Western Literary Canon in Context

The Western Literary Canon in Context
Parts I–III
Professor John M. Bowers
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John M. Bowers, Ph.D.
Professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
John M. Bowers is a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he has served as chairman of the
Department of English. In 1971 he received his B.A. from Duke University, and he went on to earn an M.A. in 1973 and a
Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Virginia. In 1975 he was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree from The University
of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar with a specialty in medieval English literature.
Professor Bowers has published four books: The Crisis of Will in “Piers Plowman”; The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-
Century Continuations and Additions; The Politics of “Pearl”: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II; and Chaucer and
Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. He is the author of more than 30 articles and essays on authors, including Saint
Augustine, Marie de France, and William Shakespeare, as well as seven entries in the 2006 edition of The Oxford
Encyclopedia of British Literature on writers such as William Caxton and works such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
He has championed scholarship on Chaucer’s contemporaries Thomas Usk and Sir John Clanvowe as well as the 15th-century
Chaucerian poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate. His current book projects concern Chaucer, William Langland, and
the Gawain Poet.
He has been a visiting research fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller
Foundation’s Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. He has lectured widely, with presentations in New York, Los Angeles, London,
and Berlin. He has taught at the University of Virginia, Hamilton College (now Kaplan University), California Institute of
Technology, and Princeton University. His regular teaching assignments include Chaucer, Shakespeare, literary theory, and
world literature.
Professor Bowers has received numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, including fellowships from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Among his
many teaching recognitions, he is the recipient of the Nevada Regents’ Teaching Award.
©2008 The Teaching Company. i

Table of Contents
Professor Biography ...................................................................................................................................................................i

Course Scope .............................................................................................................................................................................. 1
Lecture One The Bible and the Literary Canon ....................................................................... .3
Lecture Two The Bible as Literature ......................................................................................... 6
Lecture Three The Epic of Gilgamesh—Western Literature?...................................................... 8
Lecture Four Homer’s Odyssey and the Seafaring Hero.......................................................... 10
Lecture Five The Context of Athenian Tragedy...................................................................... 12
Lecture Six Herodotus versus Thucydides ............................................................................ 14
Lecture Seven Socrates and Plato—Writing and Reality........................................................... 17
Lecture Eight Aristotle’s Poetics—How We Tell Stories........................................................ .19
Lecture Nine Virgil’s Aeneid and the Epic of Empire ............................................................. 21
Lecture Ten Love Interest—Ovid’s Metamorphoses.............................................................. 24
Lecture Eleven St. Augustine Saves the Classics ........................................................................ 26
Lecture Twelve All Literature is Consolation—Boethius ............................................................ 28
Lecture Thirteen Beowulf—The Fortunate Survivor ..................................................................... 31
Lecture Fourteen King Arthur, Politics, and Sir Gawain ............................................................... 33
Lecture Fifteen Dante and the Canon of Christian Literature...................................................... 35
Lecture Sixteen Boccaccio—Ancient Masters, Modern Rivals ................................................... 37
Lecture Seventeen Chaucer—The Father of English Literature ....................................................... 39
Lecture Eighteen “Man for All Seasons”—More and His Utopia.................................................. 42
Lecture Nineteen Hamlet—English Literature Goes Global .......................................................... 45
Lecture Twenty Brave New Worlds—Shakespeare’s The Tempest ............................................. 48
Lecture Twenty-One Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the Novel ............................................................ 50
Lecture Twenty-Two The Rebel as Hero—Milton’s Paradise Lost ..................................................... 53
Lecture Twenty-Three Voice of an Age—Voltaire’s Candide ............................................................... 56
Lecture Twenty-Four Pride and Prejudice—Women in the Canon...................................................... 59
Lecture Twenty-Five Nationalism and Culture in Goethe’s Faust ....................................................... 62
Lecture Twenty-Six Melville’s Moby-Dick and Global Literature ..................................................... 65
Lecture Twenty-Seven Cult Classic—The Charterhouse of Parma........................................................ 68
Lecture Twenty-Eight East Meets West in War and Peace ................................................................... 71
Lecture Twenty-Nine Joyce’s Ulysses and the Avant-Garde ................................................................ 74
Lecture Thirty The Magic Mountain and Modern Institutions ................................................... 76
Lecture Thirty-One Mrs. Dalloway and Post-War England ............................................................... 78
Lecture Thirty-Two T. S. Eliot’s Divine Comedy .............................................................................. 81
Lecture Thirty-Three Faulkner and the Great American Novel............................................................ 84
Lecture Thirty-Four Willa Cather and Mosaics of Identity................................................................. 86
Lecture Thirty-Five Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—Literature? ................................................... 89
Lecture Thirty-Six Postcolonialism—The Empire Writes Back....................................................... 91
Timeline .................................................................................................................................................................................... 94
Glossary .................................................................................................................................................................................... 98
Biographical Notes................................................................................................................................................................. 100
Bibliography........................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Credits: Excerpts from the poem “Chard Whitlow” used by kind permission of the Henry Reed Estate.
ii ©2008 The Teaching Company.

Scope:
Why read Moby-Dick? These 36 half-hour lectures on the Western literary canon in context ask what are the great books that
every educated person should know, and why have these literary works—not others—achieved this status within an official
list of masterpieces. Why do some bestsellers stand the test of time? Why do some obscure authors steadily increase their
standing? We will examine the context: Did the political elite champion an author? Did great historical events such as World
War I effect the literary climate? Did the spread of literacy and technology bring the work to a wider audience? Canon
formation becomes a complicated, untidy, and sometimes random process, always in the state of being revised. Why these 36
authors and titles, not others? Mostly because they retain canonic status in university courses, in textbooks like The Norton
Anthology, and in paperback series like Penguin Classics. We’ll look at how the academic curriculum perpetuates—and
changes—the development of the canon.
Lectures One and Two begin with the Bible as the epitome of what “Western,” “literary,” and “canonic” mean to us. An
official list of which works went into the Bible—and which were excluded—emerges as the operative principle for canon
formation. Canonic books are honored with translation and subject to scholarly interpretation. The Bible defines how books
are written, how they are organized and edited, and even what they look like.
Lectures Three through Eight examine the earliest works of the Western canon. Rediscovered in the 19th century, the
Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh poses a problem, crossing the boundary between East and West. Ancient Greek culture
offers a new starting point, giving rise to genres that become canonic: the epics of Homer; the histories of Herodotus and
Thucydides; the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and the philosophic writings of Plato and Aristotle.
“Firstness” sometimes insures inclusion in the canon.
Lectures Nine through Twelve cover imperial Rome. Virgil’s Aeneid appropriated the achievements of the Homeric epics as
propaganda for Emperor Augustus. Ovid grafted Greek mythology to Roman literature in his Metamorphoses. Boethius
synthesized the best of Plato and Aristotle into Latin literature. And as the church replaced the empire, Saint Augustine
interpreted pagan poetry allegorically to rescue literary classics for later Christian readers.
Lectures Thirteen through Seventeen examine medieval literature. Beowulf extolled the heroic virtues of the northern
Europeans in the first surviving English vernacular epic. Something revolutionary happened as a result of religious reforms in
1215; Dante’s used his native Italian language to create Europe’s first canonic masterpiece: The Divine Comedy. Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight shows how Arthurian literature reflected local courtly values. Boccaccio’s Decameron invented
“fiction” for the new middle-class audience, including women. Chaucer built upon this experiment in his Canterbury Tales,
while he pursued the goal of making himself famous as “the father of English literature.”
Lectures Eighteen through Twenty-One focus on the Renaissance. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia exploited the new technology
of the printing press when Europeans were first exploring the Americas. Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies traveled the
globe, following Englishmen on their voyages of discovery and colonization. Cervantes filled a comparable role for Spanish-
language culture; his Don Quixote established the novel as the new prestige genre in the Western canon, despite the fact his
novel was sometimes banned. One recurring question becomes how “dangerous” books, once censored, eventually become
classics.
Lectures Twenty-Two through Twenty-Four mark the transition to the Romantic era. After the English Civil War, John
Milton composed Paradise Lost as a capstone to the entire classical and Christian traditions. The Western canon is becoming
its own determining context: As writers become more prolific, canon formation begins to operate within the output of
individual authors. Voltaire produced huge volumes of writing, but only Candide became universally read. Commercial
publishing, with its demand for instant bestsellers, means that great authors were not immediately acclaimed. Pride and
Prejudice only slowly gained recognition as a literary classic, showing how women like Jane Austen entered the literary
pantheon.
In Lectures Twenty-Five through Twenty-Eight, Western literature expands to include new national cultures. Written in
German, Goethe’s Faust redrew the cultural map of Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. In America, Herman
Melville widened these horizons to create a global, “multicultural” stage upon which the drama of Moby-Dick plays out. The
French writer Stendhal explored national character within the old Europe by setting his novel The Charterhouse of Parma in
northern Italy. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is “about” Russia across an entire generation, from before the Napoleonic Wars,
when aristocrats spoke French, to afterward, when people spoke Russian.
Lectures Twenty-Nine through Thirty-Six bring this series to a close with the 20th century. The First World War asserted the
single most powerful context. James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, but the novel’s action is set in 1904, when Europe was
still peaceful and cosmopolitan. As an allegory for the rush to self-destruction, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain told the
story of a young German who emerges from a sanitarium only to face certain death in the trenches. In the mid-1920s,
©2008 The Teaching Company. 1

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway told two stories: one of a veteran with “battle fatigue,” and the other of the older generation
overseeing the decline of the British Empire. In the war’s wake, T. S. Eliot depicted Europe’s cultural desolation in The
Waste Land, while his later works sought consolation in Christianity. As a battlefield veteran, J. R. R. Tolkien embraced a
different consolation: The Lord of the Rings reaches back into an ancient heroic past, before Beowulf, to imagine a world
where warriors fought bravely for a cause worthy of their sacrifice.
Like other European languages, English becomes the literary medium of authors who are not English. In the mosaic of
American culture, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury dramatizes the issues of race in Southern literature, while Willa
Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop explores the multiethnic character of New Mexico. At the end of the 20th century,
the Western canon is enriched by writers whose origins lie in the East. Tracing the history of India’s independence, Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children epitomizes the new postcolonial novel. Immigrant and transnational authors use the language
of the former imperial rulers. As the boundaries of “context” expand to encompass the whole world, the Western literary
canon is hardly recognizable as “Western” anymore—or even narrowly literary, as film adaptations of novels like Ondaatje’s
The English Patient boost the prestige of the original books.
2 ©2008 The Teaching Company.

Lecture One
The Bible and the Literary Canon
Scope: The Bible epitomizes what it means for any text to become canonic. Decisions always need to be made about what
goes into the “canon” of approved works—and what works are excluded, like the Gospel of Saint Thomas. Canonic
works are honored with translation into other languages. The Bible’s Hebrew was translated into Greek, and then the
whole work was translated into Latin. These texts are granted the best editing to ensure authenticity, and they need
to be correctly interpreted. An elite class of literary professionals takes custody. Often sheer luck is a major factor,
with works that barely escape oblivion or get lost and later rediscovered.
Outline
I. I want to begin this series on the Western literary canon by discussing the Bible as the epitome of what it means for a
book to be Western, literary, and canonic. We will be following four themes throughout the course.
A. Which titles end up on the official list, as often determined by librarians and scholars?
B. Which books will be privileged with translation out of their original language to a wider readership?
C. Which books will end up being printed and subjected to scrupulous editorial treatment?
D. How do the processes of accident and sheer luck determine which books will get into the canon and stay there and
which will be lost to literary history?
II. The whole terminology of canon and canonicity derives from the Bible tradition.
A. The Greek word kanón meant “rule” or “official list.”
B. The earliest clay tablets in Mesopotamia were often lists of goods; later these lists included gods, plants, place
names, and literary works.
1. These literary lists from 4,000 years ago can be seen as the beginning of canon formation.
2. Literary list-making continues today, with the bestseller lists of major newspapers and Oprah’s Book Club.
C. Harold Bloom claims that it is impossible to master the Western canon as it stands today. Even the Bible points to
this problem: “Of making many books there is no end” (Eccles. 12:12).
D. With so many books, there is always the pragmatic challenge to exclude something, despite the cultural, political,
and critical forces that create and maintain the canonic status of certain works.
III. Canon formation became part of the Western tradition in a manner directly tied to the evolution of the Bible itself.
A. Like the Jews before them, Christians became people of the book, but this meant determining exactly what would go
into this book.
B. The New Testament formation evolved during the first centuries of the Christian era.
1. The process worked backward, probably starting with the letters of Saint Paul, then the Gospels, then the Old
Testament.
2. This backward process of canonization would be mimicked in the formation of the Western literary canon.
C. In the 4th century A.D., Eusebius of Caesarea sorted out the whole body of Christian writings, dubbing some as
“acknowledged,” some as “disputed,” and some as “rejected.”
D. Constantine had asked Eusebius to provide 50 Bibles for the churches of Constantinople, and these Bibles were to be
official, with something close to the status of law.
E. Later in the 4th century, the Athenian scholar Bishop Athanasius issued an official list of 27 New Testament books.
F. By the time of Saint Augustine, the 46 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament had
become standard.
G. We did not know what had been excluded from this canon until the 1945 discovery in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of 52
lost early Christian texts. These were the Gnostic writings, and they have excited a lot of current interest.
IV. From the beginning, translation has been absolutely essential in determining whether a book leaves its home location and
reaches a wider audience.
A. The more languages a book is translated into, the greater its status. This is especially true if the work is translated
into a “prestige” language, like English in modern times or Greek and Latin in ancient times.
B. The Hebrew scriptures were already being translated into Greek by the 2nd century B.C.
C. In A.D. 382, the pope commissioned Saint Jerome to undertake a revision of the Latin Bible by comparing it with
the original Greek and Hebrew texts.

D. Biblical translation into Latin shows an important move of the Bible out of its original region and also a sense of
official status.
1. The pope, like Constantine, commissioned an official version, and this translation would have a canonic status
for centuries to come.
2. It would also be the cause of controversy when later translators wanted to move it from Latin to another
language.
3. For instance, much controversy surrounded the translation of the Bible into English, culminating in King James
I’s request for an official Protestant translation in 1611.
V. Printing revolutionized the book, and printing technology started with the Bible.
A. Gutenberg was using movable type to mass-produce Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible in 1455.
B. Mass production boosted canonic status and forced standardization of the text.
C. This standardization of text meant a great increase in the science of editing, which would eventually extend to
literary texts as well.
VI. One of the themes of this course is the role of editors as the invisible authors of the classics.
A. We know that Homer was edited in ancient Athens and that the Greek tragedies were edited at the Alexandrian
library.
B. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales were patched together by scribes after his death, and some of Shakespeare’s plays
were edited by his colleagues.
C. Even in modern times, Joyce’s Ulysses was corrected extensively after its first edition.
VII. The Western canon remains as Harold Bloom described it—a survivor’s list. Sometimes this survival is just a matter of
sheer luck.
A. Some works, like The Epic of Gilgamesh, had disappeared from all memory before being rediscovered by
archaeological excavations.
B. Others, like Homer’s Nostoi and Shakespeare’s The History of Cardenio, have vanished completely and are known
to us only anecdotally.
C. Beowulf, the only Anglo-Saxon epic that has come down to us, was nearly destroyed in an 18th-century fire.
VIII. Like the biblical canon, the Western canon only looks rational and well-organized when it shows up in textbooks.
A. In reality, it is a messy mix of accident, politics, and even, on occasion, the special pleading of other authors.
B. The lists that do survive are often a function of personality—the personality of the editor, translator, printer, or
lecturer.
IX. Since I am the personality that created this course’s canon of 35 works, I want to tell you a little about myself and the
preferences that guided my choices.
A. I am a native Virginian, and this has led to an appreciation of the historical. Hence we will examine ancient Greek
and Latin classics, as well as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which was directly connected with the Virginia Colony.
B. My university training also influenced the course, ensuring my selection of Joyce’s Ulysses and Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury.
C. As a professional, I have focused on the literature of the Middle Ages, so it will be represented here more than it was
on Bloom’s list.
D. As a Rhodes Scholar, I attended Merton College, Oxford, where T. S. Eliot had been a student and J. R. R. Tolkien
had been a professor.
1. All of my teachers at Oxford had been taught by Tolkien; in a sense, I am his grandstudent, and you are his
great-grandstudents.
2. This is much the point of the Western canon itself—this idea that we join the family, even if we don’t get
around to reading all of the books.
Suggested Readings:
Holy Bible: King James Authorized Version (1611).
Bloom, The Western Canon.
Bowers, Chaucer and Langland.
Eusebius, The History of the Church.
Grafton and Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book.

Questions to Consider:
1. We make “canons within the canon.” Looking at the table of contents of the Bible, which are the books that have become
familiar even to non-Christians—like Genesis—and which are so unfamiliar that we do not even recognize their titles?
2. Since the “canon” is created by a community of readers, what are the books that you, your friends, and your family read,
share with each other, and talk about so they become your own personal literary canon?

Lecture Two
The Bible as Literature
Scope: The word bible means “book.” The development of Christian scriptures defines the nature of Western literature.
They are written in an alphabet—a phonetic writing system that makes the contents accessible to more readers.
These works are written on parchment pages and bound together in a codex containing a large number of individual
works; the Bible is technically a portable library. Individual works are assigned to named authors such as Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John. The books fall into the emerging “genres” of history, lyric, law, sermon, letters, and
biography. The overall shape of the collection assumes a beginning, middle, and end that conforms with the Western
notion of storytelling, as well as Western history’s three-part division of the classical, the medieval, and the modern.
Outline
I. The Bible embodies everything that we have come to understand about books, bookmaking, authors, writing, and the
genres of literature itself.
A. Literature means “written with letters,” and the alphabet that was used for recording the biblical scriptures would
become essential to the history of European literature.
B. The ways that books identify themselves with their authors would also become central to our particular tradition.
C. The need to divide up and categorize various types of writing (which we’ll eventually call “genre”) would be
preserved and transmitted throughout the Western tradition by the Bible.
D. The story of literary history—indeed, the Western notion of history in general—would be reinforced by the way that
the Greek editors of the Bible assembled the texts with a sense of beginning, middle, and end.
II. The word bible simply means “book,” so we need to begin by talking about the physical artifact of the book itself—how
it was written and produced physically.
A. The Latin word littera, meaning “letters,” gives us the word “literature.”
B. Writing developed with hieroglyphics in Egypt, cuneiform in Babylonia, and ideograms in China; these were
specialized forms of writing that only trained scribes could master.
C. By the time the Jewish scribes of the Old Testament were starting to write, they had an alphabet that had been
adapted from their neighbors, the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians also transmitted their alphabet to the Greeks.
D. The alphabet allowed a phonetic writing system to develop. This meant that the whole literary project became more
democratic.
III. What about the physical nature of the page in front of them?
A. The ancient Mesopotamians used clay tablets; in fact, this usage survived until the 1st century A.D.
B. The Egyptians discovered a way of processing river reeds into a pliant, flat, white surface called “papyrus.” They
used reeds and quills as pens and the soot from their lamps as ink.
C. The word bible is considered to be derived from the city of Byblos, a major export site for Egyptian papyrus moving
to Greece and other places.
D. There were problems with papyrus: it was fragile, vulnerable to dampness and fire, hard to erase, and produced in
large and unwieldy scrolls.
E. The great advance in writing surfaces came with the introduction of cow and sheep hides, which provided a new
writing material, called “parchment” or “vellum,” that was sturdy and erasable.
IV. The next major event was the organization of these parchment pages into what we call a “codex,” or a leaf-formed book.
A. This was the greatest invention in information technology until the invention of the printing press more than 1,000
years later.
B. One of the great advantages of the codex was that you could write on both sides of the page, allowing more content
in less space.
C. When the Bible was beginning to be produced, both scrolls and codices were in use. By the time of Saint Augustine,
codices were the preferred method for Christian writers.
D. The earliest complete copy that we have of the Latin Bible is the Codex Amiatinus, which was produced in the north
of England in the 8th century and ended up in a library in Florence, Italy. This highlights the portability of the codex
as a way to transmit literature across a continent.

V. The Bible would also establish something key in the Western canon: a sense of authors.
A. The books of the Bible are attributed to authors, and this idea would become central in the Western tradition.
B. This attachment to an author would spill over into other areas of Western culture, even film.
C. One important function of the author when scholarship began to develop was that the author could help validate a
specific reading or interpretation of the text. This is what literary scholars still refer to as “authorial intention.”
D. Augustine used the idea of authorial intention in attributing meanings in the book of Genesis to Moses, the presumed
author.
1. It was only in the 17th century that philosopher Thomas Hobbes began to conclude that the first five books of
the Old Testament were not, in fact, written by Moses.
2. Later scholars thought these books were the work of several anonymous scribes, and Harold Bloom even
attributed them to an educated woman.
3. The implications of any of these theories give a sense of how meaning changes when we shift from one notion
of an author to another.
VI. The original Greek term biblia was plural; thus, the Bible means “the books,” reminding us that this volume is actually a
portable library.
A. The form of the codex allowed early Christian writers to put in between two covers—in a single, unified, holy text—
what they truly thought was important.
B. The Bible, then, was a self-contained library that needed organization.
VII. As a library, the Bible very much began the Western tradition of categorizing literature into various kinds, or genres.
A. The Bible includes histories, legal codes, lyric poetry, a philosophical dialogue, biographies, and letters.
1. Letters are often overlooked as a genre in our own day, but they were very important during the period of the
Roman Empire.
2. Some of the great writers of the classical period, including Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and Seneca, were letter
writers.
B. The Bible essentially functions as a kind of anthology, a collection of different genres by different authors.
VIII. The next great challenge was to organize this large array of content. This was done by Greek scholars and therefore
reflected the Greek tradition of a linear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.
A. This was not the only way to put things together; the Qur’an, for instance, is organized by the length of the entries.
B. This organization gives us a neat vision of religious history, starting with creation, proceeding through the central
event of Christ’s resurrection, moving forward into the history of the early church, and finally reaching into the
future with the Apocalypse.
C. To this day, we tend to think of European history according to this model, with the ancient, medieval, and modern
periods.
D. This method would also be extremely important to the way that literary history would organize itself. If you open an
anthology of the Western or world literary traditions, you will find, over and over again, this sense of beginning,
middle, and end.
IX. The Bible also gives us the canon as the organizing inclusive/exclusive principle. Just as the biblical canon was reviewed
and revised over the centuries, so the Western literary canon has been and continues to be revised.
Suggested Readings:
Holy Bible: King James Authorized Version (1611).
Alter and Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible.
1. Take any literary collection such as The Norton Anthology or The Riverside Shakespeare, and notice how the contents
have been organized in ways that resemble the Bible. How have the contents been organized to make a beginning,
middle, and end?
2. When authors become canonic—the same way that Christian saints become canonized—everything they wrote attains a
privileged status. Can you think of a play by Shakespeare that would not be read or performed if it were not by
Shakespeare? A poem by John Keats that would not be included in an anthology? A novel by Charles Dickens not
available in Penguin paperback?

Lecture Three
The Epic of Gilgamesh—Western Literature?
Scope: Almost 5,000 years ago, a king named Gilgamesh ruled in the southern Euphrates valley. Legends of his
superhuman victories became the substance of the earliest literary epic in the Western tradition. When his friend
Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh pursues the greatest of all quests—for immortal life—that takes him to the sole survivor of
the Great Flood. When Gilgamesh is robbed of eternal life, he settles for literary immortality by having his story
engraved in stone. Yet the epic was lost for 25 centuries. Archeologists found these cuneiform tablets because they
went digging in the biblical city of Nineveh, and scholars translated the tablets because they recalled the Old
Testament stories of the Flood and Noah’s Ark. The canon always generates itself backward. The origin of these
ancient legends, in modern-day Iraq, raises the question of where “West” ends and “East” begins.
Outline
I. The origin, loss, and recovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh is a great adventure story about a great adventure story.
A. A crucial episode occurred in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt. Though his soldiers were not successful,
Napoleon also brought with him an army of scholars who began studying the antiquities of Egypt.
B. It was during this campaign that the famous Rosetta Stone was discovered, allowing us the potential to decipher and
translate ancient languages.
C. Mostly because of its proximity to the Holy Land, Mesopotamia began to attract other archaeologists during the 19th
century.
D. English archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard discovered the ancient biblical city of Nineveh and the royal library
of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.
E. This area had produced the earliest written documents of Western civilization—mostly commercial and legal
documents, and eventually literary works. These were pressed into clay tablets in a writing system known as
“cuneiform.”
F. A hundred thousand clay tablets were shipped from Nineveh back to the British Museum. They languished there
until a self-taught linguist named George Smith broke the cuneiform code and began translating.
G. What Smith discovered in these tablets was an alternative version of the biblical flood story.
II. In the course of examining Gilgamesh, archaeology and scholarly work have given us the following account.
A. About 2700 B.C., the historical Gilgamesh ruled over the city of Uruk in the southern Tigris-Euphrates valley.
B. Around 1600 B.C., the earliest written account of The Epic of Gilgamesh took shape in the old Babylonian language.
III. The courtly literary work of Gilgamesh obviously had a function in its contemporary society.
A. It clearly bolstered the audience’s sense of divine kingship and status within a divine order of things.
B. Having a library large enough to store the many clay tablets of the text was a sign of distinction.
C. One section of Gilgamesh had been used in a student’s exercise tablet in Babylon, evidence that the epic had
become a school text as well. This academic function of literature would prove vital in the later formation of the
Western canon.
IV. Around 1300 B.C., there emerged what scholars now call the “standard edition” of Gilgamesh, written on 12 tablets in
the Semitic language of Akkadian.
A. The Akkadian language was related to Hebrew and to Arabic.
B. What we have, then, are centuries in which this work was written in different dialects and languages, spreading
throughout the area.
C. Since it was so widely known, Gilgamesh can be appropriately considered not only as the earliest text of Western
civilization but as the earliest canonic literary work in the Western tradition.
V. After 1,000 years of copying and distribution, Gilgamesh was claimed by Ashurbanipal as the spoils of war. This points
to an interesting theme of this course: Not only is history written by the winners, but literary history is written by the
winners as well.
A. Some conquerors would take a library as spoils, while other conquerors would destroy it as part of the eradication of
the vanquished.
B. When the city of Nineveh was destroyed by the Persian invasion in the 6th century B.C., the Persian conquerors had
no interest in or use for Ashurbanipal’s library, and Gilgamesh began to disappear from human memory.

C. Over 2,000 years later, after discovering the clay tablets, the English would repeat the actions of Ashurbanipal and
take the texts to their own library as the spoils of war.
VI. One more time, we have in Gilgamesh a literary classic that is so much the invention of the scholars, editors, and
translators who have worked on it.
A. The original tablets that survived were marred and broken, with about two-fifths of the text lost.
B. Our modern translation has actually been supplemented by other versions of the story that survived in Sumerian,
Hittite, and other Middle Eastern languages of antiquity.
C. The process of editing and assimilation also influenced the designation of genre. Gilgamesh was given a generic
identity already familiar to Westerners: the epic.
VII. The tale of Gilgamesh fits well with the Western notion of storytelling as it has come down to us from the Greeks.
A. There is a single protagonist, with characteristics of power, intelligence, and nobility.
B. He goes on quests or voyages of adventure and writes down his story when he returns to rule his city. This idea of
ruling a city would become central to the Western definition of civilization.
C. Gilgamesh has a hairy, uncivilized companion who can be seen as a prototype for the ethnic minority sidekick in
later Western literature.
D. During their “buddy adventure,” they violate the cedar forest of Humbaba, an early version of the Garden of Eden.
E. Along the way, Gilgamesh shows a heroic sexual restraint that would be repeated in the figures of Aeneas and Saint
Augustine.
F. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven, which was sent against them by Ishtar, the goddess of lovemaking.
As a punishment, the gods strike down Enkidu.
G. Traumatized by the loss of his friend, Gilgamesh sets out on a quest for eternal life. Along the way, he receives
divine advice to enjoy life to the fullest.
H. Gilgamesh finds a man who has cheated death, and this man recounts for him an early version of the flood story that
includes a warning about the impossibility of permanence.
I. Gilgamesh does find the herb of eternal youth, but it is stolen from him by a serpent, just as Adam was robbed of his
immortality by a serpent.
J. Gilgamesh returns home and carves his story into stone in an effort to achieve literary immortality.
VIII. This story turns out to be the starting point for the autobiographical genre in the Western tradition.
A. In a way, Gilgamesh is the literary predecessor of Saint Augustine, Ben Franklin, and James Joyce.
B. Though most of his autobiography would fade from memory after the Persian conquest, elements would be
preserved in the Old Testament writings about the Flood, the Garden, and the Serpent.
IX. The assimilation of Gilgamesh into the Christian tradition is not a complete story.
A. The story probably entered the Hebrew scriptures during the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews.
B. In the 19th century, the West took back the story with a sense of entitlement founded upon its Christian cultural
heritage and its prejudice against Eastern culture.
X. The incorporation of Gilgamesh into the Western canon has moved the birthplace of the tradition eastward and has
reformulated the significance of Homer’s epics within the canon.
Suggested Readings:
The Epic of Gilgamesh, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Dalley, ed. and trans., Myths from Mesopotamia.
Damrosch, The Buried Book.
1. How does a great literary text provide a whole “anthropology” of its original culture, in this case the ancient
Mesopotamian culture with its references to cattle, canals, brick production, and the making of wine?
2. The Western canon generates itself backward. What unique literary features are left in Gilgamesh if we subtract the
biblical ingredients of the Garden, the Serpent, and the Great Flood and the Homeric ingredients of the warrior hero
questing among foreign lands?

Lecture Four
Homer’s Odyssey and the Seafaring Hero
Scope: Homer is the earliest named author with a body of literary works. Going back more than four centuries to the
Mycenaean age, around 1150 B.C., his Iliad celebrated the victory of the Greeks over the Trojans—really the
triumph of the West over the East. Written during a period of Greek trade and colonization throughout the
Mediterranean, Homer’s Odyssey celebrated a new kind of hero endowed with keen intelligence. His encounters
with alien cultures dramatize what it meant to be Greek: crafty, handsome, curious, proud, resourceful, articulate—
and skilled with handling a ship.
Outline
I. Homer’s Odyssey describes Odysseus’s return home following the Greek victory at Troy. But what was the Trojan War
really about, and did it even happen?
A. The ancient Greeks believed that Homer was describing an actual historical event; there had in fact been a war
between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Trojans.
B. By the 19th century, however, there was a prevailing sense that the Trojan War was a literary fiction.
C. This notion was called into question when Heinrich Schliemann unearthed ruins at Troy that were consistent with its
destruction during time the Trojan War was supposed to have taken place. In addition, archaeological evidence on
Mycenae confirmed the presence of Greeks there as Homer had claimed.
II. The question then becomes, what was the war really all about?
A. The Greeks attributed it to the mythological judgment of Paris.
B. The more probable explanation is that Troy was important strategically in gaining entrance to the Black Sea.
1. Whoever controlled access to the Black Sea controlled the gold trade.
2. This control was increasingly important to the Greeks as they became a trading civilization.
III. What we have in this work is a sense that the Greeks had gone to sea. Homer’s epics drew upon the oral traditions about
sailing adventures.
A. The alphabet that Homer used was donated by the seagoing Phoenicians, and the papyrus on which he wrote had
been imported from Egypt.
B. This was the age of colonization for the Greeks, as they spread from their homelands, across the Aegean, into the
Black Sea and other parts of the Mediterranean world.
C. Colonization was necessary because of a huge explosion in the Greek population, an increase that the barren land
could not support.
D. The Greeks ended up settling around the Black Sea, on Sicily and into southern Italy, and even set up colonies in
southern France.
E. The Sicilian culture of the Greeks was very important in transmitting the alphabet, and eventually literature, to the
Romans.
F. As the Greeks spread, the entire Mediterranean world became Hellenized. Greek even took hold as the merchant
language.
IV. The ethos of the Odyssey is different from the warrior ethos that prevailed in the Iliad.
A. Unlike Achilles, Odysseus is a hero meant for the commercial age, the colonial age. He is a traveler marked by
intelligence and curiosity.
B. This curiosity was one of the key traits of Greek culture that Europeans would eventually claim for themselves,
especially the curiosity to seek new worlds and spread their culture.
C. When the gods decide it is finally time for Odysseus to get home, he is not magically transported, nor even provided
a ship. Instead, he is given tools.
1. Odysseus’s ability to solve problems with tools is indicative of one of the great virtues of the Greeks: They
invested in technology.
2. This idea of craftsmanship in the Greek world extended to poetry as well. Homer respected Odysseus as a
fellow craftsman.

