely important.
I'm going to play in hard mode and not allow any collected works and a cap of 10.
Iliad
Odyssey
The Holy Bible
Divine Comedy
Hamlet
King Lear
Moby-Dick
War and Peace
Leaves of Grass
Ulysses
>>8276861
Actually, swap out King Lear for Faust
>>8276861
what was the argumentation behind King Lear? I mean I'm not opposing or anything, just curious.
>>8276861
The Bible is a collection, and for the most part isn't Western, although I think you could argue the Pauline literature is proto-Western.
>>8276291
>Iliad
>Odyssey
>Republic
>Bible
>Confessions
>Divine Comedy
>Canterbury Tales
>Hamlet
>Meditations on First Philosophy
>Paradise Lost
>Critique of Practical Reason
>Faust
>Phenomenology of Spirit
>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
>Crime and Punishment
>In Search of Lost Time
>Ulysses
>Being and Time
>White Noise
Hard to do a proper combination of philosophy and literature. Towards contemporary era (Kant till now) it became increasingly difficult to decide which works of literature are important enough to include in this list, so I tried to put books in that I knew encompassed huge movements (Ulysses), or explained the condition of the 20th century (White Noise). Being and Time is included because it dictated the direction of 20th century continental philosophy.
>>8278314
samefag, if possible I would change Hamlet to Shakespeare's complete works, but I think Hamlet is his most important piece (would say Romeo and Juliet, but the story of Paolo and Francesca in the Divine Comedy is similar enough that the story gets across).