V. It is a telling point that the civilizations of the West, almost from the beginning, were seagoing civilizations, unlike the
earlier river cultures in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China.
A. The Greeks, like the Minoans and the Phoenicians, originally took to the sea as traders and colonizers. Eventually
they began to invest in naval power as well.
B. Greek naval prowess was crucial in turning back the Persian invasion. This focus on naval power would prove
pivotal to Roman success as well.
VI. As a product of this seagoing culture, the Odyssey centers around the theme of hospitality—how the hero is treated as he
travels around.
A. Almost every episode in the story involves good hospitality or bad hospitality, most often the latter.
B. The code of hospitality is a reciprocal one; it is a matter of gift giving. Most of the narrative of the Odyssey is the
story that Odysseus himself tells his hosts as a gift.
VII. In the middle of his travels, Odysseus visits the land of the dead.
A. This episode reminds us that literature is always a kind of interaction with the dead.
B. We seek in literature the same thing that Odysseus sought from the dead: advice and wisdom.
C. The dead prophet Teiresias predicts Odysseus’s future: a gentle death at sea.
1. This provides us with an end to the story, though it is revealed in the middle.
2. The seaborne death seems appropriate for Odysseus, and it would become a powerful theme in western Europe,
where the sea was central to survival.
VIII. While the remembrance of the dead would become one of the functions of literature, so would exclusion.
A. The processes of canon formation and historymaking are also about our choices of what and whom to exclude.
B. The Odyssey is a wonderful example of not only what is recalled, but also what is forgotten.
1. When Odysseus recounts his adventures to Penelope, he claims to have been faithful to her.
2. In this way, he is revising his own history to fall in line with the ideal of sexual restraint.
IX. We really don’t know much about the man, Homer, other than his name being applied to these epics and other works.
A. Authors often accumulate attribution for other titles simply because they are famous.
B. Authorial biography would become increasingly important in the literary tradition, leading to what we will later call
“author worship.”
X. Interestingly, these works would continue to live in the oral tradition, sometimes as scripts for public performance.
A. Plato referred to “rhapsodes”—professional performers of Homer’s epics—in 5th-century Athens.
B. Eventually the Athenian dialect infiltrated the epics, and the works traveled to the Greek colony of Alexandria,
where they were edited and distributed.
XI. Sometimes the Western canon shifts with the audience itself. Being a military man, Alexander the Great preferred the
Iliad, while modern audiences tend to prefer the Odyssey.
Suggested Readings:
Homer, Odyssey, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Mimesis.
Graziosi and Greenwood, eds., Homer in the Twentieth Century.
Hexter, A Guide to “The Odyssey.”
Plato, Ion, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
1. The Western canon constantly revises itself. In ancient times, the Iliad was the favorite work by Homer, but in modern
times we prefer the Odyssey. What are the characteristics of Odysseus as a hero—his intelligence, his devotion to wife
and family, his way with women, his flaws—that make him a more attractive character than the proud killing machine,
Achilles?
2. The 20th-century poet and critic Ezra Pound said that a writer can learn something from every page of Homer. Take any
page from the Odyssey and ask yourself, how does the poet describe water and sky? How does he describe a character’s
physical movements? How does he manage the timing of dialogue, when a character decides to start speaking, how long
he or she talks, and what purposes the speech serves—to persuade, deceive, or insult?

Lecture Five
The Context of Athenian Tragedy
Scope: Athenian democracy provides a context for tragedies in which the protagonist’s powers of persuasion define his
character. Originating with choral performances in which acting in unison taught the arts of good citizenship, Attic
tragedy spotlights the protagonist as the special individual dealing with the consequences of his own actions.
Aeschylus shows the protagonist resisting tyranny to assist mankind in Prometheus Bound. Sophocles offers a
protagonist using his intelligence to benefit his city in Oedipus the King. Euripides introduces a non-Greek woman
to challenge masculine self-confidence in Medea. Theatrical machinery spurred new technologies.
Outline
I. There is a sense in which literary works are transmitted and preserved in cultures very different from their own. One of
the extraordinary things about Greek tragedy is that these works are very much products of Athens in the 5th century.
A. This means that they are all about male competition. Athenian culture was about rivalry, and this is exactly how
tragedy came to be written and preserved in this culture.
B. Tragedy started off as part of a competition during the civic festival of Dionysos.
1. Anyone could write a tragedy trilogy and submit it to the jury, who would pick three finalists for performance.
Judges would choose a winner.
2. In a sense, everyone in the audience really knew the craft and technique of tragedy from the inside.
C. Aeschylus, the first great tragic playwright whose work survives, worked this idea of male rivalry into his drama by
creating the second actor, the antagonist.
II. This sense of the survival of the fittest also comes into play in the Western canon, in terms of which texts have survived
from antiquity.
A. Aeschylus’s Oresteia is the only complete trilogy that survives, and his works are the earliest documents in Western
theater history.
B. Euripides was the biggest loser in terms of how many times he won the Athenian competition, yet more of his works
survive than the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined because he became a school text.
C. One of the sad cases of this survival process is Agathon, a renowned and successful playwright from the same time
period whose works have been lost despite his success.
III. One of the hardest things for modern readers to appreciate is that tragedies started out as choral performances.
A. Though we tend to skip over choruses now, tragedy began as chorus only, with the text set to music.
B. Plato claimed that the educated man was he who had been well-trained in the chorus. This signifies an interesting
link between the chorus, education, and citizenship.
C. The chorus embodied the Athenian notion of unified action, speaking with one voice. This type of coordinated effort
would also be central to Athenian military and naval tactics.
IV. Another aspect of the local context of Greek tragedy is that unique invention of the Athenians: democracy.
A. Democracy depended upon speech delivery, and soon the Athenians developed the arts of rhetoric.
B. These arts are preserved in our own day with the kinds of arguments made by lawyers in the courtroom.
C. In the 6th century, the playwright Thespis added the protagonist to the tragic form, the solo performer making use of
rhetoric.
V. Soon, Athenians who could speak well were selling their talents. These were called the Sophists.
A. It wasn’t long before people were rather cynical about the Sophists’ abilities to twist language to their own purposes.
B. Their ability to “make the worst cause seem to be the best” often fed into tragedy, sometimes very directly, as in
Euripides’s play Medea.
VI. Medea only won third place in the Athenian competition, possibly because Euripides had touched some nerves—namely,
xenophobia and misogyny.
A. Greek men’s fear and distrust of women began with tragedy and early Greek drama. This was an area of male
competition; women were excluded.
B. With the exception of Sappho, there were very few women writers in the early Greek tradition.

VII. Aristotle did not like the ending of Medea; he called it a deus ex machina ending. But it is an interesting moment,
because it reminds us that the theater was a laboratory for the cutting-edge technology of the Greek world.
A. Even Aeschylus, the earliest of these writers, was known for amazing visual effects on stage.
B. Greek technology was often kept secret; we’re only beginning to understand and appreciate some of the innovations
and advances in the ancient world.
VIII. Plato’s idea of good citizenship involved self-sacrifice, the willingness of the individual to suffer for the good of his
people.
A. Aeschylus’s Prometheus became the prototype of the hero who does a great wrong knowingly and suffers for the
greater good.
B. In the case of Sophocles’s Oedipus, we have the story of a man who does a great wrong unknowingly, still in the
attempt to help the greater good, and suffers enormously as a consequence.
C. Tragedy, as a word, was related to “goat.” These were plays in which the individual needed to suffer like a
sacrificial goat for the good of the community.
D. What emerged from this tradition is the idea we call “theodicy”—that there is some ultimate wisdom and
benevolence in the divine providence that underlies human suffering.
IX. I mentioned that history is written by the winners, but Greek tragedy is an interesting exception to this. Although
Athenians were ultimately the losers militarily, they would determine the course of Western literature.
A. Alexander the Great conquered Athens, but he then spread Greek culture throughout the rest of the empire, including
his Great Library in Egypt.
B. The Romans also defeated the Greeks, but they, too, were delighted to take and absorb Athenian drama.
C. In modern Europe, Voltaire, Shelley, and Goethe would all incorporate Greek tragedy into their works.
D. In America, William Faulkner would famously neglect his duties as a postman in order to read Greek tragedy.
X. In terms of the survivability of Greek tragedy, the Athenians have far outreached their original audience at the festival of
Dionysos and have established themselves in contexts all over the world.
Suggested Readings:
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, The Persians.
Euripides, Medea, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Knox, Oedipus at Thebes.
McDermott, Euripides’ Medea.
Sewell, In the Theater of Dionysios.
1. The Greek word for the dramatic hero—protagonist—is related to our word “agony” and means literary “the prime
sufferer.” Can you think of a main character in a major literary work who does not experience pain, difficulty, personal
loss, or physical and emotional suffering over the course of the narrative?
2. The texts of the Athenian tragic poets are merely the scripts of plays lacking the other essential ingredients of music,
physical action, and spectacular visual effects. Look at the lyrics of popular songs and ask yourself, which ones would
survive as poetry without the music? What opera libretto would be read without the scores by Mozart or Puccini? What
film script would stand the test of time without the star performances, the musical soundtracks, and the special effects?

Lecture Six
Herodotus versus Thucydides
Scope: In the wake of Xerxes’s invasion of Greece early in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus wrote The Histories to define
“Greekness” by contrasting his audience’s identity with the alien Persians. To understand why nations wage war, he
inquires how these peoples like the ancient Egyptians were different. He proposed that not nations but civilizations
make war. His work’s status as the earliest surviving history secured its canonicity. Thucydides took this
ethnocentric attitude a step further in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Drawing upon Athenian tragedy, he
configures historical events as a contest between the protagonist Athens and the antagonist Sparta. Thucydides, with
his Great Man view of national events, will compete against Herodotus, with his exotic travelogues throughout
Western history writing.
Outline
I. I will say over and over again that winners write history, but the interesting thing for this lecture is that winners get to
choose their historians. For the last 24 centuries, the choices in the Western world have been Herodotus and Thucydides.
A. These two historians have become the models to which later historians and readers always return for the two
alternatives of recording the past.
B. This dichotomy would have been natural within the Greek world, where male rivalry was so much built in to the
literary profession and literary consumption as well.
II. In the first lines of The Histories, Herodotus claims as his purpose two basic functions of literature: recordkeeping and
the glorification of human achievements.
A. Herodotus also identified his location—his hometown of Halicarnassus, a Greek city located at a pivotal point
between the East and the West.
B. He traveled widely; in a sense he put himself in the same class as Homer in terms of being a travel writer.
III. How does one compete with Homer, especially across generations? One way to win the fight with the successful father
figure is to change the rules of the game, as Herodotus did.
A. He did write histories of travel, but he wrote them in prose.
B. Herodotus gives us the first major work of prose literature in the Western tradition. This elegant prose would be his
legacy to later writers, his literary heirs.
IV. In the first paragraph of his work, Herodotus used the Greek word historia, which translates as “inquiry.” History is an
inquiry, and it bespeaks that particular Greek virtue of curiosity.
A. The inquiry that Herodotus pursued was why the Greeks went to war with the Persians.
B. He concluded that neither kings nor nations go to war; civilizations go to war.
V. By the time he was 30, Herodotus had relocated to Athens to take advantage of audience, money, and book production.
A. Herodotus did public performances of his work; this reminds us that literature very often functions as a script, even
if it is written down.
B. The sense of audience explains the many odd, entertaining features that Herodotus put into his work.
VI. Herodotus wrote like a tourist, moving in looping digressions and picking up souvenirs along the way.
A. He does not give us the clean, linear narrative that we expect from Greek writers.
B. But this may explain why we are becoming more comfortable with him; his method very much resembles the
hyperlink connectivity of the Internet.
VII. The great touchstone of The Histories is the contrast between the Greeks and the Persian barbarians.
A. The necessity of knowing the other in order to know the self drove Herodotus to invest a lot of time examining the
Persians. In doing this, he created certain stereotypes that would feed into what we now call “orientalism.”
B. These stereotypes portrayed Eastern cultures as fanatical, irrational, effeminate, and despotic.
C. Even when Herodotus addressed other topics or cultures, he used the Persians as the starting-off point.
VIII. Because Herodotus’s narrative leads toward the Persians’ downfall, tragedy becomes a molding shape for telling
history.
A. Herodotus had a diagnostic approach to his subject, focusing both on the roots and the final ends of the events.

B. His focus on conclusion, i.e., the downfall of the Persians, endues the narrative with a constant sense of targeted
progression.
C. At the end of the work, Herodotus sets the stage for another phase of tragedy: the building tension between Athens
and Sparta as Athens became more of a naval and imperial power.
IX. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War takes up where Herodotus left off; it describes the war between Athens
and Sparta.
A. Ethnocentric values are apparent from the first paragraph. There is almost no concern for the barbarians any more.
B. Thucydides was no armchair historian; he’d actually been elected general at one point.
C. Thucydides had two literary father figures with whom to compete: Homer and Herodotus. He did this by writing
complicated prose, meant to be read as a book.
D. Like Herodotus, he took a diagnostic approach to the Athenian-Spartan conflict, concluding that the war was the
inevitable consequence of Athenian power and Spartan fear.
X. Thucydides focused on his hometown of Athens and on the great men who emerged as the leaders and spokespeople.
A. This approach can be seen in his inclusion of Pericles’s funeral oration.
B. This was the prototype of the Great Man view of history, in which one man acts as a protagonist, leading his culture
like a Greek chorus behind him.
XI. Thucydides structured his work even more clearly upon tragedy than Herodotus had.
A. Since he began writing as soon as the war started, he had no clear idea of what the outcome would be. As a result, he
imposed the tragic structure on the events as they were unfolding.
B. Later writers, historians, and novelists—including Tolstoy—would become skeptical of this imposition of a premade
narrative form.
XII. While Thucydides did achieve a clean plotline, he had to leave out a lot in the process.
A. What gets excluded from our point of view is the cultural history and the discussion of more common or minority
segments of society.
B. He also steered clear of the supernatural and was dismissive of things like oracles and omens.
XIII. Thucydides’s focus on Great Men as tragic figures conditioned the way that the Western world would view history in
the future.
XIV. Long after the battles of ancient Greece, readers in the West would continue to make their decisions between the two
founding fathers of history, Herodotus and Thucydides.
A. Alexandrian and Roman cultures would favor Herodotus, because they were engaged in conflict with Eastern forces.
B. Herodotus’s exotic images of the East would continue to fascinate the Western imagination throughout the Middle
Ages and into the Age of Exploration.
C. Thucydides made a comeback during the English Civil War and later during the Cold War, when conflicts were
structured around a protagonist/antagonist framework.
D. In the post–Cold War era, Herodotus is favored as we encounter clashes of civilizations rather than nation-states.
XV. Tragedy was hardwired into Herodotus and the Greeks, and its heroic possibilities would continue to appear in the age of
asymmetrical warfare.
A. The story of the great power overreaching and stumbling against a smaller, entrenched force would be played out in
many of the European conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries.
B. This particular concept of tragedy also appears in current-day literature and film.
Suggested Readings:
Herodotus, The Histories.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.
Burrow, A History of Histories.
Luraghi, ed., The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus.
1. Imagine the practical challenges to Herodotus when collecting the information for his Histories. How did he move from
country to country in a world of merchant shipping? How did he communicate with people who did not know Greek?

How did he locate and decipher written records going back centuries in countries like Egypt? How did he manage side
trips to see the natural and architectural marvels of distant lands? How did he remember so many foreign-sounding
names of people and places?
2. Modern readers take for granted the ability of Thucydides to exclude the supernatural elements. How does the historian
manage to report omens and oracles—and the effects of these superstitions on men charged with decision making—
without actually accepting or rejecting the intervention of the gods?

Lecture Seven
Socrates and Plato—Writing and Reality
Scope: What happens when canonic authors disagree? Plato consonantly wrote about his teacher Socrates, but his
contemporaries Aristophanes and Xenophon described a very different Socrates. Plato criticized writing, hence
“literature,” as a flawed representation in his Phaedrus. After Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, Socrates was put
on trial in 399 B.C. as a scapegoat. As a courtroom transcript, the Apology of Socrates represents trial by jury as
another democratic invention of Athens. Socrates uses courtroom rhetoric to ensure his own execution—much like a
tragic hero—for the good of the state. Connections often matter most in canon formation. Plato’s student was
Aristotle, and Aristotle’s student was Alexander the Great, and therefore Plato’s version of Socrates wins out.
Outline
I. Historians and historians of literature sometimes feel like they know a great deal about a figure from the past; sometimes
they know that they know very little. In the case of Socrates, we don’t know whether we know a great deal or very little,
because the evidence is contradictory.
A. In his portrayal as a character in Plato’s dialogues, especially the Apology of Socrates, we feel like we know
Socrates pretty well.
B. However, from Xenophon we get quite a different description of the same man in the same situation.
C. The comic writer Aristophanes, who also knew Socrates personally, gave an account of him as a clown who twisted
language and logic to bamboozle his way out of debt.
II. Which is the true witness to the reality of the man? Or do we have here an early instance of a justified skepticism about
the ability of any storyteller to give the authentic version?
A. We already have reason to suspect storytellers in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus revises the details of his own
story to suit the immediate circumstances.
B. Writers are perhaps even less trustworthy than storytellers, because they don’t have to confront their audience face
to face and assume liability for their stories.
III. We will keep referencing Athens as the birthplace of Western literature as we know it; and yet, in a sense, Athens
remains a very oral culture.
A. Greek tragedy and comedy were performed, as were Homer’s epics and even The Histories of Herodotus.
B. Plato wrote a dialogue called Phaedrus, where he actually criticized the invention of writing because it induces
forgetfulness.
C. There is also a sense that if you publish a work in written form, you lose control over it as an author.
D. Socrates himself didn’t write anything. He is the first in an impressive list of important world figures who never
wrote, including the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Mohammed—all great teachers whose words were recorded
later by their students or disciples.
IV. In the Apology of Socrates, we are dealing with a text that was never meant to be literature.
A. Because it was meant as a court transcript from Socrates’s defense in 399 B.C., we think we catch Socrates at his
most accurate.
B. Plato was an eyewitness, and an eyewitness account was meant to be one of the most reliable forms of history
writing.
C. The democratic nature of Athenian “trial by jury” meant that rhetoric and the uses of logic and persuasion were
central to the events in the courtroom.
D. Though engaged in his own defense, Socrates turned the process of defense upside-down to guarantee his conviction
according to the charges.
V. The text needs to be divided into the traditional phases of any trial, and the first phase would be the defense itself.
A. Socrates says that, instead of showing disrespect to the gods, he has, in fact, devoted his entire life to showing
respect.
B. He then proceeds to tell of his quest to prove the Delphic Oracle wrong about his status as the wisest man in the
world—a seeming admission of guilt that he has shown disrespect.
C. During this process, he lists the people he has challenged and how they have failed in their wisdom compared to
his—a move that would certainly have alienated his jury, many of whom were victims of his humiliation.

D. But instead of acknowledging disrespect for divine forces, he claims to have actually been an agent of God,
functioning like a gadfly rousing Athens from its stupor.
VI. The second phase of the trial is the sentencing phase, where Socrates gets to consider the possible penalties that will
come down to him.
A. There are three possibilities: exile, a large fine, or execution.
B. Socrates dismisses the first two possibilities as ineffective, claiming that he would continue to follow his divine
mission, questioning people and seeking the truth, if he were kept alive.
VII. The third phase of the trial is the appeals phase, where the defendant is supposed to beg for clemency of some form.
A. Instead of asking not to be executed, Socrates muses on the possible virtues of death.
B. He even imagines the ability to talk to other men who had been unjustly executed—a move that essentially
guarantees his condemnation.
VIII. Why does Socrates rig the defense to guarantee his execution? I have an explanation.
A. Socrates is offering himself up as a scapegoat for the Athenian loss during the Peloponnesian War.
B. Socrates’s student Alcibiades had turned traitor against the Athenians and precipitated their fall. Since Alcibiades
was dead and not able to be held accountable, Socrates offers himself instead.
C. In this way, Socrates is entering a tragic role; he is seeing himself as a protagonist in a civic ritual of sacrifice.
D. Socrates also becomes a prototype for the martyr figure. Early Christians would compare him with Christ.
IX. Plato had always wanted to write a tragedy, but Socrates had discouraged him. The Apology became Plato’s chance to
write a tragedy, with Socrates as the heroic protagonist figure. It also gives us something that will have a long legacy in
the West: the courtroom drama.
X. Plato broke the mold by writing his philosophical treatises as dialogues and in making sure that they got written down.
A. The complete canon of all 26 of Plato’s works survives—very rare in the ancient world.
B. Plato was also lucky in his connections; his student Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great, who spread
Athenian culture (including Plato) throughout his empire.
C. Though he criticized writing in his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato took pains to get his work published and therefore was
able to influence literary tradition for centuries.
Suggested Readings:
Plato, The Apology of Socrates, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates.
Wilson, The Death of Socrates.
1. It has been said, “All philosophy is Plato, and the rest is footnotes.” How many of the central philosophic questions of
the West are included in the Apology of Socrates? A man’s duty in society? Sorting out divine will from self-will? How
to face death? What to expect in the afterlife?
2. How would you have voted if you had been a member of the jury deciding the legal outcome for Socrates? Did his
“defense” serve as admission of guilt for impiety to the gods? Did the “sentencing” phase prevent a lesser penalty than
death? Did the “appeals” phase actually fail to ask for mercy?

Lecture Eight
Aristotle’s Poetics—How We Tell Stories
Scope: Aristotle’s ways of thinking have become so deeply ingrained in the Western mentality that it is hard to appreciate
his originality. Instead of offering philosophical speculations, he organizes and categorizes bodies of knowledge.
When examining literature, he identifies epic and drama as the two most important genres. For tragedies, Aristotle
proposes that all literature is a mimesis, or representation, of reality. As the inventor of logic, Aristotle insists that
plots have a coherent cause-and-effect storyline moving plausibly from beginning to end. Aristotle’s teachings
became universal possibly because he was lucky to have a star student, Alexander the Great. Alexander’s military
conquests ensured the spread of Greek models throughout the ancient world and eventually to Rome.
Outline
I. Aristotle’s Poetics is a lecture about the genres of literature, specifically the epic and the tragedy. At the same time, it is
formalizing its own new genre within the Western tradition: the lecture itself.
II. Aristotle came to study in Athens at a time when poetry was already part of the philosophical conversation and
educational tradition.
A. Like any good lecturer, Aristotle started The Poetics with an enunciation of his subject: the examination of poetry
“in itself,” its varieties and virtues, and the proper technique for creating it.
B. The Greeks saw the poem as something that is constructed, and therefore Aristotle could approach it with an
engineer’s focus on form and content.
1. Aristotle was a categorical thinker. Categorization is now so common in the Western tradition that we don’t
recognize Aristotle’s approach as a groundbreaking moment in our tradition.
2. Aristotle had practiced this method in every field of knowledge that he had encountered, from zoology to ethics.
Now he applied it to literature.
C. Aristotle divided the mass of writing into genres of literature and narrowed his discussion to focus on two: the epic
and the tragedy.
III. Aristotle’s optimism about the ability of the world and society to improve resulted in what we now call “descriptive
criticism,” the examination of what works and what doesn’t. The Greek word for this gives us the term “theory.”
A. Theory, in its root meaning, had to do with examining something very carefully before thinking more abstractly and
speculatively about it.
B. This idea would serve as the foundation point for all of Western scientific inquiry, from the astronomical
observations of Copernicus to the literary criticism of Northrop Frey.
IV. Aristotle decided to focus on tragedy, a natural choice since he was lecturing in Athens.
A. He defines tragedy as “representation” that accomplishes “by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such
emotions.”
B. Aristotle’s word for “representation,” mimesis, has become a key term in the Western literary tradition.
1. Plato had used the word to denote the idea that life imitates art; he warned against literary material that might
encourage bad behavior.
2. Conversely, Aristotle believed that art should imitate life, that it should be a plausible depiction of human
nature and human motivations.
V. During the course of The Poetics, Aristotle indicated that he would “discuss comedy later,” but his treatise on comedy
has not come down to us.
A. It may be that he never wrote it, but it is just as likely that he did write it and it was lost; of the 150 titles attributed to
Aristotle, only about one-fifth survive.
B. The Poetics itself seems to have had no impact in the classical world and may have almost been one of the texts that
were lost.
VI. Aristotle’s paramount concern for good storytelling was that the plot should be plausible and logically coherent.
A. His favorite example of this was Sophocles’s Oedipus.
B. Euripedes’s Medea, on the other hand, was dismissed by Aristotle because its use of deus ex machina defied
plausibility.

VII. Aristotle also insisted on completeness, “a single whole action … with a beginning, middle and end.”
A. This sense of completeness has permeated the entire tradition of Western storytelling.
B. Aristotle attributed to this completeness not only logical coherence but aesthetic pleasure, as well. The wholeness of
a storyline should produce the same pleasurable response as the organic unity of an animal.
VIII. The centerpiece of Aristotle’s thought was causation, that everything should be viewed as a sequence of cause and
effect.
A. Like every good Greek, Aristotle was teleological, thinking in terms of destination. In Aristotle’s view, every good
writer should have the grand finale in mind while writing.
B. He was also very interested in origins and insisted that a piece of writing should have a beginning that could
function with the ending as a logical bracketing of the plot.
C. This sense of coherency and causality, however, is an artificial construct applied by the storyteller, and this
artificiality would bother later writers like Tolstoy.
D. Aristotle appreciated this notion of artificiality in literature and took pains to differentiate storytelling from the
narration of histories, in which causation does not apply.
IX. Traditionally, literary history is recounted in a way that adheres to Aristotelian notions of causality and unity.
A. We like to think of our inheritance of Aristotle as the result of seamless cause and effect:
1. Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, and Alexander ensconced the writings of Aristotle in his library at
Alexandria, where they were translated into Arabic.
2. The Arabic versions were then translated into Latin, which allowed them to enter the intellectual tradition of
medieval Europe and consequently the Renaissance, where Aristotelian rules and terms became part of the
standard literary vocabulary.
B. But there is another account in which the survival of Aristotle’s works was completely accidental:
1. Aristotle lectured to students, and his works as we know them are in fact lecture notes, either by him or his
students. After Aristotle died, these notes were preserved among his students and eventually hidden in a cellar,
where they suffered damage from mildew and insects.
2. They were taken as spoils when Athens was conquered by the Romans, whose veneration for Greek culture
prompted them to read, translate, and disseminate their literary booty.
X. Aristotle gave us not only a collection of magnificent scientific and philosophical treatises but also a new genre: the
lecture.
A. This genre entered into the tradition in extraordinary ways, from the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount to
Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
B. But notice how ephemeral this genre is. Lectures are usually not meant for publication, so they come down to us far
more by accident than by intention.
Suggested Readings:
Aristotle, The Poetics, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.
Lewis, The Discarded Image.
1. Aristotle’s principle of dividing literature into genres remains part of today’s marketing strategies by publishers. If you
go to a book—or video—store, how many different genres serve to categorize the titles so that customers can find what
they are looking for?
2. Aristotle’s insistence that a story should have a plausible cause-and-effect structure, leading organically to its conclusion,
remains key to our expectations as readers. What novels or films have caused you dissatisfaction because the writer
introduced characters and episodes irrelevant to the final outcome?

Lecture Nine
Virgil’s Aeneid and the Epic of Empire
Scope: Roman legions conquered the Mediterranean world, but the prestigious culture remained Greek. At the command of
Emperor Augustus, Virgil adapted Homer’s epics in his Aeneid for glorifying Rome’s manifest destiny and
bestowing divine sanction upon his own ruling dynasty. Virgil tells how the Trojan hero Aeneas led refugees on a
voyage of settlement and colonization in Italy. Always dutiful, Aeneas abandons his lover, Dido of Carthage, whose
curses explain the Punic Wars, which paved the way to Rome’s world dominance. To read the Aeneid is to
experience constant déjà vu with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, because Virgil expected his audience to recognize
literary translation—paralleling political transition—from the Greek world to the Roman.
Outline
I. Virgil lived through a very tumultuous period of Western history.
A. First there was the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey; then, after the assassination of Caesar, there was
more civil war leading to the defeat of Brutus.
B. Only after Augustus’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium did the empire unite and a new period
of security begin.
C. Augustus turned to Virgil to write the epic of the new empire, an assignment that Virgil undertook mainly out of a
sense of duty.
II. Nothing in Virgil’s background really qualified him to write the epic of the Roman Empire.
A. He was born in the town of Mantua, which at that point was part of Cisalpine Gaul.
B. He was a lyric poet, focusing on smaller pastoral poems. In those days, writers specialized; Virgil’s leap from the
pastoral poem to the epic set a new model for the careers of later writers.
III. The interesting thing about the Aeneid is that it came onto the scene purely as a literary epic—it never went through
phases of oral transmission.
A. The Aeneid was meant for a reading public.
B. Thanks to the acquisition of books as spoils of war, the Romans were beginning to establish private libraries.
C. Augustus also established a public library, decorated with statues of authors.
IV. Virgil went beyond collecting copies of Homer; he assimilated the Iliad and the Odyssey into his own work.
A. This process of translatio studii (the transfer of culture across regions) paralleled Augustus’s process of translatio
imperii (the transfer of power across regions).
B. Virgil was a great reader of Greek literature, from the Alexandrian poets to the Athenian tragedians.
C. He is also the first nonhistorian writer that we know of to have done research on his subject. He even traveled to
Greece to get a sense of the geography.
V. Imitation had been part of the literary process for centuries, and Virgil was very clearly putting Aeneas out as a model
for Roman citizens to imitate.
A. Aeneas embodies the Roman virtue of duty, or pietas. Unlike the Greek epic heroes, he can enjoy neither personal
glory nor the comforts of home; he is driven by his imperial obligation to the future Roman people.
B. This notion of duty and responsibility would continue to ring forward into the future wherever there were empire
builders—for instance, Britain in the 19th century.
VI. As the Aeneid was written, Virgil read Books II, IV, and VI as a command performance for Emperor Augustus.
A. This is an example of what I call an “internal canon,” where parts of a larger work are singled out for study or
recognition.
B. These books are still the selections that are included in high school Latin texts.
VII. Queen Dido, whose tragic love affair with Aeneas is recounted in Book IV, is extraordinarily rich and is meant to
remind us of her Greek predecessors.
A. When Dido first welcomes Aeneas to her city, she resembles Nausicaa, the young girl who welcomed Odysseus to
the land of the Phaiakians.
B. She then turns into the seductive Kalypso, who wants the traveler to stay and become her paramour.

C. When Aeneas turns her down, Dido morphs into Medea, wanting revenge upon the man who is deserting her.
D. Dido is also the representation of the historical figure Cleopatra, under whose temptation Mark Antony fell. Aeneas
corrects that mistake, choosing duty instead of love.
VIII. The deserted Dido curses Aeneas as she commits suicide, predicting that there would be hostility between Carthage and
his future city of Rome.
A. In this way Virgil explained the three Punic Wars; Rome’s victory in these conflicts paved the way for the
establishment of its empire.
B. Tragically, in a sense, Dido’s curse becomes the downfall of her own kingdom.
IX. Book VI was a favorite of Dante’s, because it describes the descent into the underworld.
A. Aeneas enters Hades to seek advice from his dead father, Anchises. This reminds us of the journey that Odysseus
took to the underworld to seek the advice of Teiresias.
B. Anchises shows Aeneas the generations of Romans yet to be born, including his descendent Caesar Augustus, who
will bring the golden age back to Rome.
X. In putting together the Aeneid, Virgil engineered a beautifully balanced epic.
A. The first six books parallel Homer’s Odyssey, while the last six books parallel the Iliad.
B. The current canon generally only includes the first six books of the Aeneid, revealing again our modern preference
for the Odyssey.
XI. In the last six books of the Aeneid, Virgil is essentially inventing the lost prehistory of the Roman people.
A. This move would be mimicked by J. R. R. Tolkein in The Lord of the Rings, where he made up the lost prehistory of
the British people.
B. Tolkien was not only generally inspired by the Aeneid; he based his siege of Minas Tirith on a specific incident from
the last six books.
XII. Virgil died shortly after returning from a fact-checking trip to Greece, and he left precise instructions in his will that the
unfinished manuscript of the Aeneid should be destroyed.
A. Augustus overrode these instructions and had the text edited by two of Virgil’s friends so that it could be published
and become the founding epic of Roman civilization.
B. Here we have a work entering the canon even though it is unfinished and does not have what Aristotle would have
called organic unity.
C. We also have an example of editors becoming invisible coauthors, collaborators in producing the work as it would
enter the canon.
XIII. Though these loose ends would have bothered Virgil as a craftsman, the Aeneid functioned exactly the way that
Augustus wanted it to: as imperial propaganda.
A. It provided the emperor with a sense of manifest destiny, that it was the will of the gods that the Romans should
establish themselves and expand their power.
B. Virgil’s masterpiece would continue to function in subliminal (and sometimes explicit) ways for any empire that
wanted to justify itself.
C. It would also live on as a literary template for authors like Augustine, Dante, and Milton.
XIV. The Aeneid also functioned as a blueprint for any national narrative of migration, conquest, and settlement, especially
in the Americas, where it influenced Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s History of New Mexico and helped to shape Jefferson’s
ideas of territorial expansion.
Suggested Readings:
Virgil, Aeneid, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Hardie, Virgil’s “Aeneid.”
Quint, Epic and Empire.
1. The fate of a great national writer rises or falls with the greatness of his home nation. The triumph of the Roman Empire
and the Latin language ensured the fortunes of Virgil’s Aeneid. Can you think of other examples—like Shakespeare
during the British Empire—where a literary figure rose along with the fortunes of the nation? Also negative examples—

like 1,200 years of Byzantine Greek literature—that disappeared because the original civilization declined or ceased to
exist?
2. Today’s readers often find Aeneas an uninteresting hero. Is there something inherently unattractive about a leader who
struggles exclusively to fulfill some higher destiny? Or does the issue lie with modern readers who lack sympathy for the
imperial virtues of duty and self-sacrifice?

Lecture Ten
Love Interest—Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Scope: Ovid continued Virgil’s imperial project by appropriating a huge body of Greek mythology and making it seem
entirely Roman in his Metamorphoses. Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe—nearly our entire knowledge of
classical mythology is transmitted through Ovid’s Latin adaptations. Working a generation after the duty-driven
Virgil, Ovid lived in a more decadent age. The energy behind his storytelling is love—erotic love, irrational love,
destructive love, kinky love. Ovid’s major contribution to the Western canon is establishing love interest as an
essential ingredient to successful storytelling. Banished by Emperor Augustus for encouraging immorality, Ovid
also becomes a prototype for the outlaw author.
Outline
I. In the case of Ovid, we have a great writer who almost got excluded, banished from the canon before he even had a
chance to enter it. Who is this lucky member of the survivor’s list, and how did he come to contribute that central
ingredient of Western literature: love interest?
A. Ovid was born a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar and came of age after Caesar Augustus had begun to
solidify and pacify the Roman Empire.
B. He was, in a sense, the original “baby boomer,” growing up in a peaceful and prosperous world and devoting
himself to life’s pleasures: sex and literature.
C. His father intended him to be a lawyer, so he studied rhetoric and visited the Greek world, probably returning with a
considerable library of Greek texts.
II. When, against his father’s wishes, Ovid became a writer, he tried to do his duty and contribute to the emerging imperial
culture.
A. One of his early works, called the Fasti, chronicles the Roman religious holidays. It glorified the Roman culture, but
it also in a sense undercut the calendar reforms that Emperor Augustus was instating.
B. Ovid also did his duty in the Metamorphoses by appropriating Greek mythology into the Roman world and the Latin
language, extending in a literary way what the Roman generals were doing militarily.
C. In achieving this translatio studii, Ovid mapped out an interesting movement of appropriation from east to west,
from Asia Minor to Greece to Rome.
III. Ovid had an interesting and complicated relationship with his older contemporary, Virgil.
A. Ovid stated once that he “only saw Virgil,” indicating that though they moved in the same circles, he never really
got to know the older writer.
B. We have a sense that Ovid was overwhelmed by the authorial presence of Virgil, a phenomenon that Harold Bloom
would later call “the anxiety of influence.”
C. This anxiety stems from the compulsion new writers feel to engage older generations of writers in a type of Oedipal
struggle.
IV. We can read the Metamorphoses as a complex, sophisticated, slippery response to the Aeneid.
A. Ovid thumbed his nose at Virgil’s use of traditional epic constructs by structuring his own work against the Homeric
standard: a winding, chronological narrative in 15 books instead of 12 or 24.
B. Virgil had one hero in a linear storyline; Ovid had 250 shape-shifting characters in a free association of stories.
C. Virgil’s theme was about stability, self-sacrifice, and responsibility; Ovid’s world was unstable, freewheeling, and
self-indulgent.
D. Virgil’s tone was grave; Ovid was witty and ironic.
E. Ovid even expanded upon Virgil, filling in episodes that Virgil had left out.
V. The overall contribution of Ovid, in the Metamorphoses and elsewhere in his writings, is erotic love—not only as a
diversion but as an indispensable ingredient in Western literature thereafter.
A. Previously, erotic love was something that literary heroes like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Aeneas were supposed to
resist.
B. Ovid, on the other hand, saw erotic love as something to be indulged in, something to be enjoyed, even at the risk of
self-destruction.

VI. Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of love letters written by women who had been abandoned, rejected, jilted, or widowed,
had a tremendous afterlife as a model for the epistolary genre.
A. Letter writing was a major genre within the Roman Empire, with authors such as Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and
Saint Paul.
B. It also contributed to the emergence of the novel in the 18th century—many of the earliest English novels are what
we now call “epistolary novels.”
VII. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid went through all of the motions of praising the emperor and the imperial family, but there
is also a kind of subversiveness at work.
A. By placing Augustus’s own ancestor, Julius Caesar, in the stars, Ovid simultaneously complimented the imperial
dynasty and dismissed Augustus’s nonsidereal calendar.
B. Instead of making a final bow to the emperor at the end of the work, Ovid made himself and his posterity the subject
of his final lines, claiming that his work would ensure him literary immortality.
VIII. Though this claim of immortality proved correct, it was a near miss.
A. Ovid ran afoul of Emperor Augustus and was exiled during the last decade of his life.
B. He may have been involved in a sexual scandal, and his erotic poem The Art of Love proved too outrageous for the
public.
C. His books were banned in Rome and were removed from the imperial library. Some of these works were lost for
good.
IX. Yet for all of these efforts to erase him, Ovid emerged, and it is interesting who saved him: the Christians.
A. Why? Because despite all of the outrageous content of his works, Ovid began his poem with a creation story very
similar to the book of Genesis.
B. Ovid would be redeemed and imitated by future masters, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Eliot, Joyce, and
Kafka.
X. Our primary inheritance from Ovid is the idea of the erotic as an essential ingredient in storytelling. It is almost
impossible now for any author in the Western tradition, writing in any genre, to leave the love interest out.
Suggested Readings:
Ovid, Metamorphoses.
Hardie, Barchiesi, and Hinds, eds., Ovidian Transformations.
Knox, ed., Oxford Readings in Ovid.
1. The sternest Christian readers could not resist Ovid because he wrote so beautifully. One of the consistent excellences of
works in the Western canon is the verbal skills of our authors. Can you find a single page of the Metamorphoses where
Ovid’s brilliant use of language, dazzling descriptions, and witty wordplay survives even into translation?
2. The legacy of Ovid’s mythologies remains strong into the 20th century. Can you think of other modern works with a
direct debt to the Metamorphoses? William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”? Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus?
George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, made into the musical My Fair Lady?

Lecture Eleven
St. Augustine Saves the Classics
Scope: Saint Augustine’s Confessions represents the first autobiography in the Western canon. Born in north Africa during
the waning decades of the Roman Empire, Augustine operated as a reader of his life’s experiences as if his
experiences were texts containing lessons. When Augustine converted to Christianity by reading a book, he began
using allegorical readings to rescue pagan classics as well as the Old Testament. Interpretation remains the hallmark
of Western reading.
Outline
I. Saint Augustine lived in a Roman Empire very different from the one that Ovid had enjoyed four centuries earlier. By
Saint Augustine’s time, the empire was coming apart at the seams.
A. Early in the century in which Augustine was born, the Emperor Constantine had moved the capital of the empire to
Constantinople.
B. Emperor Theodosius became the last emperor really to rule a united empire. By 408 A.D., the eastern and western
halves had truly diverged.
C. The eastern half began to consolidate and reorganize into what would later be called the Byzantine Empire, whereas
the western half struggled with barbarians.
D. In 410 A.D., Rome was sacked by the barbarian Visigoths, and this was a huge intellectual, psychological, and
cultural catastrophe for the Roman people.
II. In addition to political upheaval, there were theological changes as well.
A. The Latin language took over the Christian liturgy, and Saint Jerome would create a Latin translation of the Bible.
B. The pope began to rule from Rome, very much a spiritual emperor, administering a system of bishops that
resembled the Roman system of governors.
III. Saint Augustine produced a tremendous amount of literature, much of it theological. But, as is often the case with canon
authors, one work was singled out for posterity: Confessions, his great spiritual autobiography.
A. Autobiography was a relatively new genre within the West.
B. Confessions is not only a spiritual autobiography; it is also a biography of a reader. It recounts the conversion of a
pagan to a Christian but also of a pagan reader to a Christian reader.
IV. As a native of Roman Africa, Augustine followed the traditional Roman education in rhetoric, though he did not learn
Greek.
A. The central textbook of Roman education was the Aeneid. For Augustine, the Aeneid would function as a kind of
spiritual allegory for his own movements as both a Roman administrator and a Christian.
B. During his period of higher education in Carthage, Augustine experienced the freedom to indulge in sexual
explorations and so found himself in much the same situation as Aeneas.
C. While in Carthage, Augustine read Cicero and adaptations of Plato. He would become one of the great Neoplatonic
thinkers and would do much to infuse the spirit of Platonism into Christian theology.
D. Augustine does not mention Ovid in his works, perhaps because Ovid was still sidelined from the official canon, or
perhaps because Ovid reminded Augustine of his own vices. Yet Ovid’s influence is apparent throughout
Augustine’s writing.
V. One of the great stumbling blocks for Augustine’s conversion was the Bible itself.
A. He had been brought up on pagan classics like the Aeneid, and the Bible for him was a weird Asiatic text, poorly
written, full of absurd and incomprehensible things.
B. It is hard to appreciate what a problem the Old Testament was for the early Christian church. One early Christian,
Marcion of Sinope, excluded the Old Testament entirely from his version of the Bible.
C. By Augustine’s time, Eusebius had produced a definitive edition of the Bible that included the Old Testament, so the
problem could not be avoided.
D. In Milan, Augustine heard the sermons of Saint Ambrose, during which he realized that parts of the Bible could be
read allegorically.
E. His conversion was amazingly bookish. The Bible for him provided a type of mimesis, a literary representation that
could also function as a model for his own spiritual life.

F. Saint Anthony provided Augustine with the example of turning randomly to a text for guidance, a process we now
call “bibliomancy.”
VI. The Confessions can be seen as the story of a literary man learning how to read, to understand, to write, and especially to
interpret texts in a Christian way.
A. Augustine expanded his ability to interpret the Old Testament allegorically into an ability to interpret classic pagan
texts as Christian.
B. Later in his career, Augustine wrote a text called On Christian Doctrine, in which he claimed that the literal
meaning of a text is a trap but that the reader can move from the literal meaning to a spiritual meaning, which gives
life.
C. Augustine interpreted a passage in the Old Testament in which the Jews leaving Egypt take with them some gold
from their captors as an allegory for the ability of Christians to absorb the pagan classics into their faith.
VII. Augustine praised God for the beauty of the Scriptures, which initially attracts readers and then stuns them with their
depth.
A. This points to a general phenomenon in literature, that what initially attracts us is the beauty of the language and the
drama of the story, but then we are pulled into the spiritual riches under the surface.
B. The passage reveals a deep love of literature. Augustine has moved from a child’s desire for food, to a youth’s desire
for fun, to a young man’s desire for sex, to a spiritually mature love of God and literature for God’s sake.
VIII. This attraction to the depths of a text would become a major criterion for judging literature in the Western tradition: Is
the text open to interpretation?
A. In the Western canon, we insist upon works that have an intellectual challenge built into them, that require
“exegesis.”
B. There is also the sense that hard books are good for us, that they offer a type of moral value or a sense of
redemption.
Suggested Readings:
Saint Augustine, Confessions, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Brown, Augustine of Hippo.
Stock, Augustine the Reader.
1. Saint Augustine describes his conversion to Christianity in terms of overcoming his sexual addiction. His mother, Saint
Monica, was a recovering alcoholic. His best friend, Alypius, was addicted to the gladiatorial games. How can his
Confessions be read as the founding document for the phenomenon of addiction and recovery?
2. Saint Augustine was astonished to discover Saint Ambrose reading silently to himself. How does it change our attitude
toward literature when we realize that books, throughout nearly all of Western history, were scripts designed for reading
aloud, even when the reader was sitting alone?

Lecture Twelve
All Literature is Consolation—Boethius
Scope: The Consolation of Philosophy is an example of the canonic work that isn’t anymore. Boethius was a Roman
philosopher whose project was translating Plato and Aristotle into Latin. While in prison awaiting execution in A.D.
524, he produced a literary work of immense influence throughout Europe. Translated by King Alfred the Great,
Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I, his Consolation describes a good man fallen from great heights of power
and glory. Dame Fortune turns a wheel, upon which men rise and fall in their worldly careers. The movement of
Fortune’s Wheel provided Chaucer and Shakespeare with their idea of tragedy. Dame Philosophy becomes the
model for the female spirit guide from Dante’s Beatrice to Tolkien’s Galadriel. Boethius typifies authors once
central to the canon, still extant and read by specialists, but fallen on Fortune’s Wheel in terms of any widespread
readership.
Outline
I. There is something glorious and also sad about The Consolation of Philosophy; it was a central work in the Western
literary canon for 1,200 years, and now it is not.
A. This was not a case in which the text was suppressed by political forces or lost in a fire. It simply fell out of favor.
B. C.S. Lewis called it “one of the most influential books ever written in Latin.”
C. The generation of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien was the last that really read and really loved Boethius. Now he is
read as a duty, if he is read at all.
II. Severinus Boethius is sometimes called the last great Roman.
A. He was descended from an ancient Roman family that included many senators and consuls. He modeled his own
career as a statesman and philosopher on Cicero’s career.
B. He was a scholar of Greek philosophy and could read Greek at a time when that language was largely disappearing
in the West.
C. Boethius took on a project similar to one that Cicero had started centuries before: the translation of classic Greek
texts into Latin.
D. He also had a political career as consul to the Ostrogoth king Theodoric. However, he fell under suspicion of
collusion with the Byzantine emperor and was imprisoned under sentence of execution.
III. It is believed that Boethius wrote his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy, while he was in prison awaiting
execution.
A. The story shows him deprived of everything—every honor, every possession, every friend. Suddenly there appears
before him a vision, the allegorical figure of Lady Philosophy.
B. In order to bring Boethius to the understanding that his material dispossession has no meaning, Lady Philosophy
conjures up another vision: the figure of Lady Fortune with her wheel.
C. In this movement from desolation to consolation, Lady Philosophy brings Boethius to the philosophical and
theological notion of theodicy, in which all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
D. The last book of The Consolation of Philosophy seems rather hurried, as if Boethius were trying to finish in the
moments before his execution. It may be that this is yet another unfinished canonic work.
E. In Boethius we find yet another author who would not only be canonized in the Western literary tradition but
canonized as a Catholic saint as well.
IV. In a sense, the text of The Consolation of Philosophy was designed to be a time capsule for all of classical civilization.
A. Boethius realized that the world in which he and his ancestors had lived was coming to an end. There was a sense of
urgency, almost desperation, to preserve the best and brightest of antiquity.
B. Though he was a Christian theologian, Boethius included no Christian content in his masterpiece. Instead he focused
on Plato’s work—on the figure of Socrates as an imprisoned man turning to philosophy and on the formal model of
the Socratic dialogue.
C. Boethius’s version of the Socratic dialogue would be transmitted through medieval culture for the next 1,000 years.
V. The genre of The Consolation of Philosophy would also become recognizable. It is a mixture of poetry and prose, called
“satura.”
A. Dante would adopt this style in his early work, Vita nuova.

B. In fact, one of the great legacies of Boethius’s work was to provide Latin culture with a dazzling array of meters and
verse forms in Latin.
VI. One of the reasons that Boethius was able to make the leap from the classical to the medieval period was his appeal to
monastic readers.
A. One of Saint Benedict’s edicts was that all monasteries should have a library and that monks should read appropriate
works. The Consolation of Philosophy fit this description because it revealed the meaninglessness of the material,
secular, and political world.
B. Monks not only read Boethius’s work; they copied it, preserving The Consolation of Philosophy for future
generations.
VII. One way that any great work establishes itself is by attracting translators. Boethius has been amazingly fortunate in the
prominence and fame of the people who have translated his work.
A. King Alfred the Great translated the Consolation into Anglo-Saxon, and Jean de Meun, coauthor of the popular
Romance of the Rose, translated it into French.
B. Chaucer translated it into Middle English, and Queen Elizabeth I followed with a very accurate translation into what
we now think of as Elizabethan English.
VIII. Why did The Consolation of Philosophy appeal to figures like King Alfred the Great and Queen Elizabeth I? It is a
work that resonates with people who are aware of their vulnerability to reversals of fortune.
A. The idea of Fortune’s Wheel was an ancient one; Herodotus had mentioned it in his Histories.
B. The goddess Fortune had entered the Roman pantheon, but Boethius endowed her with an almost cosmic mission in
the world.
IX. This idea of rising and falling on Fortune’s Wheel would give another unintended legacy to European culture: the idea of
Boethian tragedy.
A. The Athenian tradition had disappeared in the West, so Boethius became the model for tragedy.
B. Boccaccio would write the hugely influential Concerning the Fall of Illustrious Men, which would prompt Chaucer
to introduce the tragic idea into the English vernacular. This in turn would influence Shakespeare in the formation of
his tragedies.
X. Another cultural figure that would emerge from The Consolation of Philosophy is Lady Philosophy.
A. She had her ancestry in the form of Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl and would reappear often in the Western tradition.
B. Dante would reformulate her as his Beatrice, and she would appear in Middle English poetry as the Pearl Queen.
C. Even J. R. R. Tolkien would create a character in this tradition: Lady Galadriel, who comforts the Fellowship after
Gandalf’s fall.
XI. Although The Consolation of Philosophy has largely fallen away from the Western canon, its literary DNA stays with us
through its influence on other works.
A. Boethius is clearly the father of prison literature, a genre that would be carried on by Thomas More and Stendhal.
B. Shakespeare and Milton made use of Boethius’s concept of the great providential blueprint, and Voltaire later
mocked this idea in Candide.
XII. The question now is, why does a work like The Consolation of Philosophy lose its readership and position of
importance?
A. Sometimes context changes. Boethius’s work depends largely on a Great Man view of history.
B. As we enter a more democratic age, the rise and fall of individuals no longer holds as much meaning, and there is
also a sense that people don’t suffer as predictably for their actions any more.
XIII. Despite the Consolation’s obscurity, there continues to be a sense that all literature is written by those who have lost, as
a kind of consolation.
Suggested Readings:
Boethius, The Theological Tractates and Consolation of Philosophy.
Chadwick, Boethius.
Gibson, ed., Boethius: His Life.

1. Why not consider further “all literature is consolation”? Aren’t we relieved that our lives are not tragically painful or
comically humiliating? Don’t we feel grateful that we have not lived through wars and plagues? Doesn’t literature
console readers that not all of human achievement perishes with the heroes and heroines—or with the authors
themselves?
2. Boethian tragedy, concerning “the falls of great men,” has become fixed in the Western psyche. How many figures from
more recent history remain powerful examples in our culture because their careers conform to the up-and-down of
Fortune’s Wheel? Napoleon? Adolph Hitler? Saddam Hussein?

Lecture Thirteen
Beowulf—The Fortunate Survivor
Scope: Britannia was a Roman province for four centuries before being invaded by pagan Anglo-Saxons. Not until Roman
missionaries came in the 6th century was the new population converted to Christianity. Thereafter, England became
the birthplace of Europe’s first vernacular literature. The greatest single survivor of this poetic tradition is the epic
Beowulf. The sole surviving manuscript just barely escaped destruction in a London fire in 1731, further evidence
that sheer luck often determines which texts are available for canonization. Like all enduring works, Beowulf is
beautifully written with a moving story, as well as being our first heroic quest-romance. Its canonic status is
perpetuated by college courses and film adaptations, as well as a bestselling translation by Seamus Heaney.
Outline
I. It is sometimes said that Beowulf is the product of centuries—the centuries that came before its composition and the
centuries that followed.
A. Britannia had been a Roman province for 400 years following its conquest by Emperor Claudius. It was very much a
part of the Roman Empire.
B. When Beowulf references the old works from the “days of giants,” the poet was probably thinking about the ruins
left behind by the Romans.
C. The Anglo-Saxons remained part of the Mediterranean world by extension, as evidenced by Byzantine, Greek, and
Egyptian artifacts found in Anglo-Saxon tombs.
II. The Codex Amiatinus, the earliest complete copy of Saint Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, was a product of
northern England in the late 7th–early 8th centuries and represents a sort of renaissance in England during this time.
A. The Venerable Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in which he told the story of the Roman
occupation, the coming of the Saxons, and eventually the arrival of Christianity.
B. Bede had agents at the Vatican doing research for this text; that an Anglo-Saxon scholar could have had
communication with Rome indicates the connection that existed, even during this period, between England and the
Mediterranean.
C. After the Anglo-Saxons filled the power vacuum left by the Roman evacuation of Britain, they remained pagan until
the arrival of Christian missionaries 150 years later. This would be an important element of Bede’s story, since he
and his contemporaries were aware of their recent pagan heritage.
III. Beowulf explores this extraordinary clash of civilizations between the Germanic warrior culture of the Anglo-Saxons and
the Mediterranean Christian culture.
A. The poem’s reference to historical events allows us to date its plot to the 6th century, during the pre-Christian Anglo-
Saxon era.
B. However, the poem itself was probably written in the 9th century and went through many stages of copying before
the creation of the only surviving text, which dates to the 11th century.
C. This opens a huge historical and cultural gap between the audience of the 11th-century manuscript and the original
deeds of the early 6th century.
IV. In a sense, Beowulf is an epic, much along the lines of Virgil’s Aeneid.
A. Like the Aeneid, Beowulf was written in part to flatter and reflect favorably upon the power elite of the time.
B. Unlike Virgil, however, the Beowulf Poet had a sense of writing over a greater temporal and cultural gap.
V. Beowulf also inaugurated a new genre that would have extraordinary tenacity in the Western tradition: the quest-
romance.
A. The quest-romance has such an easy structure that it can be quickly recognized in our storytelling tradition.
1. The first scene occurs in court, where there is male dominance and an established code of conduct.
2. A challenge presents itself from the outside, and the hero embarks to face the challenge.
3. The hero enters the wilderness; there are monsters and there is mystery, very often in the form of a female
threat.
4. The hero achieves the goal of his quest and returns to court, where he is hailed as the triumphant victor.
B. This general narrative structure can be seen everywhere, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to The Wizard
of Oz.

VI. Beowulf’s quest follows this form and in fact was the original pattern for it. But the poem continues for quite a while
after Beowulf’s mission is complete. This final segment contains an element that was essential to the poet and the
audience: Beowulf’s downfall.
A. In the final pages, Beowulf becomes a Boethian tragic hero, falling on Fortune’s Wheel.
B. This is probably why Beowulf was written. It may have been originally banned as too pagan in the monasteries, until
the element of Boethian tragedy was introduced to counteract the hero’s attachment to fortune and fame.
C. There is a sense of sadness throughout the poem, an idea that the hero had tried to be virtuous but simply had the
bad luck to be born before the coming of Christianity to his people.
VII. As is often the case with very early literature, Beowulf has survived by a concatenation of accidents. It may not have
been the only Old English epic, or even the best, but it is the one that has survived.
A. Beowulf represents about 10 percent of the Old English poetry that has come down to us. Another notable survivor is
the Vercelli Manuscript, which was preserved in a cathedral in Italy.
B. Many Old English works were destroyed during the Reformation. Our one copy of Beowulf squeaked through and
reappeared in the collection of Sir Robert Cotton in the 18th century.
C. The Cotton library caught fire in 1731. The copy of Beowulf sustained damage but survived, along with our one and
only copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
VIII. When Beowulf was finally edited and circulated in the 19th century, it was not appreciated as literature but as a
historical artifact intended to boost nationalistic pride.
A. It was also recognized as an archive of the Old English language. Many publications of Old English works were
sponsored by the editors of dictionaries, who needed the words in print in order to properly cite them.
B. The poem was also seen as a repository of folklore from the preliterate period of English history.
IX. The poem finally achieved literary recognition after Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
A. Tolkien was in a position to ensure Beowulf’s inclusion in the English syllabus at Oxford University. The English
syllabus is where it can still be found, often as the anchor or starting point.
B. The poem is so central to the standard English curriculum that it has acquired a reputation as a grueling educational
duty.
X. Tolkien also helped guarantee the longevity of Beowulf by reinventing some of its characters in his own work.
A. The novelists John Gardner and Michael Crichton also reimagined the story of Beowulf in their writings.
B. Filmmakers have not done so well adapting Beowulf, though they have tried. Perhaps this is because of the Ovidian
pressure they feel to introduce a love interest to the story.
XI. Beowulf has also benefitted from translation. A translation by Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney appeared on bestseller
lists across the country and is now a standard inclusion in the Norton anthologies.
Suggested Readings:
Beowulf.
Orchard, A Critical Companion to “Beowulf.”
1. Beowulf was first studied simply because it was “there” as the earliest large-scale poem in English or any other post-
Roman language. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture for the British Academy elevated its status as literature. Who is right? The
historical scholars who plunder it for information about the Anglo-Saxons? Or the literary critics who value its poetic
beauties and poignant human emotions?
2. As it survives, Beowulf violates Aristotle’s standard of organic unity. When Beowulf returns victorious from Denmark,
the quest-romance is complete. But his story does not end, jumping forward half a century to his battle with the fire-
breathing dragon. Does this continuation really belong? Or was it added on, perhaps, simply because the scribe did not
want to lose some materials about the same hero?

Lecture Fourteen
King Arthur, Politics, and Sir Gawain
Scope: Starting in the 12th century, Arthurian literature became a political reflection of a specific time and place. History is
written by the winners, and Geoffrey of Monmouth invented King Arthur to replace Alfred the Great in his official
Norman French account of Britain’s royal past. As the best Arthurian romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
was written in imitation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse—in English—because England was at war with France
during the second half of the 14th century. The poet revived the enchantment of fairies, giants, and Green Men
unique to Britain’s folklore. The anonymous genius probed the internal contradictions of chivalry under Richard II,
a king whose court was notorious for sophistication verging on decadence. Arthurian stories continue to reflect the
political culture in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Outline
I. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best Arthurian romance in the English language. I have to specify the English
language, because much of the best Arthurian literature was actually written in French.
A. We return to the notion that history, including literary history, is written by the winners—in this case, the French-
speaking Normans who conquered the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings.
B. As we have seen before, with this translation of power came a translation of culture and the creation of new
documents to justify the new regime.
II. For the Norman French, this document was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain.
A. Monmouth, a Welsh scholar, recounted in Latin the tale of British colonization as a continuation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
B. Monmouth was working for the Norman nobility when he wrote, so part of his job was to erase the Anglo-Saxon
chapter of British history, including King Alfred the Great.
C. In place of Alfred the Great, Monmouth inserted Arthur, a Welshman. In this way, he satisfied his obligation to
erase Anglo-Saxon history and he inserted his own personal heritage.
III. The word “mystery” is a good word to apply to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
A. Its plot is essentially a whodunit, a mystery story.
B. It was written by an anonymous author in the 14th century. This is mysterious in itself, because authorial anonymity
was not the norm by this point.
C. There is only one surviving manuscript of this work, though The Canterbury Tales (also written during this period)
survives in 82 manuscripts.
D. It was largely ignored as a literary work until J. R. R. Tolkien and Eric Gordon produced a standard scholarly edition
in 1925.
IV. The manuscript’s date of 1400 gives us some context for the original date of composition.
A. It was written during the Hundred Years’ War, an extended conflict between England and France.
B. One of the results of this war was to inspire a new sense of patriotism in England, including the use of the English
language.
V. This poet was even more patriotic than others, using the original Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter in his work.
A. When choosing his hero, he overlooked Sir Lancelot, who was French, in favor of Gawain, a Celt.
B. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Gawain Poet wanted to connect the story of King Arthur to the Trojan foundation
of England.
C. The Gawain Poet boasts that England is the home of more marvels and supernatural events than any other land. He
extends this sense of marvel and wonder to Arthur himself.
VI. The story starts at Camelot at Christmastime (or “Yuletide”), which is portrayed in this work as a particularly English
holiday.
A. The Green Knight enters the festivities with a bob of holly, a plant that is associated both with Christmas and with
Druidic worship.
B. When the Green Knight is beheaded as part of his bargain with Sir Gawain, his head rolls to the floor and is kicked
around like a football. The English sport of football was commonly associated with Christmastime, and even today
in America, our own version of football is a traditional holiday entertainment.

VII. The Green Knight himself is deeply rooted in the folklore of Britain, in the idea of the giants and the wild Green Men of
the woods.
A. When editing the poem, Tolkien discovered a word for this folkloric figure: the wodwose.
B. The idea of the wild man of the woods would continue in the English tradition, appearing in Tolkien’s work and
even the recent work of J. K. Rowling.
VIII. Finally, the mystery of the whodunit is solved.
A. Who sent the Green Knight to challenge Arthur’s court? It was the old lady in the castle, who, as it turns out, is
Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur’s half-sister and Sir Gawain’s aunt.
B. Aristotle would have approved of this, since he considered it best to keep drama tightly organized within the family.
IX. When Sir Gawain returns to Camelot, he is wearing a green sash as a sign of his humiliation. The court jokes about it and
makes it into a fashion statement, and this gives us a good idea about who the original audience for this poem was.
A. The beardless, high-spirited boys of King Arthur’s court were meant to mirror the youthful court of King Richard II,
who was the patron of the Gawain Poet.
B. The poet was likely a Cheshire clergyman who joined the Cheshire bodyguard in Richard II’s household.
X. The mystery of the poet’s anonymity and the survival of a single manuscript can be explained by the political
circumstances following the poem’s composition.
A. Richard II was deposed by Henry of Lancaster, who would become King Henry IV.
B. Henry IV and his son, Henry V, eradicated all signs of Richard II’s court and dismissed the Cheshiremen guard,
including (presumably) the Gawain Poet.
C. The literary void left by the disappearance of the Gawain Poet was promptly filled by a Lancastrian, Geoffrey
Chaucer.
XI. The King Arthur story would renew itself from generation to generation, and each new era would somehow make it its
own.
A. At the end of the 15th century, Sir Thomas Malory gathered many of these romances together in his Le Morte
Darthur. This moved the genre forward by presenting many quests at once in an interlaced plot.
B. In the 19th century, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, would reformulate the story in his Idylls of the King, using it to reflect
upon the imperial grandeur of the Victorian period.
C. In the 20th century, we had Lerner and Lowe’s musical Camelot and a 1970s counterculture version of the Arthurian
story, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
XII. There is one requirement of canonic works that we have not yet discussed: They have to be well-written, well-
constructed, and display universal human values. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight passes this test exceptionally well.
A. It is one of the most carefully constructed plots and carefully crafted masterpieces in the English tradition.
B. The tests of character that Sir Gawain endures are tests that reappear in myths and civilizations all over the world.
Suggested Readings:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in The Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Bowers, The Politics of “Pearl.”
Brewer and Gibson, eds., A Companion to the Gawain-Poet.
1. There are writers who tell and writers who show. The Gawain Poet is a supreme example of a “writer who shows” by
indicating in actions what a character is thinking and feeling. For example, Gawain ties up his horse before his final
encounter with the Green Knight. This action indicates that he expects to survive with the help of the green sash. What
other actions serve as exterior indicators of a character’s true thoughts and motives?
2. Tolkien was drawn to Sir Gawain because its author is one of the greatest nature writers in English literature. His
landscape descriptions are “painterly,” especially in Parts II and IV. Can you find a passage that combines the beauty and
threat of the wilderness?

Lecture Fifteen
Dante and the Canon of Christian Literature
Scope: The medieval period was not a thousand-year monolithic Christian culture. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council
introduced new religious practices. Priests started preaching in their native languages, and all good Christians
practiced the sacrament of confession. These new church regulations encouraged a proliferation of vernacular
literature. Dante’s Divine Comedy employs his native Italian language to create a Christian masterpiece designed to
surpass all predecessors. His spiritual epic also becomes an encyclopedic summa—a counterpart to the Summa
Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas—encompassing all late-medieval knowledge, as well as all classical and
vernacular poets, in an effort to “map” the literary terrain of Europe.
Outline
I. I want to begin with a statement of fact: Dante’s Divine Comedy is the greatest single literary masterpiece in the Western
canon. This statement is true because it has made itself true over the generations.
II. One of the reasons that The Divine Comedy enjoys this honor is that Dante himself was brilliant at the whole process of
canon formation.
A. The text can be read as a reaching back over the entire Western tradition, with the poet traversing Greek culture,
Roman culture, and the modern Romance languages to establish himself at the pinnacle of the literary tradition.
B. It can also be read as reaching forward into the future. By establishing his own individual canon within his work,
Dante set himself as the starting point for revision by future authors and literary historians.
III. One of the ways to appreciate Dante’s achievement is to put it in the context of the 14th century.
A. It is a cliché to imagine that the Christian Middle Ages was a static thousand-year period. Things did change,
especially in 1215 when Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council.
B. The rulings that came out of this council did much to change the nature of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe.
1. Church attendance was now mandatory, leading to the construction of more and bigger churches.
2. Confession was now a requirement, so people needed to know exactly what qualified as a sin.
3. The need for more priests, and hence more training of priests, spurred the development of the universities.
C. Under Pope Innocent III, minorities in Europe began to come under assault. For example, Jews and Muslims had to
wear special dress to identify them as non-Christian.
D. New religious orders also appeared during this time, including the friar communities of the Franciscans and
Dominicans, who believed in carrying the pastoral morality into the lay population.
IV. Dante was a lay member of the Franciscan order, which means he was invested in these new religious changes,
especially the idea of carrying the pastoral morality to the masses.
A. He was committed to using the vernacular language so that even women would be able to understand his writings.
B. He also embodied the sense of intolerance for even the most minor of transgressions.
C. Dante and his work did a great deal to advance and even influence the practices of the church.
V. One can read The Divine Comedy from beginning to end as a parable about poetry itself, especially poetry in the
Christian community.
A. Dante was very keen on the functions, both good and bad, of poetry and poets in society.
B. He wanted to link himself and his culture with the imperial glory of Rome, so he chose as his spirit guide the figure
of Virgil. This was also in a sense a Christian choice, since Augustine and Jerome had turned Virgil into an
allegorically Christian figure.
C. In his description of the Underworld, Dante kept most of Virgil’s geography intact. He also kept many of the
monsters, with the sense that they were both mythological prototypes and appropriate Christian symbols.
VI. In the Circle of Limbo, Dante meets the Virtuous Pagans, a group of ancients like Socrates who were born before
Christianity but had still led virtuous lives. In the crowning moment of his visit to Limbo, he also meets the assembly of
great poets.
A. In this assembly, Dante re-creates the canon of classical writers: Homer, Ovid, Horace, Lucan, Virgil, and—by their
invitation—himself.

B. Some see this inclusion of his own name as an extraordinary arrogance on Dante’s part, but the legacy of The Divine
Comedy has proven his claim.
VII. As Dante and Virgil descend deeper into the Inferno, they meet the sinful poets. Dante actually punishes people who
misused language by condemning them to Hell.
A. These included influential Italian poets condemned for suicide and sodomy.
B. Dante and Virgil also encounter the lovers Paolo and Francesca, who blame the Arthurian romances for instigating
their adultery.
C. Ulysses also appears here, punished for having manipulated language to the peril of his crew.
VIII. Dante used Mount Purgatory to show how poetry could be purged spiritually in the same way that souls are refined
through the purgatorial experience.
A. The new arrivals in Purgatory sing a passage from the Old Testament that Dante has interpreted as a spiritual
allegory.
B. Here Dante and Virgil encounter Statius, a classical poet who had secretly converted to Christianity, and Arnaut
Daniel, a Provençal poet whom Dante honors as “the greater craftsman.”
IX. When Beatrice finally guides Dante through Heaven, many of the redeemed turn out to be poets as well.
A. They encounter a Christian troubadour named Folquet De Marseille, who had sung love songs to the Virgin Mary
instead of an earthly love.
B. They also encounter great Christian scholars and writers who were also poets, like Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and
Saint Francis of Assisi.
C. Ultimately, they meet Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, whose poetic hymn allows Dante to achieve an ecstatic glimpse
of the nature of God.
X. The Divine Comedy can be seen as a sorting out of writers, a type of canon formation.
A. Dante’s effort at forming a canon worked. Several of the writers he mentioned have been edited and translated
simply because he named them.
B. Dante’s devotion to the Romance-language tradition also introduced exclusivity into canon formation. Germanic,
Hebrew, and Arabic poetry were ignored in Dante’s work.
C. Dante’s exclusivity also applied to religion. Only Christians or virtuous pre-Christian writers were included in his
list.
D. But by inserting himself, Dante also acknowledged canon formation as a work in progress, and he expected future
generations to continue the process.
Suggested Readings:
Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.
Auerbach, “Farinata and Cavalcante,” in Mimesis.
Gallagher, A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”
1. Most readers never get beyond the Inferno as a “canon within the canon.” Why not look at some later cantos featuring
Dante’s favorite Christian poets, such as Arnaut Daniel and Guido Guinizzelli in Purgatorio (26), Saint Thomas Aquinas
and Saint Francis of Assisi in Paradiso (10), and certainly Saint Bernard de Clairvaux in Paradiso (33)?
2. Dante’s “canon” is basically a Romance-language syllabus starting with Latin writers and extending to works in Italian
and French. Why not use The Norton Anthology to explore other medieval poetry like the German love minstrels, the
Hebrew and Arabic poets of Spain, and especially the great Sufi poet Rumi—who died when Dante was eight—currently
the bestselling poet in America?

Lecture Sixteen
Boccaccio—Ancient Masters, Modern Rivals
Scope: Boccaccio lectured on The Divine Comedy. But how could any Italian writer compete with Dante? He couldn’t, so
he did something completely different, like his friend Petrarch, who wrote his epic Africa in Latin and imitated the
Roman love poets in his sonnets. In addition to searching for lost Greek manuscripts, Boccaccio wrote vernacular
epics that would inspire Chaucer and Shakespeare. Set during the first outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1348, his
Decameron describes how 10 young people flee Florence for a safe haven at their country estates and, in the
process, introduce something long absent from the Western canon: fictional stories. Shifting from allegory to
realism, his novellas look forward to the modern novel.
Outline
I. As we saw with Dante, the Western canon is often created by one literary genius recognizing other writers of genius who
have gone before.
A. The relationships between writers fall into three categories: relationships with ancient writers, relationships with
more recent predecessors, and relationships with contemporaries.
B. We see these relationships forming even in the early world of the Athenian playwrights. They were comfortable
acknowledging Homer, who had written in the distant past, but were highly competitive with their contemporaries.
II. With Boccaccio, we see all three of these factors operating in the way that he created his masterpiece, the Decameron.
A. He admired and imitated his classical forebears.
1. He adopted Cicero’s style of writing in clean, elegant prose.
2. Boethius inspired the theme of Fortune that runs through both the premise and the plots of the Decameron.
3. Ovid provided him with the example of wit, eloquence, and sensual obsession.
B. The problem for Boccaccio lay with the literary figures that were near contemporary to him—his rivals. These
specifically included the other great Florentine writers, Dante and Petrarch.
III. Harold Bloom has pointed out the need for younger writers to push back against earlier generations. Dante had no
previous Italian master against whom to compete, but Boccaccio and Petrarch had to push back against the enormous
father figure of Dante.
A. Petrarch staged his Oedipal revolt by focusing on the original classic texts of ancient Rome, a tradition with which
Dante was not deeply familiar.
B. Petrarch also wrote an epic, but instead of using the vernacular language as Dante had done, he wrote in Latin—the
serious language of a great writer.
C. Most importantly, he experimented with lyric poetry and is famous for having invented the sonnet form and the
sonnet sequence.
IV. By the time Boccaccio came on the scene, he had two titanic Italian writers against whom to revolt. He started with
Dante.
A. Boccaccio first encountered the works of Dante as a student, which means that Dante had already entered the
educational canon within a generation of his death.
B. Boccaccio was wrestling with Dante even at the end of his life; late in his career, he wrote Expositions on the
Comedy of Dante and The Life of Dante. Both of these texts approached Dante and his writing as sacred.
C. We see an interesting working out of Boccaccio’s Oedipal revolt against Dante in the Decameron.
1. Dante wrote in poetry; Boccaccio chose prose.
2. Dante gave us 100 cantos; Boccaccio gave us 100 stories.
3. Dante’s work was spiritual and allegorical; Boccaccio’s was realistic and earthy.
V. Boccaccio’s relationship with Petrarch was far more complicated, since Petrarch was a contemporary, a friend, and a
mentor.
A. As a mentor, Petrarch encouraged Boccaccio to follow his lead and study the classics. Boccaccio one-upped him by
studying Greek as well as Latin.
B. Because he was not a rich man, Boccaccio had to make his own copies of the classic originals. This process of
imitation helped him learn his craft.

C. Early biographies of Boccaccio give him a huge amount of credit for the rediscovery and distribution of Greek texts
in Europe.
D. Boccaccio continued to shadow-box with Petrarch in his decision to write his classically inspired epics in Italian
rather than Latin. These epics would achieve wide readership and would influence Chaucer—and by extension
Shakespeare.
VI. With Petrarch and Boccaccio, we also have a case of the big brother fighting back. In his letters, we constantly find
Petrarch chiding, criticizing, and bad-mouthing his younger contemporary.
A. When Petrarch received a copy of the Decameron 20 years after its creation, he wrote a letter to Boccaccio claiming
never to have heard of it.
B. He continued with backhanded compliments throughout the rest of the letter and finished it by translating
Boccaccio’s last story into Latin as an example of how it should have been done.
C. Lo and behold, it was Petrarch’s Latin version of Boccaccio’s tale that would become famous internationally.
VII. The Decameron emerged in the canon as a kind of sleeper classic. It did not receive much attention in Boccaccio’s own
lifetime or in the two centuries that followed.
A. By the time its first printed edition was produced in 1552, the work had risen in the estimation of readers and critics.
B. What we see here, then, is a lag time between the composition of a work and its recognition as a masterpiece. This
would happen again with Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
C. Getting attention isn’t always the best thing. Two years after it was printed, the Decameron ended up on the Catholic
Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.
VIII. As I said before, Dante can be seen as the culmination of everything that went before him. In a sense, he closed the
book on the entire genre of the epic. We can see this in other disciplines as well.
A. In music, Bach brought the fugue to its culmination, and Mahler did the same for the symphony.
B. Because of the sense of closure in Dante’s work, Boccaccio was forced to reinvent the rules of the game and, in the
process, create a new genre. This genre would be known even then as the novella, and it would develop into the
modern novel.
Suggested Readings:
Boccaccio, Decameron.
Auerbach, “Frate Alberto,” in Mimesis.
Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire.
Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.”
1. After Dante’s allegorical “dark wood” at the beginning of the Inferno, Boccaccio’s depiction of plague-stricken Florence
marks a huge leap in terms of literary realism. What details of description would you add to make more graphic his
picture of the bubonic plague?
2. Boccaccio’s company of 10 young folk includes 7 women but only 3 men. How does this “gender imbalance” influence
the subjects of the storytelling? And how might the topics of discussion and contents of the tales have been different if
the numbers were reversed and there were seven men, but only three women?

Lecture Seventeen
Chaucer—The Father of English Literature
Scope: Chaucer was the first Englishman to take Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as models. He set out to create a national
literature with himself installed as its founding father. England’s literary tradition is configured as father-son
genealogy also because the poet’s son Thomas undertook the job of canon formation. Like the Bible, Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales becomes an anthology comprising nearly all genres of medieval writing—classical epic, saint’s
life, Greek myth, British history, Arthurian romance, and bedroom farce—staking a claim as the starting point of
English literature. Chaucer’s kinship with the new Lancastrian kings meant that his books benefited from royal
sponsorship through the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
Outline
I. For 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has been known as the father of English literature. Where does this idea come from,
and what does it mean that the English literary tradition is configured in this genealogical succession?
II. We know much more about Chaucer as a person than we know about any of our earlier writers, and even some of our
later ones.
A. We have almost 600 pages of life records concerning Chaucer. We even have an image of him from an early
manuscript of The Canterbury Tales.
B. From these records, we know that Chaucer saw military service during the Normandy Campaign of 1360 and was
captured and ransomed.
III. The adversity that Chaucer suffered in France explains his animosity toward the French and their cultural and literary
weight upon the English.
A. Since 1066, the French had occupied England and had imposed French as the language of government.
B. Although Chaucer may have spoken French more often than English, he elected to compose his works exclusively in
English.
IV. Part of Chaucer’s pushback from the French tradition was to find inspiration in another culture: the Italian tradition of
the 14th century.
A. We know from his life records that Chaucer traveled to Italy on diplomatic missions more than once.
B. He might have actually had the opportunity to meet Petrarch and Boccaccio while he was there in 1373.
C. Chaucer therefore became the first Englishman to be reading Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio long before the
Renaissance. He used elements from all three writers in his own works.
V. Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio anywhere in his writings, despite the fact that Boccaccio was the single strongest and
steadiest influence upon him.
A. In Chaucer’s adaptation of the story of Griselda, you can clearly see that revolt against a father figure. Boccaccio
was an extremely powerful and domineering sort of predecessor, and Chaucer’s response is to erase him from the
account altogether, though Boccaccio served as an ultimate source.
B. Chaucer’s response mirrors Boccaccio’s own struggle with the influence of Dante when writing the Decameron.
C. One legacy that Chaucer retained from Boccaccio is the naughty story. This would become one of the most
memorable things that Chaucer transmitted from the Italian tradition.
VI. As Boccaccio had done with Dante, Chaucer tried to one-up Boccaccio throughout The Canterbury Tales.
A. Boccaccio had written in prose, but Chaucer decided to write his tales in verse.
B. Chaucer has a larger cast of characters and projects a larger number of tales in The Canterbury Tales than Boccaccio
did in the Decameron.
C. Chaucer also has a wider range of stories. His work is a real compendium, an anthology of medieval genres, whereas
Boccaccio focused only on love stories.
D. Another remarkable achievement in Chaucer’s rivalry with Boccaccio is the diversity of the pilgrims themselves.
Boccaccio had a very homogenous group, young and aristocratic, while Chaucer presents the whole spectrum of
English middle-class society at the time.
E. The use of the pilgrimage by Chaucer is actually a political experiment.
1. Current scholarship points to the pilgrimage as a principle of unifying the national community.

2. Despite their diversity, Chaucer’s pilgrims enter into a social contract that anticipates 17th-century political
theory.
VII. Part of Chaucer’s agenda, so to speak, in establishing his credentials as the father of English literature was eliminating
the competition.
A. First, this means eliminating predecessors. For instance, Chaucer never mentions Anglo-Saxon literature, though he
surely was familiar with it.
B. It also means eliminating the contemporary competition, especially on the London scene.
1. We know that the Gawain Poet was active in London at the time. Chaucer actually mentions Gawain as a
character but never acknowledges the Gawain Poet.
2. Chaucer also never mentions William Langland, whose Piers Plowman became the first national bestseller in
the 1380s.
VIII. Another avenue Chaucer takes in establishing himself as a father figure involves reaching forward in time to invite
future writers to join his enterprise.
A. There are missing parts in The Canterbury Tales, so that later writers would feel the invitation to enter into this
ongoing process and become Chaucerian poets.
1. Early in the 15th century, Chaucer’s great imitator John Lydgate, a monk poet, wrote a continuation of “The
Knight’s Tale.”
2. King James I of Scotland and even William Shakespeare used “The Knight’s Tale” as inspiration for their own
work.
B. Later writers and scholars also had a hand in the formation of the Chaucerian canon, eliminating works by other
Chaucerian authors and sometimes even excluding works by Chaucer himself.
IX. The real magic of Chaucer’s emergence as the father of English literature is, as is often the case, a matter of luck.
A. For example, Chaucer’s first major poem was an elegy on the death of the Duchess of Lancaster, whose son
eventually became King Henry IV.
B. Chaucer’s sister-in-law was also the stepmother of King Henry IV.
C. Chaucer’s son Thomas became a diplomat and an important royal administrator in the Lancastrian court. Thomas
was the force behind the creation of elegant manuscripts of his father’s work.
D. Chaucer’s sister-in-law later became the link of legitimacy for the powerful Tudor dynasty. King Henry VIII
personally supervised the first collected works of Chaucer.
X. When Chaucer came on the scene, there was no English literature, only the crushing influence of French literature.
Chaucer clearly had something in mind for creating a new literature in English only, and so he cleared the ground.
A. He rejected French influence left and right, though he faced enormous personal and cultural pressure to write in
French.
B. He also refused to link himself to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. He did not use the alliterative verse form like the
Gawain Poet had done.
C. Instead of French or Anglo-Saxon forms, Chaucer adapted the Italian stanza form.
XI. In the Italian tradition, Chaucer also found a model for the patriarchal literary succession, a succession that Chaucer,
with a great deal of luck, was able to establish in English literature.
A. Chaucer’s emphasis on storytelling and dynamic characters was passed down through Shakespeare and Dickens,
among others.
B. Chaucer’s humor not only endeared him to his readers; it also became a hallmark of the English literary tradition.
Suggested Readings:
Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer.
Bowers, Chaucer and Langland.
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio.
1. English literature as a genealogy descending from Father Chaucer seems strange only when compared to other national
traditions. Can you identify a father of French literature? A father of American literature?

2. Chaucer is primarily a humorist. As a result, his posterity in English literature shows a strong comedic strain even in its
great canonic authors like Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Can you think of a major English writer who is not witty,
humorous, and fond of eccentricity?

Lecture Eighteen
“Man for All Seasons”—More and His Utopia
Scope: A good courtier improvises whatever role is needed, and Henry VIII’s most brilliant courtier was Sir Thomas More:
lawyer, scholar, chancellor of England, and Catholic martyr. His project of self-invention carried over to literature,
and More used the new technology of the printing press to make himself an internationally famous author. While
European navigators like Amerigo Vespucci were mapping the New World, European scholars were rediscovering
Greek classics like Plato’s Republic. In friendly competition with his friend Erasmus, More wrote his Utopia as a
blueprint for future political experiments and also as an example of the “intellectual goofiness” that characterizes
much educated writing.
Outline
I. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia needs to be set in the context of the early European exploration of America.
A. It is a work very much about the discovery of a new civilization on the other side of the world.
B. It anticipates England’s own rise as a seafaring global power and also looks forward to the eventual export of
European books to these new worlds.
II. Five years after Chaucer’s death, the Mongol warlord Tamberlane died, ending the long period of Mongol imperial
domination of the East.
A. As the Persians, the Turks, and the Chinese began to wrangle for power, they hardly noticed the little kingdoms in
Europe.
B. When Sir Thomas More was born, European countries were still very small, economically feeble, in some ways
culturally deprived, and hopelessly divided.
C. Although nobody in Damascus or Beijing felt threatened by Europe at this time, this would soon change.
III. The rise of European sea power continued a long tradition in the West, one that can be traced back to the earliest
Mediterranean civilizations.
A. The Minoans and the Phoenicians were both important, ancient seafaring populations.
B. From the Odyssey to Beowulf, tales of seafaring loom large in the Western literary tradition.
IV. By the time Sir Thomas More was writing and publishing Utopia, the Spanish and the Portuguese had fleets going as far
as the Indies and the Americas.
A. More had been reading the accounts of Amerigo Vespucci, whose letters gave us the phrase “New World” and
whose first name gave mapmakers the term “America.”
B. There is a direct link between More and Vespucci: The narrator of Utopia, Hythloday, claims to have traveled with
Vespucci on his last three voyages.
V. We’re going to talk a little bit more about Sir Thomas More, who was called by his friend Erasmus “a man for all
seasons.”
A. This epithet points to More’s versatility, especially his ability to straddle tragedy and comedy.
B. More’s biography, written by his son-in-law William Roper, tells the story of More’s ability as a child to improvise
roles in Christmas plays, which prompted Cardinal Morton to send him to Oxford to prepare for a career in law.
1. Many of our great writers, going back to Ovid, weren’t really trained in literature but rather in the law, where
they learned rhetoric, or persuasive speech.
2. Part of this training was the “legal fiction,” where a situation is imagined for the sake of argument. We will see
More using this method in Utopia.
C. More was able to apply the rhetorical skills gained at Oxford to whatever propaganda purposes were requested by
the king.
1. In The History of Richard III, More used his lawyer-like skills to do a hatchet job on the earlier monarch to
legitimize the Tudor claim of Henry VIII.
2. It was More’s monstrous vision of Richard III that Shakespeare used when writing his play.
D. There is also in this play of the imagination a true sort of gamefulness that seems to have been a part of More’s
personality.
1. Humor and playfulness were at this point becoming part of the English character.
2. More also found ancient philosophy, especially Plato, congenial to this sense of playfulness.

VI. In Utopia itself, we find this sense of serious fun, or what I like to call “intellectual goofiness.”
A. The text was written in Latin so that it could have a European readership. More was writing in the finest style of
Latin prose, Ciceronian Latin, yet he plays with it.
B. This intellectual humor can be seen in the Utopian citizenry: They use gold to chain their slaves, they examine
prospective spouses naked before marrying, and they execute those who are caught twice for adultery.
C. The narrator’s name, Hythloday, can be interpreted in Greek as “nonsense peddler,” and indeed we get nothing but
nonsense from him.
D. The word utopia itself is a kind of schoolboy punning. It is based upon two Greek words: eutopia, meaning “a good
place,” and outopia, meaning “no place at all.” So Utopia is a very good place, except that it doesn’t exist.
VII. There is also built into Utopia a kind of friendly rivalry.
A. More was, in a sense, challenged to rise to the occasion by his friend Erasmus, who was staying with More while
writing his great Praise of Folly.
B. C. S. Lewis was able to recognize this aspect in Utopia, largely because he and J. R. R. Tolkien were engaged in a
similar rivalry.
VIII. Sir Thomas More was living at the dawn of a progressive, Western, modern world in which there was competition of
every kind: economic competition, competition in exploration, and competition in technology, as epitomized by the
printing press.
A. More was able to learn Greek and Latin at Oxford because the printing press had made these texts available.
B. In writing Utopia in Latin, he was assuring himself a transcontinental readership, as well as assimilating many of the
classics that he had read.
C. The people of Utopia do not value most of the imports being brought from Europe. However, they do value paper
and the classical volumes being offered to them, especially the Aldine editions of the Greek writers.
1. This is indicative of an extraordinary moment in the Renaissance: The Greek classics were available again in
the original language for the first time in 1,000 years.
2. The literary canon was beginning to materialize, featuring authors like Thucydides and Herodotus.
3. This was thanks to a humanist in Italy named Aldus Manutius, whose printing press created manageable
editions of Greek classics (known as the Aldine editions). We are also indebted to him for italic type.
IX. It is sometimes said that the ideal society that More describes in Utopia actually resembles a medieval monastery. More
himself is reported to have lived in a monastery. The famous Renaissance humanist remained at core a medieval
Catholic.
A. Throughout his life at court, More wore a hair shirt under his fine silks and would practice self-flagellation with a
knotted whip.
B. His Catholic identity led to his fall from political power, and he became the persecuted philosopher suffering
imprisonment. During his incarceration, he wrote The Dialogue of Comfort—very clearly modeled on Boethius’s
The Consolation of Philosophy.
C. Toward the end, More’s life became another recognizable genre: the saint’s life. He faced his execution as a
Christian martyr standing against the king, though Henry VIII knew better than to let him speak on the scaffold.
X. The way that More rendered his life from beginning to end shows the immense theatricality of his mindset, and it makes
his life story tailor-made for dramatization.
A. This can be seen in Robert Bolt’s 20th-century play A Man for All Seasons and even earlier in Sir Thomas More, a
Renaissance play, the manuscript of which contains one scene in Shakespeare’s handwriting.
B. More’s life lends itself to dramatization because he had a sense of courtroom drama, which we trace all the way
back to the Greek tradition.
XI. Sir Thomas More became Saint Thomas More 400 years after his death. It is an interesting case of a canonic writer also
being canonized as a saint.
A. We’ve seen this before: Augustine and Boethius were both canonized as saints, and Boccaccio’s The Life of Dante
reads like a saint’s life. It’s no wonder that there is an interesting interplay between the literary canonization of an
author and his elevation to the ranks of sainthood.
B. Tolstoy achieved spiritual status as well. His ideas of nonviolence and universal human rights influenced such
figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
XII. Another interesting point: In Roper’s biography of More, Utopia is never mentioned. Again we see, as we did with
Petrarch’s sonnets, a work whose arrival in the canon comes from nowhere, completely unexpected.

Suggested Readings:
More, Utopia.
Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More.
Wegemer and Smith, eds., A Thomas More Source Book.
1. We wrongly equate canonic authors with high seriousness. Just as Chaucer brought comedy into English literature, the
rediscovery of Plato encouraged Sir Thomas More to experiment with “serious play” and philosophical silliness. Why
not compare the intellectual playfulness of Utopia with the clownish performance in the Apology of Socrates?
2. The most outrageous fictions in Western literature are grounded in historical fact. Where does More cross the line in
Utopia? Or does he crisscross back and forth, just as he alternates between absurd speculations and serious suggestions
for social reforms?

Lecture Nineteen
Hamlet—English Literature Goes Global
Scope: Shakespeare’s Hamlet had its first recorded performance on an English merchant ship off the coast of Africa in
1607. This fact draws attention to the tragedy’s seafaring plotline, featuring Fortinbras, as well as the story’s
ultimate source in Viking history. Other Shakespearean plays like Twelfth Night testify to deep anxiety over sea
travel during the age of Atlantic exploration. The First Folio was printed in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s
death, in an effort to make Shakespeare into a literary author. Because Puritans closed the theaters in 1642,
Shakespeare’s works were read as literature by admirers like Milton. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition confirmed
Shakespeare as the great National Poet, just when England was asserting its imperial power around the globe.
Outline
I. One novel angle for approaching the world’s most famous play is to put it in the context of England’s rise as a seagoing
power during the generations after Sir Thomas More and to look at the exportation of Shakespeare’s plays as the English
language continues to go global.
II. Western civilization has always had an advantage when it comes to taking to the waves.
A. In the ancient world, both Athenian and Roman navies proved superior to their adversaries on the sea.
B. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History describes three different seagoing conquests of Britain: the Romans, the Anglo-
Saxons, and the Christian missionaries.
III. In Shakespeare’s day, there was tremendous excitement and activity in terms of naval exploration and global travel.
A. Sir Francis Drake had voyaged around the world during the late 1570s.
B. Queen Elizabeth I had overseen the victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588, which was a great boost to
England’s sense of its own ability to deploy a fleet.
C. Sir Walter Raleigh would explore South America, and other places, and would sponsor the first English settlement
in the New World, the colony of Virginia.
IV. When we look at Hamlet, we discover that we have, for all of its veneer of Renaissance culture, a story that is rooted in
Viking history.
A. The ultimate source of the characters in Hamlet is the 13th-century Latin chronicle The Deeds of the Danes by Saxo
Grammaticus.
B. Although the Vikings were from a remote northern land, they voyaged throughout the Mediterranean, reaching as
far as Jerusalem and Baghdad.
C. Eventually, the Vikings struck out across the Atlantic. In the 9th century, they began settling in Iceland and in Britain
itself, in the northeast part of Britain called the Danelaw.
D. The Vikings also settled in France, in an area they called Normandy. In effect, the Norman conquest of England in
1066 was a continuation of the earlier Viking conquest and settlement.
V. Hamlet shares a remarkable, weird resemblance to the Old English epic Beowulf.
A. It is impossible to imagine that Shakespeare read or even knew of Beowulf, yet Hamlet seems an unconscious
reworking of the original epic.
B. In Beowulf, the Danish royal household has been invaded by a supernatural creature, Grendel. The king is unable to
react to the crisis, and an outside hero is needed. In the end, the hero becomes a king.
C. In Hamlet, the Danish household has been invaded by a supernatural creature, the Ghost. Hamlet is unable to react
to the crisis, and an outside hero, Fortinbras, enters. In the end, Fortinbras is the one who takes dominion over
Denmark.
VI. I mention Fortinbras so prominently here because there is a way of looking at him as the real hero of the play Hamlet.
A. He is the active character, the planning one, the successful one, what I sometimes call the “stealth protagonist.”
B. The true play that Shakespeare wrote is a triple revenge tragedy.
1. The main plotline involves the revenge of Hamlet upon Claudius.
2. The second plotline involves Laertes’s need to avenge his father and sister.
3. But the plot that holds the story together is Fortinbras’s need to wreak vengeance upon Denmark for the death
of his father.

C. Stage and movie productions often cut this part of the story, ending instead with the death of Hamlet. It reminds us
that the work that survives in the canon is not always complete, as we saw with Vergil’s Aeneid.
D. Although everyone focuses on Hamlet’s soliloquies, the play that Shakespeare really wrote is held together by
Fortinbras.
1. The impending invasion of Fortinbras provides the circumstances for the initial encounter with the Ghost.
2. Fortinbras’s presence throughout the play is a constant reminder to Hamlet of his own paralysis and inaction.
3. Fortinbras also symbolizes what will become the secret to European success in the world: the ability to mobilize
a fleet on the sea and defeat another country.
4. At the end of the play, Fortinbras emerges as a master politician, able to control an unexpected situation and
emerge as the hero.
VII. Fortinbras signifies the ability of a country to invade successfully across an ocean, and the Western canon itself will rely
on this sort of movement across water—the movement of books across water.
A. Literature almost always starts off as a local event, and then it moves out.
B. People in Sicily wanted to import tragedies from Athens. Soon, these scripts were appearing in the great
Alexandrian library and in Rome.
C. In More’s Utopia, the only thing that the people of Utopia want from Europe, besides paper and the printing press,
are the books being printed in Venice.
D. Soon, Shakespeare’s work became an export, along with the English language.
VIII. Shakespeare’s own rise within the theater is an interesting phenomenon of canon formation.
A. There was already an active theater scene when Shakespeare began writing, but Shakespeare would emerge as the
one playwright who would eventually become an export item.
B. Even in Shakespeare’s personal canon, as an author, we have what we call canons within canons.
1. Shakespeare wrote 38 plays that are available to us, but there are only about 24 that are regularly studied and
performed.
2. In a sense, we have lost Shakespeare—not that the texts have been lost, but simply that they are not the plays
that we teach, perform, or read.
C. One of the fascinating facts of theater history is that the first recorded performance of Hamlet took place in 1607 on
board an English merchant ship off the coast of Sierra Leone, Africa, and was performed as thoughtless
entertainment.
D. Shakespeare’s plays were not always harmless amusements. Shakespeare’s company was paid to give a private
performance of Richard II to a group that was organizing a coup against Queen Elizabeth I.
E. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were about the dangers of sea travel. They hooked into the anxieties of the audience at
a time when England was focusing on sea travel for commerce, discovery, and colonization.
IX. Printing would eventually make Shakespeare more than a box-office success.
A. There were pirated editions of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime, known as the “quarto” editions.
B. The First Folio was printed a few years after Shakespeare’s death and was produced under the supervision of two of
his theater colleagues.
C. The second edition of Shakespeare’s plays includes a dedicatory poem by John Milton, entitled “Epitaph on the
admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare.” This signifies that Shakespeare was no longer just an entertainer; he
was an author.
D. When the Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, the only way to know Shakespeare was to read him, making the
printed versions all the more important.
X. One of the great critics involved in canon formation during the 18th century was Dr. Samuel Johnson.
A. He wrote the great A Dictionary of the English Language and also did a series called The Lives of the Poets, in
which he established a canon of 52 English writers since the Renaissance.
B. In between those two projects, he compiled his scholarly and authoritative eight-volume edition of Shakespeare.
XI. Shakespeare was now poised to move abroad with the English in the work of empire, and in doing so he prompted
Oedipal reactions from authors abroad.
A. Voltaire read Shakespeare in the original English and criticized the playwright for not observing the Aristotelian
unities.
B. Goethe read Shakespeare, and when he wrote his masterpiece Faust, he made it a great stage play that he imagined
would somehow go beyond where Shakespeare himself could ever dream to go.

C. When Freud published his great volume The Interpretation of Dreams, the most famous part was his analysis of
Hamlet as suffering from an Oedipal complex himself.
XII. There is now a kind of author worship around Shakespeare that he never would have experienced in his own life. It’s
what we call Bardolatry.
A. This is not just due to the imposition of Shakespeare on colonized lands. English-speaking cultures voluntarily
import Shakespeare to enrich their own culture.
B. As we have seen, an author never really makes it until his works become school texts. Shakespeare has this
advantage in North America, even on the high school level.
Suggested Readings:
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Auerbach,“The Weary Prince,” in Mimesis.
Greenblatt, Will in the World.
Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Taylor, “Hamlet in Africa 1607,” in Travel Knowledge.
1. If in 1607 off Africa the Englishmen performed Hamlet and then went to shoot an elephant, what does this say about the
status of Shakespeare’s tragedy as “high art”? Did the original audiences enjoy the final scene’s bloodshed as much as—
or more than—the great poetry?
2. The canon is usually created backward. What elements in the Danish tragedy Hamlet prepared English readers to
appreciate the Danish adventures of Beowulf and accept it into their literary tradition?

Lecture Twenty
Brave New Worlds—Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Scope: Shakespeare’s career extended into the period of English colonization with the founding of the Virginia settlement
in 1607. His valedictory comedy The Tempest imagines Europeans discovering this “brave new world.” Armed with
books, Prospero colonizes his island, enslaves the population, and imposes his language upon the natives. Under
Prospero’s colonial administration, his island paradise looks more like a penal colony. European conflicts follow the
settlers as Prospero’s old political enemies arrive, bringing alcohol to corrupt the islander Caliban. The playwright
draws on published accounts of the New World and even imagines the long-term effects of imposing the English
language on a colonial population.
Outline
I. The Tempest was written toward the end of Shakespeare’s career, just at the time when the English themselves were
beginning their colonizing enterprises in the Americas. This play examines, in ways that are truly prescient, what it
means to take possession of, and to administer, an overseas colony.
II. We can date The Tempest because it is based on source material about Virginia not available before 1610, and it was
performed at court in 1611. Shakespeare was dead five or six years later, and because of this winding down, we like to
see this as Shakespeare’s last play.
A. However, Shakespeare went on to coauthor with John Fletcher a play entitled The Two Noble Kinsmen. This is
inconvenient to our concept of Shakespeare for two reasons.
1. We don’t like the idea that a genius like Shakespeare would ever stoop to collaborate.
2. It does not make a good story out of Shakespeare’s career. We somehow think that the trajectory of an author’s
life ought to tell its own story and have its own kind of Aristotelian conclusion.
B. Because of this urge for conclusion, performances often place Prospero’s line “Our revels now are ended” at the end
of the play, when it really belongs in act 4.
III. This is also a unique play for Shakespeare because it has no direct source.
A. Shakespeare, like so many great writers, did not borrow; he stole, in terms of his plots.
B. Since The Tempest is not stolen from one source but compiled from many, it is in some sense Shakespeare’s most
literate and bookish play.
1. The route of the journey in the play is based on Aeneas’s travels in the Aeneid.
2. This route was also taken by Saint Augustine in his travels.
3. Ovid was also a natural source for this play, given its world of magical transformation and illusion.
4. Shakespeare had also been reading accounts of voyages to the New World, specifically the account of a ship
that endured a tempest and was stranded in Bermuda.
IV. The central character in this play is Prospero, one of Shakespeare’s great inventions.
A. Prospero is on the one hand a sorcerer, complete with a staff of power.
B. But he also fills many other roles. He is a duke, a scholar, an educator, a colonial administrator of sorts, and in a
more sinister sense a prison warden.
C. Prospero’s power is magical, but his magic is invested in books. This is why people like to see Prospero as a type for
Shakespeare himself.
D. Even the enslaved native Caliban can see that books are the source of Prospero’s power.
V. Prospero becomes what we like to call an internal playwright.
A. He manages the characters, moves the scenery, and gives people motivation, much like a director or an author
would.
B. He even does a play within a play, conjuring up illusionary actors and then making them disappear.
C. These illusions are charming, but there is also a more sinister sense that illusions of these kinds can become a form
of mind control.
VI. As Prospero exercises his control over the characters in the play, we are increasingly reminded that Shakespeare’s island
resembles a penal colony.
A. This reminds us also that the Europeans would take their national quarrels and struggles to the New World—the
Americas and elsewhere.

B. Part of the imposition of English rule on this island is tied with the imposition of the English language itself.
Colonizers used their language to create local history, and Prospero spends a lot of time telling people their own
history—in English.
C. This imposition of language, history, and morality is worked out most clearly in the character of Caliban.
1. Prospero makes up a history for Caliban that will justify enslaving and dispossessing him.
2. Prospero also punishes Caliban for attempting to rape his daughter, though Caliban would not have had any
exposure to Prospero’s idea of sexual morality beforehand.
D. Ariel and Caliban are the two “colonial subjects” in the play—Ariel as the indentured servant, working under the
eternally postponed hope of freedom, and Caliban as the enslaved native population who are forced to learn the
language of the invader.
E. With Caliban’s eventual mastery of English, Shakespeare is looking forward to the fact that the natives in far-flung
countries will eventually use English in beautiful ways, as evidenced in the works of postcolonial writers.
VII. Caliban exhibits the effects of colonial control in other ways as well.
A. Caliban dreams that riches will drop upon him, though he had no concept of riches before. He has internalized the
European value system.
B. He is also tamed and managed by alcohol. This concept has a sinister afterlife in the way that Europeans would
introduce alcohol to the Native American Indians.
C. In the course of the play, Caliban is also plotting a slave revolt. The threat of slave revolt would remain on the minds
of English writers throughout the colonial period.
D. At the end of the play, Prospero has a sense of paternalism toward Caliban that Rudyard Kipling would echo in “The
White Man’s Burden.”
E. Caliban is left as what we now call a “postcolonial subject”—resentful, abandoned in his own native land, filled
with foreign ideas and values, and struggling with a language not truly his own.
VIII. Part of the imperialism of the Europeans was cultural imperialism: the imposing not only of language and history, but
also a kind of literacy. There is a great example of this in the story of an English colonial, Henry Stanley.
A. Stanley was a famous African explorer who went to the Congo as an agent of Leopold II of Belgium to bring
Western civilization to the continent in the form of books.
B. As Stanley’s porters became sick on the journey, he had to jettison many of his books, engaging in what amounted
to reverse canon formation: figuring out what works civilization can do without.
C. In the end, Stanley ended up with the Bible, Shakespeare, and his journal of notes. Faced with having to burn one of
these at the request of the natives, he chose to burn Shakespeare.
D. The journal that he spared later enabled the colonization and brutal exploitation of the Congo’s people.
IX. No book and no author is subject to the fetishizing process more than Shakespeare.
A. Shakespeare’s First Folio has become a treasure not only in England but in countries like the United States.
B. That we in America want Shakespeare amounts to a funny sort of self-imposed colonial imperialism.
Suggested Readings:
Shakespeare, The Tempest.
Kernan, “The King and the Poet: The Tempest, Whitehall, Winter 1613,” in Shakespeare, The King’s Playwright.
Stanley, Through the Dark Continent.
1. Why not read Shakespeare’s actual last play The Two Noble Kinsmen and consider how the “story” of his career changes
when we no longer look upon The Tempest as the culmination of his creative journey?
2. Much has been written about Caliban as an enslaved native, but the same can be said about Ariel. How does Ariel fill the
role of the subaltern, like Kipling’s Gunga Din, who joins with the colonials against his own people?

Lecture Twenty-One
Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the Novel
Scope: Cervantes did not intend to create the genre of the novel when he wrote Don Quixote. He intended to cash in on the
popularity of chivalric romances. Cervantes knew the harsh realities of the professional soldier’s life. Battle with the
Turks left his hand maimed, and his commission for outfitting the Spanish Armada of 1588 landed him in prison.
The chivalric classic Amadís of Gaul inspired Spanish conquistadors as they marched into the Aztec capital, but the
glorious era of conquest was fading in the early 17th century except as a beautiful dream, the stuff of fiction. Part II
pushes the novelistic experiment into the realm of magical realism for Latin American writers like Borges and
Márquez. Repeatedly translated into English, Don Quixote establishes the picaresque as the standard for tales of
masculine misadventure, especially for American novelists.
Outline
I. Miguel de Cervantes wrote one of the world’s most famous accounts of knightly adventure and misadventure. He
himself had a life of ups and downs almost as exciting as the Man of La Mancha’s.
A. This reminds us that there are two kinds of writers: those who only read about their subject matter, and those who
live through it.
B. Cervantes lived an adventurous and, fortunately, well-documented life.
C. His adventures and misadventures included being wounded in a battle with the Turks, being captured by Barbary
Coast pirates, being thrown in prison for financial troubles, and failing repeatedly as a dramatist and novelist.
II. The Don Quixote prologue tells us that the idea for the novel came to Cervantes while he was in prison.
A. We know from records that Cervantes was imprisoned twice in the period leading up to the writing of Don Quixote.
B. This makes Don Quixote another example in the long tradition of prison literature that includes Plato, Seneca,
Boethius, and Sir Thomas More. But while those authors focused on philosophy and religion, Cervantes turned to
the realm of imagination.
III. Success came to Cervantes with the publication of Part I of Don Quixote in 1605, when he was 58 years old. But even
this success was bittersweet.
A. His publisher cheated him of the income from sales of the book.
B. Since there were no copyright laws, people created pirated continuations and spinoffs, which prompted Cervantes to
publish Part II.
C. Unlike Shakespeare, Cervantes died poor despite his exciting life and late success.
IV. Don Quixote is steeped in chivalric romance as a recollection of Spain’s heroic past.
A. The poor Don reads book after book about knights, quests, dragons, and damsels, until his imagination becomes
unhinged and he sets out on his own quest-romance.
B. Spain’s chivalric romance was rooted in the Muslim past of Iberia and the inevitable conflict between Christian and
Muslim knights.
C. This, combined with Cervantes’s own experience with the Turks and the Barbary Coast pirates, leads to a kind of
demonization of the Islamic past in the novel.
V. Spain, of course, had a history different from the rest of Europe.
A. In the 8th century, the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula led to a multicultural society in which Muslims,
Christians, and Jews lived for centuries with a remarkable degree of harmony.
B. The result was an extraordinary flowering of civilization and culture such as was going on nowhere else in Europe.
1. Islamic architectural marvels were built, and exotic foods were imported from other parts of the Muslim world.
2. Textiles were imported as well, including paper-making technology from China.
3. The subsequent development of book making on the peninsula meant that there were amazing Muslim scholars
working in Spain during this period.
VI. During the course of the novel, the Don and his squire progressively move south into the old Islamic territory of
Andalusia, and as a consequence more and more Islamic presence filters into the story.
A. More than once, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter violent mule drivers that the original audience would
have recognized as moriscos—converted Moors.

B. Cervantes even pretends that the entire novel is translated from an Arabic original with the help of a converted
Moor. This fiction of translation is a dodge that other writers have used from time to time as a way to avoid taking
full responsibility for what they have put into print.
VII. Exotic elements of Don Quixote are partly derived from Spain’s Muslim past, but Cervantes is also looking westward to
the Americas.
A. The pivotal year of 1492 marked not only the Spanish siege and conquest of the last Muslim stronghold of Granada
but also the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
B. Cervantes’s novel is very much rooted in this conquest. He alludes to Mexico and Peru and even mentions tobacco
and chocolate, new imports from the Americas.
C. One of the books that Don Quixote had been reading in the novel is an epic account of the Spanish conquest of
Chile.
VIII. The books that Cervantes mentions during the course of the novel are meant to inspire a kind of chivalric fantasy. One
of the books at the top of this kind of canon of chivalric literature is Amadís of Gaul.
A. This work had tremendous currency at the time.
1. Even Sir Philip Sidney in England spoke highly of it, claiming that it could move the reader “to the exercise of
courtesy, liberality, and especially courage.”
2. This is an excellent example of the Platonic notion of mimesis.
B. For the Spanish conquistadors, the book primed their imaginations for what they would encounter in real life in the
New World.
C. It is probably not a coincidence, then, that Cervantes would establish his posterity among Spanish-language writers
in the Americas, who found in his writing the inspiration for magical realism.
IX. Don Quixote started out as a blacklisted book—it was actually not permitted to be imported to the Americas.
A. Cervantes was careful to avoid religious controversy; after all, he lived in Spain during the Inquisition.
B. Instead, like Tolkien would later, he replaced religion in the novel with enchantment.
1. The Don blames his changes of circumstance on the sorcery of a wizard, Frestón, who may well have been
Shakespeare’s inspiration for Prospero.
2. Cervantes’s world of enchantment also brings the Ovidian tradition into Spanish literature.
C. The novel was banned not for religious content but to limit the import of books into the Americas. Nonetheless, Don
Quixote was smuggled into the Americas in crates supposedly containing wine and brandy.
X. Another remarkable thing about Don Quixote was its instant popularity.
A. It was a bestseller; within two years it had crossed the Atlantic and was known even in obscure mining towns in
Peru.
B. This popularity, however, made the literary establishment snub Cervantes as not intellectual or demanding enough.
XI. It is a wonderful turn of historical circumstance that Cervantes and Shakespeare were exact contemporaries.
A. Don Quixote was published during the same year that King Lear was first performed.
B. Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same date: April 23, 1616.
C. Shakespeare was one of the first Englishmen to be aware of Don Quixote and even wrote a play (now lost) based on
Cervantes’s plot.
XII. What we have as the great and continuing legacy of Don Quixote is what most people recognize as the first European
novel.
A. It is a book that contains the entire history of the novel, combining elements of the chivalric romance with elements
of the saint’s life.
B. Don Quixote is also a novel permanently in search of itself. It is a book about books, about the function of the
imagination, and about how fiction itself emerges from the ugliness and haphazardness of life.
XIII. Don Quixote always casts a spell on its readers, and this spell has influenced authors across the centuries.
A. The concept of a book about the influence of books is repeated by Gustav Flaubert and Jane Austen in the 19th
century.
B. Nowhere was Cervantes’s influence greater than in the English-speaking world, especially for American writers like
Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather.

Suggested Readings:
Cervantes, Don Quijote.
Auerbach, “The Enchanted Dulcinea,” in Mimesis.
Paulson, Don Quixote in England.
1. Can we imagine how the genre of the novel might have evolved in the English tradition without the looming canonic
presence of Don Quixote? How many of our own canonic masterpieces would disappear, or at least would not have been
written in the picaresque manner that they were?
2. How does Cervantes’s classic story survive particularly in popular culture, with films like Borat about the comical man
from a dusty village on a quest, his mind bedazzled with media visions of America, searching for his ideal lady-love
from the TV show Baywatch?

Lecture Twenty-Two
The Rebel as Hero—Milton’s Paradise Lost
Scope: Canonic works usually come at the end of an era. John Milton lived long enough to find his age superseded by the
science of Galileo, the political theory of Hobbes, and the literary innovations of Dryden. Paradise Lost stands as
the culmination of the prior Western canon: both the classical tradition of Homer and Virgil and the Christian
tradition of the Bible and Dante. The warfare between angels and devils captures the spirit of chivalric romances,
while the relationship between Adam and Eve replays the psychological drama of courtly love. Milton himself was a
rebel in the Puritan revolution against Charles I. Though the Puritan movement was defeated and the monarchy
restored in 1660, Milton gives voice to the new revolutionary spirit of Europe through the tragic, unyielding heroism
of Satan.
Outline
I. John Milton is the first author in this survey who actually had a literary education.
A. He was born in 1608, at exactly the time when Shakespeare’s work triumphed on the London stage and scholars
were busy translating the King James Version of the Bible.
B. From his early childhood, he was constantly devoted to study. He had a wealthy father who provided him with the
best possible education.
C. His education was much like Sir Thomas More’s, but instead of being trained to be a lawyer or courtier, Milton was
learning literature mostly for literature’s sake.
D. By the end of his extensive formal training, Milton had spent years reading virtually every book that had survived
from classical antiquity, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and
Italian.
E. His father also permitted him to embark on a grand tour of Europe, and he was able to go to Italy at the height of its
Renaissance.
II. Milton had a keen interest in science and exploration, and in some sense Paradise Lost is the first truly global work of
the modern world.
A. Milton had read all the books and studied all the maps of Africa, Asia, and the Americas that were being produced.
B. Much like Virgil and Ovid had done, Milton named geographical locations as a way of imagining where the English
fleets would spread the British Empire.
III. But for all of its excellence, Paradise Lost was actually a literary anachronism by the time it was published in 1667.
A. The times had changed: It was now the age of Newton and Hobbes. Charles II had returned to the throne and
introduced continental notions of culture, and Dryden was transforming English prose into a simpler, clearer
medium of communication.
B. Milton’s contemporary Samuel Butler, and later Voltaire, lampooned the type of classical epic that Milton was
producing.
IV. There is a sense of belatedness, then, about Milton’s epic, but this reminds us that the great writers have always had this
sense of arriving at the end of a long period of development.
A. One can sense this feeling in Virgil, who seems to have been writing under the realization that he was simply
emulating the achievements of Homer and the other Greeks.
B. Milton shares with Bach the romantic image of the lone artist of titanic genius working in isolation, bringing to
perfection a long period of development.
C. Shakespeare as well was writing at the end of a long period of development within the English theater and was
famous for rewriting earlier Elizabethan plays.
D. Milton had his predecessors in writing a great religious epic—notably, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Milton had an edge
on Dante, however, since he could read the classics in the original Greek and Hebrew.
V. Paradise Lost stands at the very pinnacle not only of the literary tradition but also of the entire intellectual and cultural
tradition of the classical and medieval worlds. This may be a good time to review the works we have covered to this
point.
A. The story is obviously built on the book of Genesis, but only as a skeleton that Milton then fleshes out (with some
notable changes).

B. The Homeric epic clearly provides the structure of Paradise Lost, especially its chronology, with its use of
in medias res.
C. Milton is clearly thinking about Aeschylus’s Prometheus when he has Satan as a character revolting against God and
Divine Law. Sophocles’s Oedipus also comes to mind in the suffering and fall of Adam.
D. Satan makes use of Athenian rhetoric, the ability to make the worse seem to be the better, to twist logic in order to
persuade.
E. Milton’s God is a sort of Aristotelian God, imposing order on the universe with a kind of scientific precision.
Aristotelian notions of pattern, logic, connection, and plausibility hold the whole epic together.
F. Milton’s opening lines are reminiscent of Virgil’s, and Adam resembles Aeneas in the end when he receives a vision
of the future of man.
G. Milton has inherited the Augustinian tradition that equates the original sin of Adam and Eve with some sort of fall
into irrational sexuality.
H. Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy had established the notion of theodicy—that there is a providential
working out that makes sense even of very bad individual circumstances. This, in fact, is the theme that Milton
asserts at the beginning of his epic.
I. Dante’s fingerprints are all over Paradise Lost—in the notions of Heaven and Hell, in the war between Satan and
God’s angels, in the sense that Hell is repetition.
J. Milton had actually planned to do a patriotic epic about King Arthur, but by the time he had gotten around to
writing, chivalric literature had fallen in his estimation.
K. Finally, what about Shakespeare?
1. Young Milton had originally planned to write a tragedy, a stage play that he was going to call Adam
Unparadised.
2. The form of blank verse that Shakespeare had refined and elevated became the language, the meter, and the
verse form of Paradise Lost.
3. Paradise Lost is very much a tragedy in the tradition of Hamlet, with Satan’s motive of revenge.
4. In the end, Satan lacks the grandeur of Shakespeare’s tragic characters; instead, he suffers a kind of comic
debasement also found in Shakespeare.
VI. There is a paradox about Milton. On the one hand, he condemns Satan’s revolt against God’s absolute rule, but he
himself was a great champion of freedom against tyranny.
A. Though he wasn’t trained for politics, Milton joined the Parliamentary cause against the Royalists during the English
Civil War.
B. Like Satan, he ended up on the losing side and narrowly escaped execution as a traitor during the Restoration.
C. All that he had in the end was artistic freedom, freedom to produce a poem that he knew would be no crowd pleaser.
D. Milton could identify with Satan’s “sense of injur’d merit,” and this led some readers to think that Satan, in fact, was
Milton’s hero. This notion would harden over the next century into a kind of romantic view of Milton.
VII. Romantic poets loved to read and even compete with Milton. This leads to another paradox: Milton became in a sense a
tyrannical father figure for later poets.
A. Wordsworth and Keats both yearned to write long poems like Milton’s, with gigantic loftiness, a power to astonish,
and most of all the sublime.
B. Byron was also very aware of Milton’s achievement; in an effort to avoid direct competition with Milton, he
produced a comic epic, Don Juan.
C. These poets could never achieve the sublimity of Milton’s work, so Paradise Lost is in a sense the last long poem in
the English tradition and in most other European traditions.
D. Interestingly enough, the novel as a genre will come to the rescue as a vehicle of the epic for writers like James
Joyce and will appropriate some elements of poetry itself in the form of Virginia Woolf’s lyrical novels.
VIII. As we come into the 19th century, we get a sense of Milton’s Satan as a hero figure. This whole cultural outlook of the
rebel as a hero is Milton’s greatest legacy during this century.
A. During the Romantic period, we have this idea manifested in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Lord Byron’s
Manfred.
B. Brontë’s Heathcliff, Goethe’s Faust, and Melville’s Captain Ahab also embody this satanic figure.
C. This cultural climate ultimately made possible the rise of a real-life satanic hero—Napoleon.

IX. The Napoleonic era would in turn influence later writers like Stendhal and Tolstoy. Here we have the two sides of
mimesis: Life imitates art in the form of Napoleon, but art also imitates life in the form of post-Napoleonic literature.
Suggested Readings:
Milton, Paradise Lost.
Bloom, “Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare,” in The Western Canon.
Hill, Milton and the English Revolution.
Lewis, A Preface to “Paradise Lost.”
1. It is said that Paradise Lost belongs outside the English literary canon because it seems to completely lack humor.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen are all funny, but not John Milton. Is this true? If so, are there other English
masterpieces just as unfunny as Milton’s Christian epic?
2. Like Homer’s Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost concerns conjugal love between husband and wife. In between, Ovid has
inserted wild abandon and Augustine has damned fleshly attachments. As a result, how does the passionate devotion
between Adam and Eve differ tragically from the cool-headed cleverness of Odysseus and Penelope that earn them a
happy ending?

Lecture Twenty-Three
Voice of an Age—Voltaire’s Candide
Scope: Voltaire demonstrates how a single great author can embody the aspirations of an entire nation. Exploiting the
machinery of international publishing, he wrote stage plays, histories, biographies, philosophic tracts, epic poetry,
and literary criticism. But canon formation requires selectivity even within an individual writer’s career. Today
Voltaire is known solely for his short philosophical novel Candide. Readers remain fascinated by the good-hearted
young man buffeted from the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War to the earthquake-ravaged ruins of Lisbon, then to
South America, where Europeans competed for plunder, always clinging to his old tutor’s confidence that “all is for
the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
Outline
I. Size matters, especially in the Western literary canon, which is so much defined as a kind of competition and rivalry
among male writers. Milton figures impressively in the number and size of his works, but Voltaire also weighs in with an
astonishing 2,000 literary works.
A. Notice that this is a mostly male phenomenon. Women writers can get away with having smaller, tidier, more
economical outputs.
B. But when it comes to male writers, size really does seem to matter. Look at The Riverside Chaucer and The
Riverside Shakespeare.
C. Yet we never really read everything by these authors. We always carve out a “canon within a canon” from these
authors’ works in ways that can be capricious and even cruel.
II. The fickleness of canon formation within an overall output is maybe most beautifully and sadly represented in the case
of Voltaire.
A. Of the 2,000 or so works that Voltaire published, there is only one, Candide, that is still widely read.
B. Voltaire can be called the voice of his age, and he also wrote in almost every literary genre available at the time.
C. His The Age of Louis XIV was a kind of resistance to the typical Great Man view of history; it was a portrait of an
age. With this work, Voltaire can be seen as the inventor of the genre of “integral history.”
D. Voltaire also created pieces in the epic and anti-epic traditions.
E. He spent an inordinate amount of time on nonliterary or semiliterary writing, such as a philosophic dictionary and
scientific works.
III. Voltaire emerges as a kind of latter-day Socrates, very much Europe’s gadfly.
A. He devoted his writings to undermining pretensions and exposing hypocrisies wherever he found them, showering
Europe with political pamphlets that outraged authorities across the continent.
B. He wrote more than 20,000 letters, many of them to crown heads of Europe.
C. He was idolized by the founding fathers of the United States, including Franklin and Jefferson.
IV. Voltaire was a great master of publicity, engaging the attentions of readers throughout Europe.
A. His early outspokenness actually earned him a brief stay at the Bastille, where he wrote his first tragedy and
developed his pen name. It was not, however, an experience that he wanted to repeat.
B. As a result, Voltaire became an expert in covering his tracks, disclaiming responsibility for libelous writings, even
fleeing to another country when things got too hot.
C. Despite this habit of flight, Voltaire never acquired the status of “poet of exile” like Ovid, because he was
tremendously wealthy and really risked nothing in fleeing.
V. Voltaire had an amazingly long career, living to the age of 84.
A. His life story can almost be read as a latter-day Don Quixote, because he was obsessed with righting wrongs and
correcting injustices, sometimes comically.
B. For example, he was famous for fighting to exonerate men who had already been executed.

VI. As a result of these characteristics, Voltaire became the prototype for the public intellectual, the one person who speaks
for an age, who speaks truth to power.
A. The 19th century would have Émile Zola, who involved himself in the Dreyfus Affair by campaigning to free a man
who he thought was innocent.
B. The 20th century would see the prototype repeated in Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
VII. When he was 31 years old, Voltaire found it necessary to flee to England for what turned out to be a three-year exile.
A. During this exile, he learned to speak English, to write English, and by his own account to think in English.
B. He was able to encounter directly the literary, critical, and political work being done in England during the 18th
century.
C. During this time, Voltaire read many English authors whose works would eventually influence him in the creation of
Candide, including Swift, Fielding, Pope, and Locke.
D. Voltaire became a great admirer of the English, and especially of their ideas of political freedom and religious
tolerance.
VIII. There is an important scene in Candide in which the characters are admiring the library of a Venetian nobleman,
Pococurante.
A. They have sought this man out because it was said that he had never known a moment’s grief. Yet he turns out to be
completely jaded about life’s pleasures and unimpressed by the beauties of the world.
B. While they are in the library, they see one after another masterpiece of Western literature, which Pococurante
proceeds to dismiss, criticize, and reject along with their authors.
C. Toward the end of the scene, the nobleman says “Fools admire everything in a well-known author.”
D. Voltaire seems to be implying here that the Western canon operates according to a kind of literary tyranny that tells
you what books need to be read and respected. Since Voltaire was an enemy of any tyranny, he rejected the tyranny
of the Western canon itself.
IX. However, Voltaire himself is fully invested in this literary canon, and this investment exposes itself in the final scene of
Candide.
A. The characters settle quietly in the Bosporus, the setting of the Trojan War, with the intent to “cultivate our garden.”
B. In a sense, it is a return to the roots of the canon—the Garden of Eden and Homer’s Iliad.
X. While Voltaire trashes the Western literary canon throughout the book, he also assimilates it in some interesting, often
satirical ways.
A. Dr. Pangloss uses Aristotelian logic to prove the benevolence of the universe, but the construction of the story itself
is a major assault on Aristotle’s principles of plausibility and logical cause and effect.
B. Candide emerges as a work that thumbs its nose at the classics of the Western canon but also engages in a wonderful
sense that things work out for the best.
XI. Even within Voltaire’s own canon, Candide was not an automatic choice for canonic survival.
A. Voltaire actually wrote 20 short philosophical satires, some of which were extraordinarily similar to Candide.
B. That this one work has emerged in the canon is still a good thing, because at least Voltaire gets to be remembered,
unlike the prolific and once-popular author Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
XII. One wonders, what is it about Candide that makes it rise to the surface?
A. Flaubert called it “a summary of all his works.” That is, if Voltaire spoke with the voice of an age, he spoke all of
his most important truths in that one work.
B. Candide also has posterity—it reaches out across generations to future writers. Voltaire’s naïve, good-natured main
character is repeated in the characters of works by Stendhal, Tolstoy, Salinger, and Rushdie.
Suggested Readings:
Voltaire, Candide.
Besterman, Voltaire.
Durant, The Age of Voltaire.
Voltaire, The Portable Voltaire.

1. Why not read a couple of Voltaire’s other “contes,” such as Zadig and Ingenuous, to see why Candide, not any other
satiric work, might have been singled out for canonic status?
2. A large volume of production can work against as well as for the canonic status of an author like Voltaire. Besides Jane
Austen with only six novels, can you think of other authors—or maybe composers or painters—whose reputations rest
upon a small body of works?

Lecture Twenty-Four
Pride and Prejudice—Women in the Canon
Scope: However monumental looking, the Western canon remains expansive. It admits new genres like the novel and
embraces new authors like Jane Austen. As literacy brought women into the book-buying public, women began to
figure among the published writers yet were different from masculine novelists like Sir Walter Scott. Set during the
Napoleonic Wars—and mindful of the harsh economic realities of marriage—Pride and Prejudice indulged in
romantic escapism. Austen’s novels attracted fans, including the Prince Regent, but only London publishers could
make money for a writer. Jane Austen specialized in the literary pleasures of happy-ending stories and a sparkling
style that gradually established her canonic status even beyond the classroom.
Outline
I. Pleasure is why readers are drawn to Jane Austen’s novels. Everyone wishes her career had been longer, that she had had
the opportunity to write more than the six perfect, masterpiece novels that she did create.
II. Women come late to the Western canon. The literary tradition has been dominated by men from the beginning, and it has
been hard for women to break through.
A. This was especially true in England, where the literary paternity established by Chaucer created a father-son
genealogy.
B. Yet the canon has a work-in-progress nature that allows revision to include new writers.
C. In the last 100 years, women have been accepted more and more into the canon, as reflected in standard classroom
literature texts.
D. There have been great attempts to go back and retrieve women writers who might have been neglected in the past,
such as Sappho, Marie de France, and Christine de Pisan.
E. Genre has always been a challenge to women, especially in the world of the theater. The novel, however, would
become the genre for, about, and by women.
III. The novel has always had this kind of marginal status. It was thought to be written by outsiders and mavericks, and it
was an uphill climb for authors to make it into the ranks of the respectable by writing long, fictional prose works.
A. The novel had a shaky footing even with the English, who really pioneered the genre, though Dr. Johnson did come
to its defense by pointing out its accuracy and honesty in portraying mankind.
B. C. S. Lewis labeled Jane Austen as a literary daughter of Dr. Johnson, in that she inherited his common sense, his
morality, and much of his style. She did, however, bring a sense of wit to the style that was not present in Johnson’s
work.
C. The central role of the critic in canon formation begins to emerge as we enter the modern period: Johnson had the
power to establish a new genre, Lewis had the power to link Johnson and Austen, and Auerbach did much to put
women back into the story of Western literature.
IV. Jane Austen did have predecessors. There were women novelists of the 18th century whom she read, appreciated, and
learned from, and it encouraged her own career.
A. There was a woman novelist named Fanny Burney, to whom Jane Austen’s father compared his daughter when
trying to pitch one of her novels.
B. There was also Ann Radcliffe, who wrote what we call “gothic novels.” Jane Austen actually parodied this genre in
her own novel Northanger Abbey.
C. Maria Edgeworth was a contemporary of Austen and wrote some very good novels. In a wonderful way, the literary
tradition is creating itself backward, in that people are now reading Maria Edgeworth thanks to Austen’s status in the
canon.
V. Pride and Prejudice is very much a woman’s novel.
A. All scenes and events are filtered through the mind of Elizabeth Bennet. Even Mr. Darcy’s emotions are enunciated
by her, not by him.
B. Interestingly, if we look at the novel through the Aristotelian method of examining narrative and storytelling, the
true protagonist of Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs. Bennet.

VI. Jane Austen wrote about money, but she also wrote for money.
A. She lived in a bourgeois economy during the Industrial Revolution, and there are economic forces constantly at
work in her novels.
B. Austen wrote the first draft of Pride and Prejudice under the title First Impressions when she was 20 years old. It
was offered anonymously to a London publisher, who immediately rejected it.
C. Seventeen years later, after she had revised and retitled the novel, it was published, and she sold the copyright for
£110. In her career as a writer, she earned £700, a substantial amount of money but meager in terms of an entire
career’s reward.
VII. The literary canon also works according to a kind of economic system, and it sometimes has to do with abundance and
scarcity.
A. Some writers, like Voltaire, simply wrote too much to benefit from the value of rarity.
B. Austen, on the other hand, wrote just enough so that we value, at a great price and with great esteem, each one of her
novels.
VIII. As an artist, Jane Austen was very economical in the sense that she condensed her novels to exactly what they need
to be.
A. As a writer, Austen imagined herself doing scrimshaw with a very fine brush on a two-inch-wide piece of ivory.
B. In a letter, she reported that she “lop’t and crop’t” First Impressions in order to create Pride and Prejudice.
C. She always read drafts of her novels aloud to her family, cutting out whatever did not meet with their approval.
IX. Austen also had an extraordinary way of condensing the time span and scope of her novels.
A. She once remarked that three or four families in a country village was the very thing to work on.
B. She also narrows the generations, leaving out grandparents and small children.
X. There is very close generational contact in the novels, because the whole point is the passage of money from one
generation to the next, through inheritance and dowry.
A. All of the fictional characters in Jane Austen’s novels are richer than her own family was. Her father was a country
clergyman, earning about £200 a year.
B. It’s always important in Austen’s world to watch where the money comes from, whether it’s from trade or business
or landed aristocracy.
XI. A little needs to be said about the larger context of the English economy at this time.
A. Jane Austen wrote during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of her characters become suddenly wealthy as a result of
pirateering during this conflict.
B. This was also a time of great fluctuation in the market, with securities and rents going up and down. This instability
shows itself in subtle ways in her characters.
XII. With Austen, there is a kind of romantic notion of a neglected genius overlooked in her own day, but this was not the
case.
A. Her novels were popular in her lifetime, even catching the attention of the Princess of Wales and the Prince Regent.
B. She was also recognized by other authors of genius across the generations. Novelists have always been enraptured
by Jane Austen.
C. Her books have never been out of print and are widely available now.
D. Recent biographies and film adaptations of her work have kept Jane Austen a popular and intriguing figure in
today’s society.
Suggested Readings:
Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.
Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life.
1. The first readers of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice debated whether the anonymous author was a man or
woman. How would we feel differently about the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy if the author was
male?

2. The notion that Jane Austen nurtured a fairy-tale belief that “they got married and lived happily ever after” is
undermined by the older married couples in her novels. The marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet has not turned out happily.
What about Sir William and Lady Lucas? Even Lady Catherine De Bourgh? What obstacles will Lizzy and Mr. Darcy
face to have a happy married life?

Lecture Twenty-Five
Nationalism and Culture in Goethe’s Faust
Scope: The early 19th century witnessed the collective aspirations of nationalism captured in Goethe’s two-part dramatic
epic Faust. As a German-language writer, Goethe felt responsible for creating a national culture long before the
unification of Germany in 1871. Reaching back into the medieval past, Faust traces the adventures of an insatiable
spirit willing to sell his soul for the totality of human experience. In an age dominated by Napoleon and Lord Byron,
titanic human ambition was no longer a moral failing but something compelling. Gigantic yearnings, like
Beethoven’s, fostered a new aesthetic of the colossal and the sublime, while the cult of the scientist looked forward
to figures like Einstein.
Outline
I. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent nearly his entire working life in the German city of Weimar and as a writer helped to
create a distinctly German literary tradition, even before Germany was a nation-state.
A. By this point in the early 19th century, other European nations felt this need to have a great national poet. As a great
reader of Shakespeare, Goethe positioned himself to become the great author of German-language literature.
B. Like Sir Thomas More, Goethe trained to become a lawyer but neglected his legal career to pursue a literary career.
C. His epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther became the first international bestseller of the German literary
tradition.
II. There was no real German nation-state until Bismarck’s 1871 victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Unlike England,
Germany had a culture long before it had a nation.
A. It was a culture deeply invested in music and very much rooted in the medieval past.
B. It is significant, then, that Dr. Faust, the hero of Goethe’s great masterpiece, was a German magician, necromancer,
and charlatan said to have died around 1540.
III. Goethe’s Faust was also related to a phenomenon in vogue in the 19th century: Gothic fiction.
A. Gothic novels explored the demonic, sinister, superstitious, and supernatural aspects of medieval culture.
B. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein dates from this period, as does the novel The Vampyre by Lord Byron’s personal
physician, John William Polidori.
C. Goethe’s Faust was very much in line with this vogue and was centered around the real-life figure of Lord Byron, a
literary and cultural icon that obsessed Goethe throughout his career.
IV. Goethe became a champion of the northern Germanic traditions and cultures of Europe, which is somewhat ironic
because he invented the term World Literature (Weltliteratur).
A. He was wide ranging in his reading and writing. He actually did an imitation of the Persian poet Hafez in his
collection West-Eastern Divan.
B. He had also traveled to Italy and had been exposed to early Greek culture when in Sicily.
V. His career, then, evolved in such a way that there was constant contrast between the northern Germanic culture and the
southern European culture.
A. This idea of a German-Mediterranean split continued to obsess later thinkers such as Nietzsche in his The Birth of
Tragedy.
B. We will also see this tension in the work of Thomas Mann and in the differing approaches of J. R. R. Tolkien and C.
S. Lewis.
VI. As he emerged as a romantic figure in the early 19th century, Goethe was a champion of a new aesthetic based on artistic
inspiration, the sublime, and the cult of genius.
A. Romantic inspiration as the source of authentic art and poetry was very much in the air at this time.
B. The problem with art based on inspiration alone is that the source of inspiration can fade away.
C. Faust contains numerous fragments and dead ends. In fact, Goethe described his overall body of work as “fragments
of a great confession.”

VII. Goethe participated in an aesthetic tradition that drew heavily upon a late classical literary critic, Longinus, who
produced a treatise we call On the Sublime.
A. Longinus emphasized the spectacular, claiming that the experience of it “raises us toward the spiritual greatness of
god.”
B. This idea of an intense, overwhelming aesthetic experience lined up with the German movement of Sturm und
Drang, which was represented in Goethe’s Prometheus.
VIII. Longing for the transcendent became a marker of the German tradition after Longinus.
A. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Meister Eckhart and Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote tales about the quest for the
spiritual and the god-like.
B. Later, the same theme would be played out in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Strauss, Hermann Hesse,
and Rainer Maria Rilke.
IX. German art, especially opera and other music, would constantly embrace the colossal after Goethe. This can be seen in
the works of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler and in the use of majestic German music to mark momentous political
changes in the nation.
X. Longinus also gave the Western tradition the sense that certain great writers are geniuses.
A. Longinus put Homer and not too many others in this category, but it would become the gold standard, the great test
for any writer.
B. After World War I, Oswald Spengler would define the genius of the West particularly in terms of this Faustian
spirit: the yearning for the infinite and the cult of great men of action with their insatiable ambitions.
XI. This spirit as embodied in Faust creates a peculiar theological paradox: Though he has committed every sin, he is taken
up to Heaven.
A. The restlessness that underlies his sin also underlies his salvation. What was a crime in traditional Christianity has
now become a heroic virtue.
B. Bonaparte was seen as a real-life embodiment of this Faustian urge to reach impossible heights of power. Even his
defeat was colossal and spectacular.
XII. What is the answer to the challenge of this German idealism? Try harder, aim higher.
A. This ideal of the power of the will became a kind of obsession throughout later German culture, reaching its sinister
conclusion in the Nazi era.
B. Faust himself is addicted to willful actions, yet his passivity toward the end of the story looks forward to the
spectator mentality of Modern characters like Leopold Bloom.
XIII. With the rise of Romantic figures like Goethe and Lord Byron, the cult of genius moved beyond military and political
men and toward the artist and the scientist.
A. These two types are observers, watching the world so that they can represent it correctly in their art and theory.
B. Goethe had a very charismatic presence and was in a strong position to foster this cult of the genius, and particularly
the cult of the scientist.
C. Goethe himself was a scientist. His research on comparative botany and plant morphology actually influenced
Charles Darwin decades later.
D. Faust, as a character, ends his long, worldly career as an engineer. His willingness to trample an elderly couple for
the sake of his project establishes progress as a justification for any means.
XIV. Hereafter we get a familiar cultural icon: the German genius, specifically the German scientific genius.
A. Einstein became the epitome of the 20th-century cult of the scientist, with his constant striving beyond relativity
toward a unified field theory.
B. Einstein also made a Faustian bargain: He urged the creation of the atomic bomb but was a passive observer of its
consequences.
XV. Since Aristotle, the Western tradition has been invested in a sense of progress, and that progress has been entrusted to
the scientific community in our own day. But there is a sinister side that Goethe was already contemplating: that the
science of progress rolls over anyone who gets in its way.

Suggested Readings:
Goethe, Faust.
Bloom, “Goethe’s Faust, Part II: The Countercanonical Poem,” in The Western Canon.
Boyle, Goethe.
Heller, The Disinherited Mind.
1. Like authors and literary works, canonic genres have their ups and downs over time. The 19th century was the age of the
novel, not drama, and yet Goethe chose to write Faust as a play that is almost impossible to imagine staging. Can you
think of a single Romantic or Victorian play that is still read, studied, and holds the stage?
2. It is remarkable how many canonic authors wrote for fame, not money. Though a celebrity writer, Goethe made his
livelihood as a court official at Weimar. Can you think of any great authors who wrote primarily for money and achieved
lasting fame only as an unexpected consequence?

Lecture Twenty-Six
Melville’s Moby-Dick and Global Literature
Scope: Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution meant a worldwide search for resources to supply 19th-century homes
and factories. Melville’s Moby-Dick describes the technical process of whaling, almost like a how-to manual, while
Captain Ahab’s obsession with avenging himself upon the great white whale parallels this unquenchable commercial
thirst for the raw materials of oil and ambergris. The multiethnic Pequod becomes a microcosm of this new global
community. Published first in London, Melville’s American novel typifies the reach of the Western literary tradition
beyond the old European homelands. Melville’s whaling novel, with its forbidden eroticism, represents another good
example of a work more often listed as canonic than actually read.
Outline
I. In 1848, exactly when Melville was sitting down to write Moby-Dick, Marx and Engels were laying out in their The
Communist Manifesto a clear idea of what world literature would mean in a world of global commerce.
A. They predicted that “intellectual creations of individual nations [would] become common property” and, by
extension, national cultures would unify into a global culture.
B. Indeed, during the 19th century the imperial nations of Britain, France, Spain, and the United States were largely
unified in their commercial values and global ambitions.
II. Moby-Dick is really about the global search for whale oil and ambergris for the consumer economy created by the
Industrial Revolution.
A. In the course of the novel, the ship does cross the world, starting in Nantucket and ending in the Pacific Ocean east
of Japan.
B. The whaling ship itself is a microcosm of the new global community: One harpooner is a Pacific Islander, one an
African, and one an American Indian.
III. In this novel, Melville does what any writer who wants to get into the game does: He attaches his writing to the Western
canon itself.
A. He clearly aligns himself with the biblical traditions of Jonah and the Whale and Noah’s Ark.
B. There is also a background of the epic sea voyages of the Odyssey and the Aeneid.
C. Captain Ahab is a wonderful gathering of all the great characters of Western literature: Prometheus, Oedipus, Satan,
Hamlet, and Prospero.
IV. Harold Bloom has claimed that “To become canonical, any new work must have the countercanonical built into it,” and
we see this in Melville.
A. Melville built the plot of his masterpiece on basic historical facts from nautical history.
B. But the storyline is not what interested Melville most. He was aiming to create a counter-canonical work—the
antinovel.
V. Moby-Dick very clearly belongs to the New England Puritan culture.
A. The Puritans were practical, and they were drawn to useful books like encyclopedias.
B. In the 18th century, there was a boom in encyclopedia writing, with the purpose of combating superstition and
fueling revolutionary opinion.
C. Melville absorbed the encyclopedic tradition for another purpose. Great American literary classics of the frontier
and pioneer culture resembled the how-to manuals with which Americans are obsessed even now.
VI. But there is something strange going on in Moby-Dick: It is encyclopedic, it looks like a how-to manual, but it doesn’t
really function like one.
A. There is a disconnect from the pragmatics of how-to books. The novel starts to read like a computer manual written
by an English professor schooled in French critical theory; you can’t exactly learn whaling from it.
B. This points to another aspect of the Puritan tradition: the use of practical material as a starting point for
philosophical or spiritual reflection.

VII. The Puritan tradition emerged in America but had an earlier history as a counter-tradition in England. To understand
Moby-Dick, we need to look at the great literary works produced in the age of Chaucer.
A. Piers Plowman, a vast spiritual allegory by William Langland, was written during this time and had tremendous
early influence on England.
B. The urge of the Langlandian hero, a shadowy character wandering the world and experiencing spiritual wonders,
reemerges in Melville’s protagonist Ishmael, as well as in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.
C. The Langlandian tradition of allegorical symbolism dominates every page of Moby-Dick. Any common shipboard
item assumes complex allegorical meanings.
VIII. The parallel counter-tradition of Puritan literature in Moby-Dick is revealed in the first line: “Call me Ishmael.”
A. In the Bible, Ishmael is the first (but illegitimate) son of Abraham, and Abraham later fathers a legitimate son, Isaac.
B. These twin genealogies appear in the literary tradition, with the “legitimate” Chaucerian line and the “outlaw”
Langlandian line.
C. With the novel’s first words, Melville is signaling that he is following the outlaw tradition, and the novel form fits
this aim perfectly since it is an outsider’s genre.
IX. Following the Puritan tradition, Moby-Dick engages in a sort of satire and pushback from official church religion.
A. The novel was first published in London to rave reviews, so the American publisher rushed it into print without
reading the manuscript.
B. American church writers were outraged by the anti-Christian elements that they found in the book.
X. In modern times, we are beginning to realize the outlaw quality of this novel in terms of its sexual content.
A. Through his earlier novels, Melville had established a reputation for himself as a literary sex symbol in the manner
of Lord Byron.
B. In Moby-Dick, he pushed the envelope even further. Literary critic Leslie Fielder has pointed out the undercurrent of
homosexual themes in American literature. The question is, how innocent is the homosexuality in Moby-Dick?
1. Ishmael and Queequeg actually meet each other naked in bed and very soon enter into a formal betrothal
agreement.
2. Though not much is said throughout the rest of the novel, it is clear that the rest of the crew recognizes them as
a couple.
C. Many people would doubt that Melville understood such a relationship, but while he was writing in 1849, he was
also reading Thomas Hope’s Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek, which provided the details of male-male bonding
in Greek culture.
XI. Notice that, in the creation of his antinovel, Melville has done everything that a writer is not supposed to do.
A. He has confused who the protagonist is: Captain Ahab or Ishmael.
B. He has neglected the Aristotelian directive of telling a linear story with a beginning, middle, and end.
C. He has thumbed his nose at the Ovidian directive that there has to be a love interest, generally a heterosexual one, in
the story.
D. Melville is pushing back from the English tradition in a type of postcolonial revolt, using the genre of the novel to
create a different kind of literature.
XII. So the question is, why don’t we recognize the odd qualities in Moby-Dick?
A. It has been famous for so long that we don’t exactly see the novel that Melville wrote anymore.
B. The canon is so fixed, we tend to acknowledge the naming of the books more than the reading of them.
Suggested Readings:
Melville, Moby-Dick.
Bercaw, Melville’s Sources.
Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel.
1. Context counts. If Moby-Dick had been written 10 years later, Melville would have found himself in the run-up to the
Civil War. Can you imagine how the novel’s international outlook and attitudes toward racial identities would have
become very different if the book had been written in the midst of America’s greatest national crisis?

2. Moby-Dick’s debt to the ghost story looks like an embarrassment. But many literary classics have their roots in
“subliterary” genres of popular culture. Can you think of other canonic works that grow out of fairy tales, boyhood
adventures, children’s stories, and other unlikely mainstream writings?

Lecture Twenty-Seven
Cult Classic—The Charterhouse of Parma
Scope: A veteran of the Grand Army, Stendhal embodied the Romantic ideals of Bonaparte set against the harsh realities of
the greedy, conservative post-Napoleonic era. As a “cult classic” admired by every later novelist, even Hemingway,
The Charterhouse of Parma takes a humorous attitude toward its upper-class characters but with a political agenda
missing from Jane Austen’s novels. Stendhal introduces a realistic style perfect for describing his Italian characters
exactly as they might have been. Readers feel that they really know the romantic Gina del Dongo, her handsome
nephew Fabrizio, and the cynical politician Count Mosca. The “pursuit of happiness” becomes the new driving
force.
Outline
I. I’ve spoken quite a lot about the phenomenon of genius recognizing genius in the creation of the Western literary canon.
But certain individual works are particularly dear to other writers, like Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma.
A. Balzac and Gide both expressed their admiration for the perfection of Charterhouse.
B. Simone de Beauvoir singled Stendhal out as one writer who could depict female characters “without mystery.”
C. Even Ernest Hemingway admitted that he “fought two draws with Stendhal.”
II. A canonical work has to extend its influence beyond its home country, and Charterhouse clearly achieved this.
A. Italo Calvino described it as one novel containing many novels.
B. Its vast timeline particularly influenced Tolstoy in his writing of War and Peace.
III. The action of the book starts in 1796, but the novel was actually written in 1838. This affords the novelist another kind
of time perspective: the ability to look back over several decades.
A. This perspective allowed Stendhal to realize the failure of Napoleonic idealism.
B. The knowledge of this failure prompted him to open the novel with a kind of sad irony that would be mimicked by
Tolstoy.
C. It is worth noticing other interesting influences from Stendhal to Tolstoy, such as their heroes’ shared characteristics
of illegitimacy and cluelessness in battle.
IV. We have in Charterhouse a wonderful case of what we call the Stendhalian narrator.
A. This is an omniscient narrator who knows more than any of the characters in the novel.
B. The Stendhalian narrator shares information with the reader from the beginning, so that there are wonderful
moments in the plot that only the reader can appreciate.
V. Despite Stendhal’s claim, especially through Charterhouse, to a position within the Western canon, he has a slippery
footing for several important reasons.
A. “Stendhal” was one of more than 200 pen names used by Marie-Henri Beyle. Too many pen names can begin to
erode an author’s status.
B. Stendhal dabbled in almost every conceivable genre. By the 19th century, categories of literary profession were
starting to harden, and if you wrote in all genres, you wouldn’t be known for them.
C. Stendhal wrote during a great age of nationalism in literature, yet he disassociated himself from his native France,
falling in love with Italy instead.
VI. Stendhal actually dictated The Charterhouse of Parma in 52 days of creative outpouring in November and December of
1838.
A. As a result of this rapid-fire, effortless production, the story has this extraordinary pace, lightness, and sense of
surprise.
B. Because he dictated this book so quickly, Stendhal qualifies less as a craftsman than other great writers who revised.
C. Unlike these writers who agonized over revisions, Stendhal was more of an embodiment of the Romantic aesthetic
of inspiration. His inspiration sometimes flagged, and his output is littered with unfinished books.

VII. Stendhal was not much respected in his homeland, or even in his lifetime. There is often a sense that the reading public
needs a lag time to catch up with a great writer.
A. Stendhal knew this and predicted that he would be famous “around 1880,” a prediction that turned out to be
accurate.
B. As a result of this posthumous recognition, many of his works were published after his death. In this respect, he
joins the ranks of Thucydides, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolkien.
VIII. The cult classic The Charterhouse of Parma has many peculiarities about it. In some sense, it can be compared with
Moby-Dick as an antinovel.
A. Stendhal starts the book with a famous battle scene, instead of following convention and placing the battle at the
end.
B. The book is woven together with recognizable clichés—it can even be seen as a bodice-ripper kind of novel.
C. The title is not explained until the final three paragraphs of the novel, where it is revealed as a monastery, though it
suggests a mood of Gothic gloom.
D. There is also a funny punning going on in the French version of the title that alludes to both intoxication and the
hero’s “greenness.”
IX. Another novel set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, has the famous
subtitle A Novel Without a Hero. In a sense, the same thing could be said about Stendhal’s novel.
A. Throughout the book, Fabrizio del Dongo is called “our hero,” and yet he isn’t even born when the novel begins and
he drops out at various points in the narrative.
B. In a sense, Gina del Dongo is the true protagonist, as she is the character with motive. Yet she too is missing during
long stretches of the novel.
C. Stendhal’s refusal to organize his novel around a single protagonist is again a kind of pushback against tradition.
X. In a sense, Stendhal espoused the Aristotelian idea of mimesis, that artwork should imitate and represent everything
around it. Yet Charterhouse does something different: It is highly politically engaged.
A. Stendhal has been credited as the founder of the artistic idea of man embedded in a total cultural reality.
B. This means that every little detail assumes meaning in a cultural context, even the powdering of hair.
C. Stendhal was no armchair historian; he had been an active participant in Napoleon’s campaigns. After Napoleon’s
fall, he developed a great contempt for the ruling nobility.
D. What he foregrounds in the book is a political commitment, an emerging strain in the 19th-century novel.
XI. At the heart of Chaterhouse, however, is something not quite so political: the pursuit of happiness.
A. When you read the novel, you are struck that the word “happiness” appears on nearly every single page.
B. There is a bittersweet sense throughout the book that happiness is fleeting; no one gets to enjoy it for very long,
especially given the rapid demise of the characters at the end of the book.
C. Stendhal showed lighthandedness and subtlety in handling the canonic works of the past on the topic of happiness.
Late in the novel, Gina del Dongo is linked by name to Boethius, introducing the sense of Fortune’s Wheel turning
and happiness falling away.
D. It would remain to Tolstoy to pursue the great question: Where and what is happiness?
Suggested Readings:
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma.
Auerbach, “In the Hotel de la Mole,” in Mimesis.
Calvino, “Guide to New Readers of Stendhal’s Charterhouse,” in Why Read the Classics?
Greaves, Stendhal’s Italy.
Questions to consider:
1. Though the 19th century was a great age for nationalism in the arts, the Frenchman Stendhal lived in Italy and his finest
novel is set in Italy. Can you think of other canonic authors whose works were set in countries different from their native
lands?

2. “Cult classics” often enter the Western canon almost by accident. For example, Petrarch would have been astonished that
his sonnets became his most famous literary works. Voltaire would have felt the same about Candide. Can you think of
other literary classics that achieved a degree of lasting fame that would have surprised their authors?

Lecture Twenty-Eight
East Meets West in War and Peace
Scope: War and Peace is “about Russia” in the far-reaching sense that a literary work represents a whole people and creates
a sense of nationhood. Originally, Tolstoy wanted to write a trilogy of novels centering on the failed liberal
movement of the 1820s, but he first needed to trace these political currents back to the period of the Napoleonic
Wars. Challenging Aristotle’s cause-and-effect storytelling and the Great Man view of history, Tolstoy describes
how the whole Russian people contribute to their nation’s destiny. Hence War and Peace needs hundreds of
characters with a variety of self-interests over a whole generation to address the universal question: What is life for?
Tolstoy steadily imagines the Napoleonic Wars as a great East-West conflict, with Russia’s traditions rooted in her
Oriental past and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Outline
I. Tolstoy claimed that War and Peace was “not a novel,” a shocking claim because this is one of the great novels of the
Western tradition. This invites us to question the status of the genre and even the status of the “Western-ness” of
Tolstoy’s writing.
A. Looked at in this way, War and Peace becomes another example of an outsider novel, even an antinovel.
B. It fulfills Harold Bloom’s expectation of a kind of subversiveness built into the real masterpieces within an
individual genre.
II. Believe it or not, Tolstoy intended War and Peace to be a society novel like some of the great English novels of the
period.
A. The work starts out with a party—a great tool for writers, because it allows them to assemble all of the characters in
one place and begin the interaction that will follow over the rest of the story.
B. Here Tolstoy has done something we have seen with so many great masters: He has taken the standard features of a
genre and then stretched them to the breaking point.
III. Tolstoy allows his society novel to evolve into a family saga, then a historical chronicle, and finally a national epic.
Tolstoy is giving us what will become a political novel.
A. Tolstoy originally wanted to write about the men who were involved in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. He planned
a continuation of the story in which Pierre, a member of the Decembrists, returns from exile in Siberia.
B. Before he got either project off the ground, he decided he needed to start further back, in the period of the
Napoleonic Wars.
C. In this way, he arrived at War and Peace—the poster child of the big novel originally meant as the first part of a
trilogy.
IV. It is worth pausing to appreciate the status of the trilogy in the Western literary canon.
A. The trilogy legacy can be seen in the Greek tragedies, in Dante, in Tolkien, and even in the novels of Jane Austen.
B. It is easy to see why the trilogy would embed itself in the Western tradition, because it conforms to Aristotle’s
notion of beginning, middle, and end.
C. Tolstoy may have decided against a trilogy because he was dissatisfied with this Aristotelian concept.
V. War and Peace is a kind of national epic, with titanic figures confronting each other. Tolstoy did exhaustive research to
be sure that he got everything right.
A. When Napoleon and Czar Nicholas appear in the novel, they act and speak exactly as Tolstoy’s research had
indicated.
B. Like Cervantes and Stendhal before him, Tolstoy had personal experience with warfare. He had been an artillery
officer in the Crimean War.
VI. Because of his war experience, Tolstoy knew that generals did not win battles. He appreciated the role of small forces in
big events.
A. History for Tolstoy became the self-interest of millions of people drawn to a vast national drama.
B. War and Peace introduces some 580 characters whose actions or inactions drive great historical events. In a way, it
was a trick that he had learned from Stendhal.

VII. Since Tolstoy’s history is not based on the Great Man view of history like Thucydides, there cannot be a single plotline
running throughout the novel.
A. The truth for Tolstoy was not clear-cut and could not be described in the single, coherent, plausible plotline
suggested by Aristotle.
B. Tolstoy’s view of history as open-ended to factors and contingencies has much more in common with our modern
notion of chaos theory.
C. As a result, Tolstoy rejected the Aristotelian idea of beginning, middle, and end.
D. The ultimate goodness that Pierre and Natasha find is not contingent upon recognizing a universal truth but upon
accepting the complex and coincidental texture of life as a whole.
VIII. As an old joke says, War and Peace is about Russia.
A. In this way, Tolstoy is more like Herodotus than Thucydides. He is an anthropologist encompassing the totality of
the Russian people.
B. The only unity of place is the wide-flung borders of the Russian nation itself.
IX. When Tolstoy said that War and Peace was not a novel, he was setting himself, his novel, and his culture against the
European tradition. This raises the question of East versus West and even poses the question of whether Tolstoy belongs
in the Western literary canon at all.
A. Russian literature stands on the Eastern side of the historic divide between Roman Europe in the West and
Byzantine civilization in the East, from which Russia derives its culture, religion, and alphabet.
B. Tolstoy resembled Herodotus in defining his people by contrast with the foreign—in Tolstoy’s case, the French.
1. This was a great assault on the Eurocentric thinking that had dominated Western literature for so long.
2. This can be seen in the gradual disappearance of the use of the French language in the novel as its characters
identify their Russianness.
C. Unlike the foolish characters in European novels, Tolstoy’s Pierre demonstrates a type of strength in his simplicity,
emblematic of the Eastern Orthodox concept of the Holy Fool.
D. One of the most prominent and important geopolitical fault lines in the last 100 years has been the divide between
the Catholic West and the Orthodox East.
X. We in the modern world bring an expectation to our writers; we want to see them develop and make progress.
A. We want to see quick learning, and Tolstoy is a terrific case of this.
B. He wrote society novels early on, War and Peace in the middle of his career, and spiritual and religious writings late
in life.
C. Tolstoy gives us a surprise at the end of his career—the short historical novel Hadji Murád.
1. This is the tale of a Chechen tribal warrior fighting against the Westernized Russian military occupation of his
homeland.
2. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom singles this book out as the “best story in the world.”
3. The narrative has a spare kind of realism that anticipates Hemingway.
4. Hadji Murád looks forward to postcolonial novels like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where the European
genre becomes the vehicle for non-Western writers and their non-Western heroes.
Suggested Readings:
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. (NB: No single translation is definitive, and readers vary in their preferences, with recent
audiences preferring translations by Briggs or Pevear and Volokhonsky over Maude).
Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel.
Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox.
Bloom, “Tolstoy and Heroism,” in The Western Canon.
Forster, Aspects of the Novel.
Maude, The Life of Tolstoy.
1. War and Peace raises a question that goes back to the earliest Greek historians: Where does factual history end and
literary storytelling begin? Do Herodotus’s digressions into cultural anthropology discredit him because he does not tell
a straightforward narrative? Does Thucydides’s focus on “Great Men” discredit him because he leaves out the common

foot soldiers and civilians? Big as his novel is, what does Tolstoy leave out that might undercut his status as a historical
truth teller?
2. Tolstoy cannot resist the novelist’s urge to include a “love interest” among his main characters. Not since Homer’s Iliad
have Western writers managed to tell a war story without including some romantic plotline. Can you think of a single
great war novel that refuses to include some ingredients of a love story?

Lecture Twenty-Nine
Joyce’s Ulysses and the Avant-Garde
Scope: James Joyce exploits the resources of Tolstoy’s “big novel” to explore the intimate lives of common Dublin citizens
on June 16, 1904. His “internal monologues” take readers into the minds of the would-be writer Stephen Dedalus,
the advertising man Leopold Bloom, and his sexually frustrated wife Molly. Realistic depictions of sex got the book
banned in England and the United States, but succès de scandale helped its status. Writing during 1914–1921, Joyce
looks back at the peaceful, cosmopolitan Europe prior to the massive disruptions of the First World War.
Modernity’s crisis of values is represented by avant-garde experimental styles, for example Joyce’s “stream-of-
consciousness” style in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. The book’s notorious difficulties conform to the aesthetics of
early 20th-century art and music, though Ulysses becomes another book more honored as canonic than actually read.
Outline
I. Ulysses, reputedly the hardest novel in the Western canon, actually has its roots in children’s literature.
A. Many of the masterpieces of the Western tradition are rooted in juvenile genres—the adventure, the ghost story,
even the puppet show.
B. Joyce admitted that his inspiration for Ulysses came from Charles Lamb’s children’s adaptation, and to this day the
plot line of the novel remains incredibly simple.
C. The difficulty in the novel lies much more in the avant-garde style of writing than in its actual content.
II. Ulysses has a reputation for obscenity, but the theme of paternity is much more pervasive in this novel than the theme of
sexual love.
A. Shakespeare was interested in father-daughter relationships, but Joyce focused on father-son relationships,
particularly the failure of fathers and the breakdown of patriarchal lineage on familial and cultural levels.
B. Joyce was obsessed with the idea of literary father figures, not as domineering forces but as weak, absentee figures
who no longer nourished, challenged, or inspired him.
C. The failure of fathers in the novel fuels its pervasive sense of regret.
1. Bloom is a figure of middle-aged personal regrets about career, marriage, and family.
2. Stephen’s regrets are more monumental, even global. He has the feeling of belatedness that plagues all artists.
III. In the novel, Stephen says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” He means literary history as much
as national history, and indeed, Joyce was very much in touch with his literary predecessors.
A. His experimental novel actually returns to the aesthetics of Aristotle as filtered through Aquinas, with the three
unities of place, time, and action.
B. Like Saint Augustine in his Confessions, Joyce took himself as the subject of exploration; Stephen is the younger
Joyce, and Bloom is the middle-aged Joyce.
C. Dante was really Joyce’s favorite, hence the complex writing and the intricately crafted texture of the epic.
D. Like Voltaire, Joyce felt that he had been failed by his Catholic father figures; he lost faith in organized religion and
in the centrality of Christianity to Western civilization.
E. Shakespeare was the one English-language master against whom Joyce felt he could carry out his Oedipal revolt.
1. Stephen is a sort of updated version of Hamlet, the intellectual who lives totally inside his own head, forever
thinking.
2. Bloom is a modern version of Falstaff, fully alive to the senses, indulging and enjoying wherever possible.
3. The problem with Shakespeare is that our lack of information about him makes him a shadow figure, a remote
absentee father.
F. Like Tolstoy, Joyce researched his novel for accuracy and was a compulsive reviser.
G. Joyce does not seem to employ the Aeneid in his work. This may be because of Virgil’s focus on strong paternity
and empire, two aspects against which Joyce was revolting.
H. In a sense, Ulysses is yet another example of the postcolonial novel before the term itself was invented. Joyce read
Chaucer as he was writing, and although there was some influence, Joyce was not part of the mainstream
Chaucerian tradition.
IV. James Joyce lived—and wrote Ulysses—during a period of huge upheaval in Europe.
A. As the final line of his novel indicates, the book was written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris during the years of the First
World War.

B. This means that Ulysses looks back from the war years to the pre-war era in 1904, when Europe was at peace and
people like Leopold, Molly, and Stephen moved in a highly cosmopolitan world.
C. In hindsight, World War I emerges as the great event of the early 20th century, casting its shadow across the decades
to come as the Napoleonic Wars had done a century earlier.
V. Twentieth-century writers like Joyce had a sense of being failed by European civilization and their cultural father figures,
yet they continued to feel the weight of the past upon them. This led to an artistic culture of constant reinvention.
A. At the beginning of his Confessions, Saint Augustine makes a great statement about the central human problem:
“Our heart is restless.”
B. Augustine resolved this by converting to Christianity, but in the 20th century restlessness had become a virtue, not a
vice.
C. A great artist in the 20th century is in restless pursuit of reinventing himself, finding new styles for his work.
VI. Joyce’s trajectory as a writer was extraordinary, absolutely amazing.
A. His style moved from the straightforward short story to the Bildungsroman, then to revolutionary stylistic
expressionism, and finally to the outermost limits of linguistic experimentation.
B. Joyce’s style represents a fusion of form and content, as can be seen in the stream-of-consciousness subject and style
of Molly Bloom’s monologue.
C. When Ulysses was published, it made Joyce a literary celebrity, but it also became notorious as being obscene and
subversive and was banned for many years in America.
D. Even though it was criticized as obscene at the time, Joyce’s writing is actually just the realism of Stendhal and
Tolstoy applied to people’s inner lives.
E. Joyce spent the next 15 years working on the ultimate example of literary experimentation, Finnegans Wake.
1. It is the universal dream of the human race, along the lines of Carl Jung’s “universal unconscious.”
2. It absolutely defies the expectations of the Western literary tradition. There is no plot, no protagonist or
antagonist, and only one recognizable character.
F. Joyce planned to end his career with a short, simple book but instead drank himself to death at the age of 58.
VII. In Joyce, we have one more example of a canonic author who exhausted the possibilities of his own chosen genre.
A. Shakespeare had the last word on tragedy, Milton the last word on the epic poem, and Joyce the last word on the
experimental novel.
B. Ulysses would have an immediate impact on the work of Woolf and Faulkner, both writers who worked from the
fringes, outside the mainstream.
Suggested Readings:
Joyce, Ulysses.
Bloom, “Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare,” in The Western Canon.
Ellmann, James Joyce.
Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake.
1. Great authors attract great biographers. Since Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., the biography itself has
helped to create this literary greatness for an author. Why not look at one of the most impressive modern achievements,
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, to appreciate how much this book boosts the status of Ulysses by providing background
information about the author?
2. Because of Ireland’s bitter history of colonial exploitation, Ulysses is an English-language novel with an anti-English
political bias. Why not read Joyce’s novel with steady attention to the author’s antagonism toward English characters,
English literary figures, and even “the King’s English”?

Lecture Thirty
The Magic Mountain and Modern Institutions
Scope: Completing The Magic Mountain in the aftermath of World War I—and profiting from the pioneering psychologies
of Freud and Jung—Thomas Mann uses the story of the “ordinary” young man Hans Castorp as a tragic-comic
allegory for the intellectual confidence, based on faulty science, that fostered a suicidal trust in national institutions.
Going from the institution of the university to a Swiss sanatorium for seven years and finally to the military, Hans
forgets his great epiphany, with the implication that those who forget the past—including the great literature of the
past—are condemned to repeat its mistakes. Originally conceived as a companion piece for the homoerotic classic
Death in Venice, this 1,000-page literary monument grapples with Germany’s cultural crisis in the wake of the
Great War.
Outline
I. It is stunning to realize that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain started as a novella and grew into this monumental
work of the Western canon. I want to talk about what happened in the composition process to create this increase in
length and what the novel really contains as a result.
II. It certainly is not the only achievement in Mann’s career.
A. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, sold a million copies in its first year and was singled out for reference in the
awarding of Mann’s Nobel Prize.
B. In 1912 he wrote his homoerotic classic, Death in Venice, about an older writer who falls in love with a young
Slavic man at an Italian seaside resort.
III. In 1913 Mann started imagining The Magic Mountain as a humorous companion piece to Death in Venice.
A. In it, a young graduate falls in love with an older Slavic woman in the Swiss mountains.
B. In the two works, we have the contrast of an older man’s homoerotic obsession with a younger man and a younger
man’s heterosexual obsession with an older woman.
C. We also see the classic contrast between the Germanic North and the Mediterranean South, as well as an interesting
contrast in diseases.
IV. It is worthwhile to examine the function or presence of disease in literature overall.
A. The motive force behind Sophocles’s Oedipus the King is the plague that has broken out in Thebes.
B. Boccaccio’s Decameron is situated in Florence at the time of the first outbreak of the bubonic plague.
C. In the 20th century, we have disease-focused works from Camus and Solzhenitsyn, as well as a great outpouring of
literature about the AIDS plague.
D. Why such a tradition of disease literature? Because disease forces men and women to confront their mortality and
face the big questions of human existence.
V. What happened to turn Mann’s companion-piece novella into a literary monument? The outbreak of World War I in
1914.
A. Mann was writing the novel during a war that Germany would lose, so this crisis was even more of an assault on his
culture’s assumptions and optimism than it was for cultures on the winning side.
B. Mann’s reaction to this crisis was to “circle the wagons” of the Western tradition by bringing together the classics of
Western civilization.
1. Dante’s Purgatory also took place on a mountain, where the poet experienced education, art, and love.
2. Mann’s novel reminds us of the Petrarchan tradition of the idolatry of love.
3. Mann’s use of the sanatorium presents us with a microcosm of European culture. Everyone was there, in a
highly cultivated place where art, music, and poetry were used to increase health.
VI. In his attempt to preserve the Western tradition, Mann was able to lean upon the masters of German literature who had
emerged in the previous century.
A. The magic mountain had become a traditional element of German art, appearing in the works of Goethe and
Wagner. Mann recollects this tradition in the chapter entitled “The Walpurgis Night.”
B. In his The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had postulated twin forces in the creative process, forces that he associated
with the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Mann dramatized this concept in his novel through the characters Settembrini
and Naphtha.

C. Mann also put to comical use the Freudian concept of the phallic symbol.
D. Jung was a contemporary of Mann, and his idea of the collective unconscious appears in Hans Castorp’s
hallucinatory dream.
VII. During his dream, Castorp has a great epiphany in which he realizes that death should not dominate human life. But he
lapses into his normal state of unawareness when he returns to the sanatorium. The French cultural historian Michel
Foucault examined this impulse toward normalization and ordinariness in his work The Birth of the Clinic.
A. In various works, Foucault describes modern institutions that are designed to achieve this normalizing process—
prisons, factories, the armed forces, insane asylums, even academic institutions. In Mann’s novel, Castorp has been
a member of most of these institutions.
B. As Foucault noted, “there is no outside” to these institutional systems of surveillance; in other words, there are no
hiding places.
C. According to Foucault, the purpose of these institutions is to “produce bodies that were both docile and capable.”
Hans Castorp becomes the perfect example of this product.
VIII. In an eerie sense, Mann is anticipating another German institution that would develop within the next two decades: the
concentration camp.
A. It is easy to point out the resemblances between the sanatorium and the concentration camp, especially in the
diagnosis of the abnormal and the use of medical experimentation.
B. It is extraordinary to see in news footage how quickly and completely the Jews in particular submitted themselves
and became “docile, capable bodies” when they reached the Nazi concentration camps.
IX. Thomas Mann was already putting this kind of institutional system under criticism in The Magic Mountain.
A. Hans Castorp emerges from the sanatorium normal and healthy, but he’s been reduced to a kind of simpleton.
B. He joins the army of “docile and capable” men rushing into the trenches of the First World War, and we see him as
completely unthinking and dazed, singing as he tramples the bodies of his fallen comrades.
X. The Magic Mountain became part of a larger body of literature reflecting the impact of the Great War on both sides of
the combat.
A. The post-war years would see the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
B. Though on the winning side, the British were especially aware that the progress of European civilization had been
disrupted, as can be seen in the works of T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien.
XI. Mann, whose wife was of Jewish ancestry, needed to leave Germany during the Nazi period, and they settled for a while
in Princeton. While there, he lectured on the European novel and the German tradition, including—of course—Goethe.
Suggested Readings:
Mann, The Magic Mountain.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic.
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Reed, Thomas Mann.
1. Size matters. Though Mann’s The Magic Mountain was originally intended as a companion piece for the novella Death
in Venice, the work that achieved greater status within the canon is the novel that grew to far greater length. Are there
other cases where sheer bulk becomes a decisive factor in why one literary work, even within a particular author’s
oeuvre, prevails over others?
2. The number of literary works about diseases raises some interesting questions. For example, does the impact of ancient
Greek medical writings upon the earliest historians and philosophers, with their sense of “diagnosis” and “crisis,”
predispose Western literary texts to the theme of illness, even psychological maladies such as Hamlet’s melancholy?

Lecture Thirty-One
Mrs. Dalloway and Post-War England
Scope: The British won the First World War and kept their global empire, but at a price. Set on a single day in June 1923,
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway delves into the emotion-laden thoughts of Londoners, mostly the politician’s wife,
Clarissa Dalloway, and the battlefield veteran, Septimus Smith, the latter still suffering from “shell shock.” Woolf
learned from Joyce’s Ulysses how to probe the mental lives of her characters. As Mrs. Dalloway’s mind drifts back
over a lifetime of memories, ghosts materialize on the day of her party, such as her early love Peter, a failed colonial
administrator back from India. Around the time Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway, Gandhi joined India’s
independence movement in 1920 and Woolf’s friend E. M. Forster wrote A Passage to India to dramatize the decline
of British rule.
Outline
I. Harold Bloom described Virginia Woolf as the most complete person of letters in England in the 20th century.
A. Her father edited the Dictionary of National Biography, and his first wife was the daughter of William Makepeace
Thackeray.
B. Woolf’s girlhood home was visited by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, among others.
C. Her own home became a gathering place for the so-called Bloomsbury group, which included novelists,
philosophers, poets, and economists.
D. In addition to her novel masterpieces, she published critical essays on other writers like Chaucer and Jane Austen—
once again, genius recognizing genius.
II. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, founded the Hogarth Press to begin printing the experimental works of the Modernist
movement, the kind of books that would be shunned by the mainstream press.
A. They were the first to publish T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in book form, and they published the first complete
translation of the works of Sigmund Freud.
B. Leonard Woolf had to turn down Joyce’s Ulysses because it was too big and too complicated, but that does mean
that Virginia Woolf got to know Joyce’s novel in its prepublication version.
C. Her own experimental novel Mrs. Dalloway was printed on her husband’s press, and this raises an interesting
canonical point: What is the difference between great canonical work and the commercial bestsellers of mainstream
presses?
III. Virginia Woolf was born the same year as James Joyce and died by drowning the same year that Joyce died. Like
Ulysses, her novel Mrs. Dalloway telescopes all of its action into one single June day, but almost two decades after
Joyce’s setting of 1904.
A. Unlike Joyce’s characters, Woolf’s characters have experienced the Great War and therefore carry a much greater
burden of regret.
B. As Joyce had done in the “Wandering Rocks Episode,” Woolf shifts the narrative through the minds of minor
characters, even passers-by on the street, creating what Erich Auerbach called the “multipersonal representation of
consciousness.”
C. T. S. Eliot very much admired Ulysses when it came out, but Woolf dismissed it as “underbred.” Her novel, on the
other hand, is of better taste, with upper-class characters in the tradition of Austen, Stendhal, and Tolstoy.
D. Woolf criticized E. M. Forster for depending too much on coincidence in his novels, but her own novel depends on
extraordinary coincidences as well.
E. Woolf found in Ulysses a kind of pedantry, which she thought was in very bad taste.
IV. Woolf’s heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, has a name that recalls one of the classics of the English novel tradition: Samuel
Richardson’s Clarissa of 1748.
A. This was a landmark 18th-century novel, and it prompted Samuel Johnson to give serious consideration to fiction in
his criticism.
B. There is an irony in Woolf’s reference to Richardson’s novel: Richardson recounted “The History of a Young
Lady,” while Woolf’s heroine is no longer young but a woman in her fifties.

V. Another reference we can appreciate recalls Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
A. When Clarissa first met her future husband, she mistook his name to be Mr. Wickham.
B. Again, the irony is rather lovely, since Richard Dalloway is not a rake but a stable, reliable young man.
VI. The main plotline is paralleled by a secondary plotline involving a World War I veteran named Septimus Warren Smith.
A. Smith commits suicide during the course of the narrative and therefore is the death figure in the novel.
B. Septimus in Latin means “seventh,” and this allusion, combined with Smith’s connections to Italy, gives the
impression that Woolf is referencing Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell from the Inferno—for the suicides.
VII. Though now considered a very experimental novel, Mrs. Dalloway is actually deeply rooted in the Greek classics.
A. She observes the Aristotelian unities of time and place—the action takes place in one day and mostly in one place.
B. We are reminded of the passing of time within the novel by Big Ben chiming the hours. In fact, the novel’s original
title was The Hours.
C. The action of the novel begins in medias res, much like Homer began his epics, though Woolf’s method for
recollecting the past differed from Homer’s.
D. Clarissa’s party recollects Homer’s banquet with the Phaiakians in that it acts as a centripetal force, bringing
together characters who might otherwise not have met in the course of the day.
E. Toward the end of the novel, there is a rather heavy-handed allusion to Greek tragedy in the form of Sir William
Bradshaw, the messenger who arrives to reveal the horrible violent events that have taken place offstage.
VIII. Woolf and other writers of the time were bringing together these classical elements to feel a little more secure in a
world that seemed different after the war.
A. Even upper-class men had fought and died in the trenches, so the sense of mortality had hit English society even at
its highest level.
B. Woolf reminds us of the lingering impact of the Great War with the presence of Septimus Smith, who keeps reliving
traumatic moments from the trenches.
C. In the end, Smith disdains the idea of entering a clinic and commits suicide instead. Woolf would later make the
same choice herself.
IX. Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is, again, very much about World War I. But the action is set on two individual days, one
before and one after the war.
A. During the interval between narratives, the Ramsays lose their son, Andrew, in the war.
B. The before-and-after element of the novel allows it to have a tremendous poignancy, a great degree of pathos in its
original sense.
X. In addition to exploring the malaise of the individual, Woolf addressed the unraveling of the British Empire itself.
A. Her character Peter Walsh was a colonial administrator in India, but there is something empty, bureaucratic, and
unheroic about his careerism.
B. It is interesting to note that Woolf was writing at the same time that Forster was publishing A Passage to India, his
scathing indictment of the corruption of British colonial rule.
XI. Virginia Woolf had a very slow climb up into the Western canon after Modernism fell out of favor in the 1950s.
A. Woolf started coming back in the 1970s, partly due to the feminist movement.
B. But gender and politics aside, Woolf was simply a wonderful writer. Mrs. Dalloway established the genre of the
lyrical novel, and it remains impressive in Woolf’s ability to maintain tone and rhythm over 300 pages.
Suggested Readings:
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.
Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking,” in Mimesis.
Bell, Bloomsbury.
Bloom, “Woolf’s Orlando: Feminism as the Love of Reading,” in The Western Canon.
Lee, Virginia Woolf.
Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War.

1. Virginia Woolf wrote lyrical novels but not lyric poetry—which was thought to be a masculine genre. Why would
poetry, whether the epic verse of Milton or the love sonnets of Shakespeare, be considered inappropriate for female
writers?
2. When two contemporary authors compete with each other, the newcomer usually becomes more outrageous and
shocking than the predecessor. Think of Euripides after Sophocles, Ovid after Virgil, and Boccaccio after Petrarch. But
Virginia Woolf “outclasses” James Joyce by becoming more dignified. Can you think of other writers who sought to
outdo rivals by becoming more formal and assuming greater gravity?

Lecture Thirty-Two
T. S. Eliot’s Divine Comedy
Scope: Lyric poetry occupies a marginal position in the Western canon dominated by narrative works from Homer onward.
Like Dante, T. S. Eliot created a narrative outline for his overall career. After Harvard, he studied at Oxford during
the First World War and remained in London to become a poet. A friend’s wartime death contributed to Eliot’s
mental breakdown—coinciding with the cultural breakdown of post-war Europe—out of which came The Waste
Land. Eliot’s personal solution included a return to traditional Christianity. His Ash Wednesday records this leap of
faith, while his Four Quartets, completed during World War II, describe a deeper plunge into the realm of the spirit.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, the Four Quartets completed Eliot’s 20th-century “divine comedy.”
Outline
I. T. S. Eliot was the product of university education. He received his undergraduate education at Harvard and pursued
further study in philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.
A. What we begin to see as we enter the 20th century is university-educated writers producing books that are ready-
made for a university curriculum.
B. Eliot provided footnotes for The Waste Land, making it look like an academic text.
II. Eliot had already been introduced to the Bloomsbury group in London by the time he wrote The Waste Land, and
Virginia Woolf herself helped hand-set the type when the poem was printed by her husband’s Hogarth Press.
III. In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot claimed that the “poets in our civilization … must be difficult.”
A. Over the course of the essay, Eliot attempted a bit of canon formation, arguing to insert the poet John Donne into the
English tradition because he saw Donne as a predecessor for the kind of difficult poetry that he himself wanted to
write.
B. His attempt was successful—Donne is now in the canon.
IV. Eliot became friendly with James Joyce while in Paris and greatly admired the parts of Ulysses that were being published
serially in literary magazines.
A. In some sense, The Waste Land is Eliot’s attempt to achieve in a 433-line poem what Joyce had achieved with his
massive novel.
B. Both Ulysses and The Waste Land, along with many other influential works, were published in the landmark year of
1922.
V. The Waste Land became yet one more reflection of the Great War and the crisis that followed in Western civilization.
A. The opening line of the poem is one of the most famous in English literature and is reminiscent of both Chaucer and
Whitman.
B. In his allusions to Chaucer and Whitman, Eliot was connecting himself to the beginnings of both the English and
American traditions.
C. Eliot cancels his predecessors’ sense of optimism and life’s renewal, focusing instead on “dead land” and “dull
roots.”
VI. Another fallout of World War I for Eliot was the death of his close friend Jean Verdenal in 1915.
A. Eliot had dedicated his collection of poems that included “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Verdenal.
B. Some interpret The Waste Land as a sort of guilt-ridden confession of homosexual longing rendered very cryptically
and obscurely.
VII. Eliot defended his overall evasiveness in his poetry in terms similar to Oscar Wilde: “To be intelligible is to be found
out.”
A. One wonders whether Eliot was really worried about being “found out”; homosexuality was still a crime in England
and America.
B. In Forster’s novel Maurice, we have a case of how very careful writers were if they approached the subject of
homosexuality in literature during this part of the 20th century.
VIII. The ending of The Waste Land continues to have a cryptic quality; it disintegrates into snippets of poetry in Italian,
Latin, French, and even Sanskrit.
A. The quoted authors in these snippets really give us a sense of Eliot’s take on the Western canon.

B. Writers such as Homer, Augustine, and Milton are assembled, then deconstructed and disassembled in the
fragmentary telling of the poem.
IX. Like other Modernists, Eliot was very conscious of the weight and intimidation of the past.
A. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot expressed this obligation to prior writers, claiming that no
artist “has his complete meaning alone.”
B. Instead of having a sense of positive reciprocal interaction between the living and the dead, Eliot saw his
predecessors as a kind of dead weight pressing from the past upon the present.
X. Eliot opened up the Western canon of European literature to include a whole branch of language and literature that had
not been acknowledged before: the Sanskrit classics of India.
A. The Waste Land and the Four Quartets allude to sacred words and episodes from Eastern religious texts.
B. Eliot took the trouble to study Sanskrit while he was at Harvard, and his transcripts reveal that he did very well in
this study.
C. Why did Eliot make such an effort to learn Sanskrit?
1. In the 18th century, Sir William Jones had discovered that the language used in ancient Indian texts resembled
the classical languages in which he had been trained.
2. This discovery led to a breakthrough in recognizing that several hundred languages were related and were
originally part of some single family group called the Indo-European languages.
3. The Indo-Europeans spread not only their language but also their technology and their religion, as evidenced by
the similarity in mythic symbols among Greek-, Scandinavian-, and Sanskrit-speaking civilizations.
4. For T. S. Eliot and others, this linguistic and cultural connection meant that the Indian literary tradition could be
annexed to the English tradition.
XI. One genre has been missing so far in our course on the Western canon: the lyric poem.
A. The lyric poem is problematic on many fronts; it tends to be easy to lose and can be very hard to date.
B. There is also difficulty in translation, since its structure and wording is far more delicate than the narrative form.
XII. T. S. Eliot had an idea of shaping his career so that it would fit a kind of narrative form that had become the norm within
the Western literary tradition.
A. In 1927, he became a British citizen and converted to the Anglican Church, which connected him to one of the great
narrative models of the Western tradition.
B. He began clearly and successfully to pattern his career on the template of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
C. Just as Dante had set up a canon of Christian poets in the Divine Comedy, Eliot created a preferred “spiritual canon”
in his work, including Saint Augustine, Saint John of the Cross, Dame Julian of Norwich, John Milton, and the
author of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita.
XIII. In the final section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot tells of a mystical experience in which he encounters a “familiar
compound ghost” of all the dead father figures of the literary tradition.
A. This encounter is reminiscent of Aeneas meeting his dead father, Dante meeting his dead teacher, and Hamlet
encountering the ghost of his dead father.
B. This final encounter shows a change in Eliot’s attitude toward his literary forefathers: They now provide a
nourishing, uplifting, even consoling moment.
C. These final lines are constructed in imitation of Dante’s own verse form, terza rima.
XIV. Eliot spent the last two decades of his life watching himself transform into a canonic author. His style is now
immediately recognizable.
Suggested Readings:
Eliot, Collected Poems.
Eliot, The Waste Land.
Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life.
Eliot, Selected Essays.
1. Unlike the Chinese tradition that begins with the Odes, the European tradition has been relentlessly narrative. Dante
organized his early lyrics into a personal narrative in his New Life, and critics extract a personal love drama from

Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the whole Western canon, is there a major poet whose lyrics have not been arranged and read
as the “story” of the author’s life?
2. There are two ways great writers attract recognition: either publishing so much that they are always in the public view—
like Voltaire and Goethe—or publishing so little that each new work becomes a major event. Eliot clearly chose the
second option. Can you think of other canonic authors who published so little that each of their works is treasured?

Lecture Thirty-Three
Faulkner and the Great American Novel
Scope: There is no Great American Novel, because the United States is really a mosaic of regional cultures that frustrates
any unified literary tradition. If Hawthorne and Melville represent the New England tradition, William Faulkner
typifies Southern writers haunted by their own separate history, particularly the Civil War. The Sound and the Fury
opens with “a tale told by an idiot” as the autistic Benjy Compson remembers 30 years of Mississippi family history,
fragmented and disjointed, like the shattered consciousness of Eliot’s The Waste Land. The strong presence of the
Negro servants contributes to the picture of a multiracial culture, as well as one marked by regional differences,
even a different dialect of English. Faulkner’s ongoing legacy includes the emergence of African American
literature.
Outline
I. American literature is a mosaic of regional literatures. No region is quite as distinct as the South, and no Southern novel
is quite as distinctive as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
A. Literary history belongs to the winners; after the Civil War, the North proceeded to privilege the Puritan tradition of
New England at the expense of the Southern tradition.
B. When Southern writers did emerge in the 19th century, their Southernness was generally camouflaged or somehow
denied, as we can see in the case of Edgar Allen Poe.
II. William Faulkner was from Mississippi and was essentially a Southerner, though he did get away from home when he
joined the Royal Air Force during World War I.
A. He is another writer who was deeply affected by the Great War; both his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, and his Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel, A Fable, address issues from World War I.
B. In Faulkner’s mind, the First World War tended to blend very much with the Civil War. In both cases, a state of
bewilderment and dislocation of culture occurred, a sense of the failure of ideals and chivalry.
C. The Faulkner family tree embodies another dual sense of failure; Faulkner’s grandfather was a Confederate colonel
and a novelist who had both lost the war and been marginalized as a writer.
III. Faulkner worked very hard at joining himself and his works with the mainstream of the Western literary tradition.
A. Because he was not university trained, he was able to encounter the literary classics on his own and avoid the fatal
inferiority complex that had plagued Joyce and Eliot.
B. He famously neglected his duties as a postmaster to read the classics of the Greek tradition.
IV. The fingerprints of Aeschylus and Sophocles are especially clear in The Sound and the Fury.
A. Like Greek tragedy, the story is haunted by essential taboos—in this case, fratricide and incest.
B. The Compson family resembles Agamemnon’s family in the Oresteia, a family suffering the long-term effects of a
devastating war.
C. Quentin emerges as the suicidal Orestes, Caddy resembles headstrong Antigone, and Jason is very much a modern
version of Creon.
V. Shakespeareian tragedy also forms a core constituent within Faulkner’s thinking.
A. The title of the novel is taken from Macbeth, where the tragic hero describes his life as “a tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
B. This title plays out in the form of Benjy, the family idiot who provides the substance of the first chapter.
C. Quentin Compson becomes another Hamlet, thinking constantly as he spirals toward insanity.
VI. Despite his Southern roots, Faulkner had an amazing knack for connecting himself with the Modernist avant-garde in
France.
A. He was such an admirer of Joyce that, while in France, he haunted the same café in Paris but was too shy to
introduce himself.
B. Faulkner was given Ulysses as a gift just two years after its publication, and it is easy to see its impact on the writing
of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s Quentin has an internal monologue much along the lines of Stephen Dedalus
in the “Proteus Episode.”

C. Faulkner also came to know Eliot’s The Waste Land while in Paris; his use of Benjy as a type of central
consciousness mimics Eliot’s use of the blind prophet Tiresius.
1. We now know that Benjy was most likely autistic, and his narrative gives the sense of time jumping throughout
several periods.
2. There is a beginning, middle, and end to the narrative, but not necessarily in that order.
VII. Faulkner was creating a Southern tradition by hooking it firmly with the mainstream tradition of Europe.
A. In his own works, he relied on the traditions of the Greek classics; the novel form of Flaubert, Balzac, and
Dostoevsky; and the influence of the Modernist avant-garde in Paris.
B. In the process of creating a Southern literary tradition, he had to find his literary ancestors. He identified Mark
Twain as “the father of American literature,” but notice that he chose a Southern writer as this ancestral figure.
VIII. Faulkner also identified and zeroed in on a specific genre that belonged to the South: the “plantation novel.”
A. This was a subgenre of the novel and had been written over and over again since the 19th century, most famously in
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.
B. Faulkner was following the trajectory of this tradition, recounting the decline of Southern culture into a kind of
decadence in the 20th century. This type of literature would be known as “Southern Gothic.”
IX. In terms of establishing a literary culture, there also has to be a reach forward into the future, and Faulkner was
remarkably successful at this.
A. Faulkner was followed by an extraordinary array of distinguished authors: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote,
Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few.
B. These writers not only established themselves in the classroom but continue to make their separate appeals to
individual readers.
X. The Sound and the Fury raises an interesting question about when a masterpiece is done.
A. The story as originally published ends with Benjy being driven out of town on the way to the insane asylum.
B. Faulkner wrote a supplemental family history for a later edition. He intended this supplement to appear as an
introduction, but the publishers printed it as a conclusion, where it remains to this day.
C. Once again, we are reminded of the role that the editor or publisher plays in manufacturing a canonic text.
XI. It is also important to recognize the importance of prizes in the establishment of a canonic author. Faulkner was awarded
the Nobel Prize, the National Book Award, and two Pulitzers and has often appeared on the Oprah Book Club list.
XII. The problem of race in America became the driving force throughout nearly all of Faulkner’s fiction.
A. Quentin Compson’s thoughts on race remind us of Herodotus: one is defined by comparison to a racial “other.”
B. By his forthright treatment of race, Faulkner encouraged several future generations of African American writers.
XIII. As I said earlier, America comprises a mosaic of regionalisms, based not just on geography but on race, ethnicity,
gender, and sexuality as well. The portrayal of this mosaic would become more and more the norm in American
literature, as we will see in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Suggested Readings:
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
Nobel Prize Library: William Faulkner.
Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History.
1. Like Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner’s novel disturbs today’s readers because its characters use the word “nigger” over and
over. What should be done? Stop reading The Sound and the Fury? Change the word to “Negro” or even “African
American” in future editions? Or accept the book’s historical identity and look instead at the author’s message beyond
this offensive word?
2. Faulkner intended the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury to be printed in different colors of ink, keyed to the
different time periods, to help the reader follow the jumps in chronology. His first publisher could not manage this, but
modern printing technology would have no problem. Should contemporary editors “manufacture” the masterpiece by
printing Benjy’s “internal monologue”—as the author intended—in different colors of inks?

Lecture Thirty-Four
Willa Cather and Mosaics of Identity
Scope: Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop about New Mexico as a region with a completely different history
going back to Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries, including a different literary history starting with
De Villagrá’s epic History of New Mexico (1610). As a pioneer and rugged individualist, the French Bishop Latour
arrives as the complete outsider in a multicultural society of Native Americans, old Hispanic settlers, and new
Yankee soldiers and merchants. By the end of the 20th century, English literature is no longer strictly English, or
even mainstream American, but a mosaic of writings based on the minority identities of African American, Native
American, Latino American, and Asian American voices, as well as the other minority voices defining themselves
through gender and sexuality.
Outline
I. We can hardly overestimate the role played by librarians in the creation of a canonic literary tradition.
A. In ancient times, the librarians at Alexandria and Caesarea picked out which texts to edit and preserve.
B. I read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop because my high school librarian put it on a list of
recommended readings.
C. Death Comes for the Archbishop has also appeared on lists of great books compiled by The American Oxonian
magazine and Modern Library.
II. Cather was born in Virginia and might well have become a well-known Southern writer a generation before Faulkner if
her family hadn’t moved to Nebraska when she was a child.
A. She, too, wrote a World War I novel, One of Ours, about a veteran returning from the war and suffering
disillusionment, unhappiness, and the restlessness of a lost generation.
B. In reaction to the war, Cather reached back into the pioneering era of the 19th-century American West, when gallant
deeds and old-fashioned virtues could still be described without cynicism.
III. Cather’s New Mexico novel opens up a whole alternative history for the United States and also suggests other traditions
within American literary history.
A. This region has a very different history from the one taught on the East Coast, where people trace their national and
state histories back to the arrival of the Puritans.
B. The area was first crossed by Franciscan missionaries in 1539, well before the English began settling in the New
World. In 1610, Pedro de Peralta established the Spanish colonial outpost at Santa Fe, which remains the oldest
capitol of any U.S. state.
C. In that same year, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá published his epic poem History of New Mexico, modeled very much
after Virgil’s Aeneid.
IV. In this way, political and literary history in New Mexico can claim priority over New England and Virginia, but it is a
different history with different major events.
A. After decades of unrest and revolt, the region was fully pacified after the reconquest of 1692 and finally became a
part of Mexico during its war of independence.
B. The region of New Mexico was ceded to the United States in 1846, but it did not become a full-fledged state until
1912. It is this “territorial period” on which I want to focus, because it was in this Wild West atmosphere that Cather
set her novel.
C. This region had distinctive literary milestones as well, including Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by the territorial
governor of Mexico, Lew Wallace.
V. Novels like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans laid the foundation for the frontier novel of the 19th century.
A. There was a real heyday for these cowboy novels in the 1870s and 1880s.
B. The tradition continues in contemporary American literature, with works like E. Annie Proulx’s Close Range:
Wyoming Stories.
C. Proulx’s achievement underscores the unlikelihood of a woman writing these cowboy stories of the Old West. Willa
Cather was already feeling this challenge long before she wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop.

VI. The main character in Cather’s novel is Jean-Marie Latour, who was based on the real-life Archbishop Jean Baptiste
Lamy.
A. Lamy had arrived in Sante Fe in 1851 and lived to see the region transformed and its own cathedral rising.
B. Cather’s protagonist of the archbishop conforms to type, in a sense: He is a pioneer but is even more of an outsider
than this term suggests.
C. He has been sent from Rome, and what we have here is a parallel history of colonialism: the religious colonialism
embodied earlier by Saint Augustine.
D. Latour manifests the kind of paternalism that accompanies imperialism—what Kipling called “the white man’s
burden.”
E. Latour had come to New Mexico to tame the wilderness and to shape up a corrupt priesthood, and after many
struggles he does accomplish this. Part of the power of this novel is this sense of one world giving way to another.
VII. Cather’s novel does not seem experimental, but it is very much a part of the Modernist experimentation with form and
structure.
A. Its narrative constantly digresses into local history and vignettes of the New Mexico past.
B. The loosely connected episodes consciously, I think, recall the “land sagas” of Iceland, which were enjoying a
vogue in European and American readership at the time the novel was written.
VIII. It is said that Cather was inspired to write her novel after visiting the Cross of the Martyrs in Santa Fe. This initial
inspiration influenced the subject of the novel itself.
A. It reads like a Christian martyrology or saint’s life. There are trials and tribulations and spiritual doubts along the
way, yet with perseverance and divine intervention, Latour succeeds.
B. Like a good saint’s life, the story even contains a miracle.
C. This reminds us that the novel itself has a special debt to the saint’s life, which was one of the early types of
European prose biographies that underlie the novel form.
IX. Fiedler’s idea of “innocent homosexuality” is easy to see in Death Comes for the Archbishop, despite all of the landscape
and local history.
A. The central storyline of the novel involves the archbishop’s lifelong friendship with his fellow priest, Father
Vaillent.
B. When the archbishop is dying, he does not think of Christ and Mary; he thinks about his boyhood friend.
C. In this way, the story joins the tradition of heroic, manly yarns going all the way back to Beowulf and Gilgamesh.
X. This innocent homosexuality is not at all unexpected, because of Cather’s own same-sex values.
A. As a young woman, Cather conscientiously took on many male attributes, and she had several relationships with
women over her lifetime.
B. She was very secretive about these matters for the same reason that Forster was discreet: because homosexuality
continued to be illegal, and such a scandal could wreck a writer’s life.
XI. In her critical writing, Cather tended to focus on writers from what could be called a “gay canon.”
A. In terms of canon formation, Cather’s lesbianism actually worked in her favor in the 1970s, when there was a
renewed interest in staking out one’s own claims for a particular sexuality.
B. It is now rather routine in literary academics to take specific interest in gay or possibly gay writers, as it points to a
unique sexual identity that fits into the larger picture of America as a mosaic of identities.
C. Cather’s novel gives us an extraordinary coming together of this mosaic, and it bespeaks a new direction in
American literature, where the ethnic minority peoples begin to write their own literature.
Suggested Readings:
Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Lee, Willa Cather.
Swift, Willa Cather and the American Southwest.
1. How well has Willa Cather produced her “story of adventure, … a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women,
and love,” to show that a woman writer does not need to restrict herself to the romance-driven fiction of Jane Austen?

2. Does Death Comes for the Archbishop make a surprisingly strong claim as the Great American Novel because it taps
into the core narrative of the national experience—immigrants taming the wilderness—while bringing together so many
different ethnic participants in this epic adventure?

Lecture Thirty-Five
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—Literature?
Scope: J. R. R. Tolkien was educated at Oxford, where he later became a professor of Anglo-Saxon. Invalided home from
the Somme in 1917, Tolkien began devising mythologies for some lost antiquity of enchantment and heroic causes,
as an antidote to the cynicism and industrial ugliness of 20th-century England. Half-forgotten lore survived, he
thought, in Old English classics like Beowulf that were taught at Oxford. He became a campus writer, assimilating
the contents of the required syllabus. Continuing through the darkest days of World War II, his literary fantasy grew
into The Lord of the Rings. Though his top-selling trilogy continues to inspire the genre of fantasy literature—as well
as blockbuster movies and video games—what justifies The Lord of the Rings as a literary masterpiece? How solid is
the Western canon if there is room for Frodo and Gandalf?
Outline
I. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings had a slow takeoff when it was first published in the 1950s, but over the years it has
become a publishing phenomenon beyond anything imaginable by The Da Vinci Code.
A. On average, almost 4 million copies of Tolkien’s books are sold each year.
B. The Lord of the Rings has also passed the translation test: It has been translated into nearly 40 languages.
C. In the course of things, Tolkien essentially invented the genre of fantasy literature, or at least popularized it to a
degree that never existed before.
D. Tolkien’s writing has even encouraged a whole proliferation of video games.
E. In 2000, Amazon.com pronounced The Lord of the Rings not only the book of the century but the book of the
millennium.
II. We really need to put this marketing and sales phenomenon into a larger context of criticism and other benchmarks for
determining a literary canonic work.
A. One benchmark is to have critical appreciation accounting for the popularity. One critic who comes to mind in
Tolkien’s case is Carl Jung, whose idea of “a thousand voices” can be seen in Tolkien’s echoing of traditional
literatures.
B. Another is that genius must recognize genius; in this case, W. H. Auden hailed Tolkien’s work as a supreme literary
achievement.
C. It is always important for scholars and teachers to give their approval to a work; Tolkien is now taught in
universities and is the subject of academic conferences.
D. A great writer must constantly renew himself with the current critical modes; Tolkien has easily plugged into
modern eco-critical discourse.
III. Tolkien is another author whose canon was established after his death. Like Chaucer’s son, Tolkien’s son took charge of
editing and publishing posthumously many of his father’s works.
IV. To understand Tolkien’s position in literary history, we need to appreciate that he, too, belonged to that lost generation
after World War I.
A. He had firsthand experience training for the cavalry before the war, but he ended up as a signaling officer in the
Lancaster Fusiliers.
B. He became extremely frustrated with the breakdown of communication in the field of battle, and he fantasized in his
writing about systems of communication that can work effectively over great distances.
C. Tolkien was sent home with trench fever after the Battle of the Somme, and while he was recuperating, he started
inventing languages and mythologies of England’s lost prehistoric past.
D. The Lord of the Rings is filled with images of trench warfare—lifeless faces in the water, corpses stacked up like
cordwood, and Aragorn’s sympathetic reaction to shell-shocked warriors.
V. There is a sad strain in the story; Frodo’s great achievements are forgotten almost as soon as he returns home.
A. A counterpart can be seen in the works of Faulkner and Cather, where war veterans encounter an unappreciative
reception when they return to their small towns in the South or the Plains states.
B. Frodo himself seems to experience a kind of post-traumatic stress, eventually withdrawing psychologically, and
ultimately physically, into the company of the elves.

VI. J. R. R. Tolkien had a real professional stake in the Western literary canon.
A. In 1912, he had taken a first-class degree in English, which was not a very reputable degree at the time.
B. He knew many languages and made his scholarly reputation with the Oxford edition of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight.
C. In 1925, he was appointed professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and he later delivered a famous lecture about
Beowulf that catapulted the epic into the canon.
D. After becoming Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Tolkien remained in that position until his
retirement; in essence, he spent his entire professional life at Oxford.
E. Oxford’s influence can be seen in Tolkien’s fictional city of Minas Tirith, a place of knowledge and ancient
heritage.
F. He spent most of his career dignifying English as an academic field and put great effort into organizing the syllabus
with major authors and major works.
G. He also became the prototype of the campus author, a figure that we now find often on college campuses.
VII. Tolkien had an interesting sense that The Lord of the Rings was really history.
A. He liked to make believe, in a sense, that the stories he was telling were true stories passed along in the oral
traditions and surfacing later in the earliest written works of England.
B. Tolkien’s premise for his fiction was that these stories had a sense of heroism and adventure that fixed them in
people’s minds.
C. He looked carefully at the archaeology in the region around Oxford and used the Neolithic sites there as inspiration
for episodes in his work.
VIII. T. S. Eliot, another man of Merton College in the early 20th century, gave us a way to appreciate the greatness and
durability of Tolkien’s achievement.
A. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot proposed that truly new pieces of art could reorganize the
existing tradition of great works.
B. Tolkien did this in all of his writing—introducing the new in a way that reconfigured not only the shape but the
membership within the literary canon.
C. He faced a real problem with Chaucer, who had done such an effective job of establishing himself as the starting
point of English literature.
1. In doing this, Chaucer had essentially erased prior writers, especially the Old English writers.
2. Because of his direct influence on Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, and others, Chaucer’s claim as the father of the
tradition was almost insurmountably strong.
D. Tolkien bridged the canonic gap between Old English writers and Chaucer by presuming a continuous arc of
tradition that sailed past Chaucer to the earliest surviving Old English text. In doing so, he redefined the length and
inclusiveness of the English literary canon.
IX. This means that readers of Tolkien have an incentive to go back and read Beowulf and The Wanderer to know the texts
that influenced Tolkien himself. This new talent that Eliot had predicted actually encourages readers, not just academics,
to engage with original works.
Suggested Readings:
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography.
Garth, Tolkien and the Great War.
Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.
1. Professor Tolkien represents the class of academics—including Harold Bloom—who have taken charge of the Western
canon. Can you think of an author or a literary work that enjoys a large number of readers but is not included on the
classroom syllabus at colleges and universities?
2. There are authors whose appeal shrinks over time—for example, the prolific Voltaire is now represented only by
Candide—and authors whose audiences are eager for any scrap of new writing, however mediocre. Does the Western
canon’s harsh processes of exclusion and extinction sometimes save us from marginal works such as The Children of
Húrin and Farmer Giles of Ham?

Lecture Thirty-Six
Postcolonialism—The Empire Writes Back
Scope: The literary culture of England became the property of the non-Western nations wherever the colonial language had
been imposed. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children traces Saleem Sinai’s life from midnight of August 15, 1947, when
both he and the new nation of India were born. Rushdie assimilates the tradition of Lawrence Sterne, Charles
Dickens, and E. M. Forster to write a completely un-English novel, reaching into native mythologies, the Sanskrit
Ramayana, and the Muslim Arabian Nights. Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat against Rushdie only elevated his
status. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient tells how the Hungarian archeologist corrects and expands
Herodotus’s The Histories, indicating how European history—including literary history—can be rewritten by the
outsider. The film The English Patient won nine Academy Awards, as a reminder of how movies, with global
audiences, actually bolster the status of books in the 21st century. The Western canon remains a “survivors’ list,” a
work-in-progress always generated backward, expanding to welcome new members and dropping authors who no
longer speak to the needs of current readers.
Outline
I. The postcolonial novel in English has become an unexpected fulfillment of the prediction made in 1848 by Marx and
Engels about the globalization of literature.
A. They foresaw that Western books would become a kind of export to non-Western countries.
B. Something happened in world trade in the second half of the 20th century that Marx and Engels had not expected:
The cultural forms of the West provided models for domestic manufacture in non-Western nations.
C. The English language, especially in the genre of the novel, became the chief means for non-Western writers to
appropriate the cultural heritage of both the English and American traditions.
II. Postcolonial novels have come especially from the subcontinent of South Asia, and it is easy to see why historically.
A. India had come under English influence very early, with the arrival of the East India Company licensed by
Elizabeth I.
B. Even after India’s independence from British colonial administration, English itself would continue as the official
language of India.
III. I want to consider two cases of outstanding postcolonial novelists, both with family roots in South Asia: Salman Rushdie
and Michael Ondaatje.
IV. Rushdie was born into a secular Muslim family in Bombay in 1947, the same year that India achieved its independence.
A. He was educated at Rugby School in England and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, where the writer-in-
residence was the elderly E. M. Forster, author of the famous Anglo-Indian novel A Passage to India.
B. Rushdie recognized himself as the Indian half of this Anglo-Indian equation, writing in the English language but as a
transnational with a very different point of view.
C. The title of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children comes from a famous pronouncement by India’s first Prime Minister:
“At the stroke of the midnight hour … India will awake to life and freedom.”
D. Rushdie’s novel gives utterance to a nation torn and divided across the split represented by midnight itself, looking
back at the past and forward into the unfolding future.
V. Rushdie did the work of any writer who aspires to join the canon by making Midnight’s Children assimilate prior
canonic works, specifically in the English novel tradition.
A. Rushdie also appropriated the native, non-Western techniques of storytelling from his homeland, namely the oral
tradition of circular narrative.
B. Despite these gestures toward the native Indian tradition, Rushdie otherwise made all the right moves to insert
himself into the Western canon, including the accumulation of important prizes and the creation of a prolific body of
work across genres.
C. Rushdie also achieved the dubious type of celebrity associated with scandal; his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses,
garnered him a fatwa, or death sentence, from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and he came close to joining the long
list of literary martyrs.
D. Another important move for Rushdie was his acceptance by academics and scholars. Midnight’s Children almost
always ends up now on the syllabus of the modern British novel or postcolonial literature course.

E. As a critic, Rushdie summoned up the authority of T. S. Eliot, reiterating the idea of a new work reshaping the
tradition.
VI. I move now to the work of a second postcolonial novelist, and we will ponder again whether he, too, has made the right
moves to join the Western canon. The author is Michael Ondaatje, and the work is The English Patient.
A. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka of mixed heritage, including Dutch and Portuguese.
B. Because of his travels to England, his education in Canada, and his teaching career at York University, Ondaatje
knew the Western canon from the inside. It was almost second nature for him to connect his own work with the prior
masterpieces of the canon.
C. The English Patient is a wartime love story set in Italy, and in this way it connects itself to both Hemingway and
Stendhal.
D. It is also a lyrical novel very much in the tradition of Virginia Woolf. Ondaatje was known as a poet before he
became a novelist, so the lyrical novel came naturally to him.
E. As a Canadian, Ondaatje also aligns himself with the American tradition. Like Moby-Dick, The English Patient is
brimming with encyclopedic, technical, how-to information.
F. The eventual playing out of a scenario from Herodotus among the characters in the novel reminds us of the Platonic
process of mimesis that has functioned in the Western canon for thousands of years.
G. The Hungarian archaeologist, one of the main characters of the novel, has a real passion for Herodotus and uses The
Histories as a guidebook to the Egyptian desert, correcting and supplementing as he goes along.
VII. Like Rushdie, Ondaatje operates as a transnational author schooled in a tradition not originally his own.
A. This turns out to be a great boost for a writer aspiring to enter the global marketplace, as people once colonized by
English-speaking cultures assimilate and domesticate the language.
B. The English language has a huge, flexible vocabulary and a plasticity that makes it a superb vehicle for writers from
other traditions.
C. But writing in English does not make an author English, and this points to an irony in Ondaatje’s novel—most of the
main characters are not actually English.
VIII. If you look at the continuing reception of The English Patient, you’ll see that Ondaatje, like Rushdie, has made all the
right moves for entering the canon.
A. He has won the prestigious Booker Prize and has himself been the subject of a long biography.
B. The English Patient has been translated into multiple languages and was adapted as a prize-winning movie.
C. Ondaatje continues to write and publish and has paid special attention to the ruthlessness of the literary tradition
when it comes to eliminating authors and works.
IX. There is good news in the relentless process of canon formation: Inclusion is also a constantly operating principle.
A. Professor Harold Bloom worries that we have, in fact, gained too many masterpieces.
B. I am more optimistic; we continue to be a culture that respects the classics, if only sometimes in the naming and the
citing.
X. We remain “the people of the book.”
A. The old book bazaar in Istanbul continues to function in the same way that it has for a thousand years, trading
everything from economic texts to works by Rumi. One can see here the whole story of the Western canon in one
place.
B. Our culture remains one organized around the marketing and consumption of books, as we can see in our ubiquitous
bookstores, libraries, and online resources.
C. I have tremendous confidence that the Western canon is alive and well in the 21st century.
Suggested Readings:
Ondaatje, The English Patient.
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back.
Ondaatje et al., eds., Lost Classics.

1. In addition to women writers, the great English novelists have frequently been outsiders. As precursors of the
postcolonial, American novelists have continued this trend by writing their novels in English, but not as Englishmen.
Does the novel as a genre basically belong to “marginal” writers? Can you think of a single canonic English novelist who
is 100 percent mainstream English?
2. Think of a favorite book of your own that did not “make it” into the canon. What went wrong? What factors might have
changed the outcome?

Timeline
B.C.
c. 2700 ............................................ Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk.
c. 1600 ............................................ Earliest version of The Epic of Gilgamesh takes shape in Old Babylonian.
c. 1300 ............................................ Gilgamesh written as “Standard Version” in Akkadian.
c. 1150 ............................................ Troy destroyed by Mycenaean Greeks.
c. 700 .............................................. Homer writes the Iliad and the Odyssey.
586 .................................................. Babylonian exile of the Jews.
536–533 .......................................... In Athens, Thespis develops the form of tragedy featuring a solo actor.
490–479 .......................................... Greeks repulse Persian invasion at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea.
c. 440 .............................................. Herodotus writes The Histories.
431 .................................................. Euripides writes Medea.
431–404 .......................................... Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.
c. 427–347 ...................................... Life of Plato, author of Apology of Socrates.
c. 426 .............................................. Sophocles writes Oedipus the King.
c. 400 .............................................. Thucydides writes History of the Peloponnesian War.
399 .................................................. Trial and execution of Socrates.
384–322 .......................................... Life of Aristotle, author of Poetics.
334 .................................................. Alexander the Great defeats the Persian Empire.
264–146 .......................................... The three Punic Wars, including Rome’s final destruction of Carthage.
70–19 .............................................. Life of Virgil, author of the Aeneid.
44 .................................................... Julius Caesar assassinated at Rome.
43 B.C.–A.D. 17 ............................. Life of Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses.
31 .................................................... Augustus defeats Antony and Cleopatra at Actium.
A.D.
43 .................................................... Claudius makes Britannia a Roman province for the next four centuries.
50–100 ............................................ The four Gospels of the New Testament are written.
325 .................................................. The Council of Nicaea separates orthodox from heretical Christian doctrines.
330 .................................................. Emperor Constantine moves the Roman imperial capital to Byzantium, renamed after
himself as Constantinople (today called Istanbul).
331 .................................................. Constantine commissions Eusebius of Caesarea to supply 50 Bibles for churches in his
new capital.
367 .................................................. Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria establishes a “canon” of books for the New Testament.
382 .................................................. Pope Damasus I commissions Saint Jerome to undertake a revised translation of the
Latin Bible.
387 .................................................. Saint Augustine converts to Christianity.
391 .................................................. Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.
395–408 .......................................... Split of Roman Empire into the Latin West and Greek East.
449 .................................................. Coming of the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Britain.

524 .................................................. Boethius writes Consolation of Philosophy.
Early 6th century.............................. Historical setting of Beowulf.
598 .................................................. Christian missionaries arrive in England from Rome.
731 .................................................. Bede completes his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
9th century ....................................... Probable date for the writing of Beowulf.
899 .................................................. Death of Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons.
1066 ................................................ Norman invasion of England; the French language is imposed on the Anglo-Saxons.
1215 ................................................ The Fourth Lateran Council convened in Rome by Pope Innocent III.
c. 1220 ............................................ Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus writes the earliest version of Hamlet.
c. 1301–1321 .................................. Dante writes the Divine Comedy.
1337–1453 ...................................... The Hundred Years’ War between England and France.
1348–1349 ...................................... The bubonic plague reaches Europe.
1353 ................................................ Boccaccio writes the Decameron.
1380s............................................... Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is composed by an unknown author.
1390s............................................... Two Wycliffite translations of Bible into English are created.
c. 1400 ............................................ Chaucer writes the Canterbury Tales.
1405 ................................................ Tamerlane’s death leaves a power vacuum in Asia.
1453 ................................................ Constantinople falls to Turks, and Byzantine scholars migrate westward with Greek
manuscripts.
1455 ................................................ Gutenberg prints the Latin Bible on a movable-type press.
1488–1513 ...................................... Aldine editions of Greek classics by Homer, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Plato are printed
in Venice.
1492 ................................................ Ferdinand and Isabella capture the last Muslim stronghold at Grenada; Columbus
discovers America.
1514–1522 ...................................... The five-volume Polyglot Bible is produced in Spain as the first original-language texts
of the Scriptures.
1515 ................................................ Erasmus edits the Greek New Testament at Cambridge University.
1516 ................................................ Sir Thomas More writes Utopia.
1532 ................................................ Machiavelli writes The Prince.
1534 ................................................ Henry VIII of England breaks with the Church of Rome; Martin Luther completes his
German translation of the Bible.
1539 ................................................ Franciscan missionaries first enter the territory later called New Mexico.
1540 ................................................ Death of the historical Dr. Faust, magician and charlatan.
1546 ................................................ Council of Trent confirms the canonic contents of Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible.
1547–1616 ...................................... Life of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.
1588 ................................................ Spanish Armada attempts to invade England, outfitted by funds partly raised
by Cervantes.
1564–1616 ...................................... Life of William Shakespeare, author of Hamlet and The Tempest.
1607 ................................................ English found the Jamestown colony in Virginia; the first recorded performance of
Hamlet is performed on a ship off Sierra Leone; Don Quixote is performed as an amateur
skit in Peru.

1610 ................................................ Spanish found Santa Fe in New Mexico; Historia de la Neuva México is published
in Madrid.
1611 ................................................ King James Bible published.
1619 ................................................ Start of the African slave trade in North America.
1620 ................................................ English Puritans arrive in Massachusetts.
1623 ................................................ First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays published seven years after his death.
1649 ................................................ Charles I of England executed.
1649–1660 ...................................... Puritans rule England.
1660 ................................................ Restoration of Charles II and the English monarchy.
1667 ................................................ John Milton publishes Paradise Lost.
1680 ................................................ Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, leading to the reconquest in 1692.
1755 ................................................ Novelist Tobias Smollett translates Don Quixote into English; Lisbon earthquakes
kill 30,000.
1756–1763 ...................................... Seven Years’ War involving nine European powers.
1759 ................................................ Voltaire publishes Candide anonymously.
1789 ................................................ French Revolution begins with the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
1798 ................................................ Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt begins the West’s long-term involvement in the
Middle East.
1803–1815 ...................................... Napoleonic Wars, including the 1812 invasion of Russia.
1808 ................................................ Goethe writes Faust, Part I.
1810–1821 ...................................... Mexican War of Independence from Spain.
1813 ................................................ Jane Austen writes Pride and Prejudice.
1815 ................................................ Battle of Waterloo.
1832 ................................................ Goethe writes Faust, Part II.
1839 ................................................ Stendhal writes The Charterhouse of Parma.
1846–1848 ...................................... Mexican American War cedes southwest lands to the United States.
1848 ................................................ Marx and Engels write the Communist Manifesto; uprisings occur across Europe.
1851 ................................................ Herman Melville writes Moby-Dick.
1861–1865 ...................................... American Civil War.
1868–1869 ...................................... Leo Tolstoy writes War and Peace.
1871 ................................................ Unification of Germany following the Franco-Prussian War.
1872 ................................................ George Smith decodes the cuneiform language of the Gilgamesh tablets unearthed by
Austen Layard at Nineveh.
1904 ................................................ June 16, “Bloomsday,” setting for James Joyce’s Ulysses.
1914–1918 ...................................... First World War.
1920 ................................................ Gandhi starts India’s independence movement.
1922 ................................................ James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are written.
1924 ................................................ Thomas Mann writes The Magic Mountain.
1925 ................................................ Virginia Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway.
1927 ................................................ Willa Cather writes Death Comes for the Archbishop.

1929 ................................................ William Faulkner writes The Sound and the Fury.
1935 ................................................ Sir Thomas More is canonized as a Catholic saint.
1936 ................................................ J. R. R. Tolkien’s British Academy lecture boosts Beowulf into the canon.
1939–1945 ...................................... World War II.
1943 ................................................ T. S. Eliot writes Four Quartets.
1945 ................................................ Discovery of the long-lost Gnostic Gospels at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
1947 ................................................ Independence, then partition, of India and Pakistan.
1954–1955 ...................................... J. R. R. Tolkien writes The Lord of the Rings.
1980 ................................................ Salman Rushdie writes Midnight’s Children.
1992 ................................................ Michael Ondaatje writes The English Patient.
2003 ................................................ The United States begins the occupation of Iraq, homeland of Gilgamesh.

Glossary
allegory: A literary mode, meaning “to say one thing and mean another”; that includes parables, personification, irony, and
sarcasm.
Amadis de Gaule: Don Quixote’s favorite chivalric quest-romance, read also by the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico.
Andalusía: Ancient Islamic homeland in southern Iberia, containing the great cities Granada and Córdoba; the area where
Don Quixote heads on his quest.
Babylonian Captivity: Period during the 6th century B.C. when Hebrew scholars used the new alphabet to compile the
earliest books of the Old Testament.
canon: An official list of books and authors.
catharsis: Of Greek origin; Aristotle’s term for the purging or purifying of powerful emotions such as fear and terror.
chivalric quest-romance: Narrative of the knightly hero who sets out from the court on a quest, encounters dangerous
adventures in the wilderness, and returns victoriously to the court afterward.
codex: A leaf-form book, bound at the spine, with pages that can be turned; the plural is codices.
deus ex machina: Of Latin origin; literally “god out of the machine,” referring to the crane used to lower some supernatural
character onto the stage, as well as a quick, artificial means for ending a drama, deplored by Aristotle.
dystopia: A very bad society, the opposite of utopia.
fetish: Inanimate object, like a book, revered because it is believed to possess magical powers; in Freud’s sense, an erotic
object; this definition was adopted by Mann in Magic Mountain.
hubris: Of Greek origin; the blind arrogance of man’s ambition.
in medias res: Of Latin origin; means “into the middle of things” and describes the chronology of the epic from Homer
through Virgil and to John Milton.
kolossal: Of German origin; aesthetic of something “colossal” creating a sense of the spectacular and the sublime.
liberal: Champion of political freedom and individual rights against tyranny, supporter of ideals of American and French
revolutions extended to Italy (Stendhal) and Russia (Tolstoy).
lollardy: Early Christian reform movement in England, started by followers of Wyclif (d. 1384), with sympathizers like
Chaucer, laying foundations for the Tudor Reformation of the 16th century.
mimesis: Of Greek origin; “imitation,” either art imitating the reality of life or human beings imitating the examples
preserved in literary texts.
nemesis: Of Greek origin; the divine force undercutting human greatness and ambition.
novella: Of Italian origin; “new story” or fictional narrative, usually short, typically comical, like those collected by
Boccaccio in his Decameron.
parchment: Named after the Greek city of Pergamum, a writing surface made from animal skin; used instead of Egyptian
papyrus.
Pentateuch: The first five books of the Old Testament.
picaresque: Describes a novel with a “hero” who is a rogue, deadbeat, or comic simpleton stumbling through a series of
misadventures.
pietas: Of Latin origin; the sense of Roman duty and responsibility that takes precedence over personal desires, exemplified
by Virgil’s Aeneas.
postcolonial writer: An author in a previously colonized country who responds to the prior invaders by writing in his own
native language (Chaucer) or using the intruder language in nontraditional ways (Salman Rushdie).
Septuagint: The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures produced in Alexandria beginning in the 3rd century B.C.,
adopted by early Christians in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean.
Sophists: Athenian rhetoric specialists trained to “make the worst case appear the best”; the first lawyers.
teleology: From the Greek work for “target,” concerns the aims and conclusions of events in a plotline.

theodicy: Trust in God’s goodness despite evil and injustice in the world.
translatio imperii: Of Latin origin; the “transition of power” from one country to another.
translatio studii: Of Latin origin; the “transition of culture” from one country to another.
utopia: More’s made-up name, mixing Greek eu topia (“good place”) with ou topia (“no place”); origin of the adjective
utopian.
vellum: Named after the word for “calf,” a writing surface made from cow or other animal skin; used throughout most of the
Middle Ages.

Biographical Notes
Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.): The first great tragic playwright with surviving works, including Prometheus Bound, The
Persians—which contains his eye-witness account of the Athenian naval victory at Salamis—and his only surviving trilogy,
The Oresteia.
Alcibiades (450–404 B.C.): Athenian nobleman and student of Socrates; backed the invasion of Sicily and betrayed his
homeland during the Peloponnesian War; a memorable character in Plato’s Symposium.
Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515): Italian humanist and publisher; printed “Aldine editions” of Greek classics in Venice and
invented italic type.
Alexander of Macedonia (356–323 B.C.): Student of Aristotle; united Greece, conquered the Persian Empire (including
Egypt), and spread Greek culture throughout his domain.
Alfred the Great (849–899): King of the West Saxons; held back Viking Danes and ordered books such as Boethius’s
Consolation and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History translated into Old English.
Ambrose, Saint (339–397): Bishop of Milan, one of the Four Doctors of the Church; served as an example to Saint
Augustine for interpreting the Bible allegorically.
Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512): Florentine navigator; published accounts of his voyages to the New World between 1499
and 1502, influenced More’s Utopia, and had America named after him.
Aristophanes (c. 456–c. 386 B.C.): Athenian comic playwright who satirized Socrates in The Clouds; also a character in
Plato’s Symposium.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.): Student of Plato; lectured on dozens of fields of knowledge, including Poetics, but had his treatises
published only long after his death.
Ashurbanipal (7th century B.C.): The Assyrian king whose library at Nineveh preserved tablets of Gilgamesh discovered by
Austen Layard and decoded by George Smith.
Athanasius (293–373): Bishop of Alexandria; proclaimed the “canon” of 27 books for the New Testament and wrote the Life
of St. Anthony that facilitated Saint Augustine’s conversion.
Auerbach, Erich (1892–1957): German literary scholar and Jewish refugee from the Nazis; wrote his classic study Mimesis
using only the primary canonic texts available to him in Istanbul during World War II; died as a professor at Yale.
Augustine, Saint (354–430): Bishop of Hippo and author of the Confessions; established official Church theology and fixed
the canon of 46 books of the Old and New Testaments.
Augustus Caesar (63 B.C.–A.D. 14): The first Roman Emperor; commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid as the national
epic proclaiming Rome’s manifest destiny to rule the world.
Austen, Jane (1775–1817): Wrote six well-loved novels, including Pride and Prejudice, which she published anonymously;
her last two novels, including Northanger Abbey, were published posthumously.
Averroës (1126–1198): Muslim scholar, physician, and scientist working mostly in Spain; produced an Arabic version of
Aristotle’s Poetics that was later translated into Latin for European readers.
Barlaam of Calabria (1290–1348): A Greek from southern Italy and Constantinople-based theologian; assisted Italians at
translating Homer, Euripides, and Aristotle into Latin.
Bede, Saint (672–735): Monastic scholar; wrote Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) describing the Anglo-
Saxon invasions and later conversion of Britain to Christianity; honored among the most brilliant theologians in Dante’s
Paradiso.
Bloom, Harold (b. 1930): Yale English professor; author of The Western Canon, which centers on Shakespeare; The Anxiety
of Influence, which examines generational competition between great authors; and The Story of J, which suggests that early
books of the Old Testament were written by a woman; read Moby-Dick at age 16.
Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375): Florentine author of the Decameron, Falls of Great Men (which uses Boethian tragedy as
pattern for world history), and Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, preserving ancient mythologies based on newly discovered
Greek manuscripts.

Boethius (c. 480–524): The last great Roman; translated Greek philosophical texts into Latin and authored Consolation of
Philosophy while awaiting execution by the Ostrogoth king; his relics lie in the same church as Saint Augustine’s outside
Milan.
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1803–1873): English novelist, once extremely popular for works like Paul Clifford and Last Days
of Pompeii, now fallen out of the canon; has a “bad writing” contest named after him.
Campbell, Joseph (1904–1987): Scholar of comparative mythologies, champion of James Joyce, and commentator on Sir
Gawain; interviewed in a celebrated PBS series The Power of Myth.
Cather, Willa (1873–1947): American author best known for Nebraska novels like O Pioneers!; also wrote the New Mexico
classic Death Comes for the Archbishop; now studied largely as a lesbian writer.
Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616): Spanish adventurer and author; wrote Oriental plays like Great Sultana, pastoral novel
Galatea, and Don Quixote Part I (1605) and Part II (1615); died on the same date as Shakespeare.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340–1400): Author of the Canterbury Tales whose kinship with Lancastrian kings helped his status
as Father of English Literature, edging out William Langland and the anonymous Gawain poet.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 B.C.): Roman politician and philosopher whose long-lost letters, discovered by Petrarch,
revised Latin prose style for Renaissance authors such as Erasmus, Thomas More, and John Milton as well as the Italian
prose of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Constantine I (c. 272–337): Roman Emperor; ended the persecution of Christians, converted, summoned the Council of
Nicaea to settle doctrines of faith, moved the capital to the old Greek city of Byzantium, and ordered 50 Bibles for the
churches in the new capital Constantinople in 331.
Cotton, Sir Robert (1571–1631): English courtier and antiquarian; after the dissolution of monastic libraries in Britain,
compiled a massive collection of medieval manuscripts that included unique copies of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, almost lost in a fire in 1731.
Demetrius of Phaleron (c. 350–c. 280 B.C.): Athenian follower of Aristotle; exiled to Egypt, he is credited with organizing
the great Library of Alexandria as a center for preserving, copying, editing, and studying books.
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (1496–1584): Conquistador with Cortés against the Aztecs; author of The True History of the
Conquest of New Spain.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868–1963): African American writer and civil rights leader whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
announced “the problem of the color line” as the chief challenge of the 20th century; became a citizen of Ghana at age 95.
Eliot, T. S. (1888–1965): American poet, dramatist, and critic; published three poems charting his spiritual quest: The Waste
Land, Ash Wednesday, and The Four Quartets, as well as the church drama Murder in the Cathedral and the comic poems
made into the musical Cats.
Erasmus, Desiderius (1469–1536): Dutch scholar, friend of Sir Thomas More, and author of The Praise of Folly; produced a
Greek edition of the New Testament in 1515.
Euripides (c. 484–406 B.C.): Last of the three great tragic playwrights; won third prize for edgy dramas like Medea, but has
more surviving plays than any other tragic poet.
Eusebius (c. 263–339): Bishop of Caesarea; influential at the Council of Nicaea, he sorted out “acknowledged” books of the
New Testament and wrote History of the Church.
Faulkner, William (1897–1962): American writer; produced short stories and novels like The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom! Absalom! concerned with South’s race relations; honored as a “regional writer” when awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1950.
Fletcher, John (1579–1625): English playwright, educated at Cambridge; collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII, the
lost Cardenio, and the Bard’s last play, The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Forster, E. M. (1879–1970): English writer whose Aspects of the Novel contains brilliant critical insights; his novel A
Passage to India (1924) provided an example for Postcolonial novelists like Salman Rushdie; his novel Maurice, written in
1913 but published posthumously in 1971, became a classic in the gay literary canon.
Foucault, Michel (1926–1984): French social historian and public intellectual; published Birth of the Clinic and Discipline
and Punish examining how modern institutions create a “carceral society” using matrix to render people “docile and
capable”; taught at Berkeley and died of AIDS.

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939): Austrian psychiatrist and writer; introduced the “Oedipal complex” as a way to understand
Hamlet in Interpretation of Dreams (1900), as well as studies of phallic images and erotic fetishes, influencing writers like
Thomas Mann.
Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100–1155): Welsh, Oxford scholar whose History of the Kings of Britain introduced King Arthur
to English literature, popularized belief that Trojan refugees colonized Britain, and told the earliest version of King Lear.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832): The first great German-language author; studied law, became court official in
Weimar, began as an 18th-century writer with Sorrows of Young Werther, ended as a 19th-century Romantic with Faust, Parts
I and II, and did research on plant morphology that influenced Darwin.
Gregory of Tours, Saint (538–594): Refers to Beowulf’s uncle Hygelac in his History of the Franks.
Heaney, Seamus (b. 1939): Irish poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, roaming academic, and bestselling translator
of Beowulf.
Herodotus (c. 484–c. 420 B.C.): Authored The Histories as the first major prose work examining the cultures of Egypt and
Persia, including Xerxes’s invasion of Greece and the confrontation with the Spartans at Thermopylae.
Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679): English political philosopher, Royalist contemporary of John Milton, translator of
Thucydides’s Peloponnesian Wars, author of Leviathan, and first scholar to point out that Moses did not write the
Pentateuch.
Innocent III (c. 1161–1216): Pope and author of On the Misery of the Human Condition; launched the Albigensian Crusade
in southern France, convened the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) with sweeping religious reforms, and oversaw the Fourth
Crusade while setting the stage for the Fifth Crusade.
Jerome, Saint (c. 347–c. 420): Traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East, rendered an official translation of the Bible
into Latin by order of Pope Damasus I, and died as a hermit outside Bethlehem.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel (1709–1784): English critic and man of letters; educated at Oxford, compiled the Dictionary, edited
Shakespeare in eight volumes, wrote Lives of the Poets outlining the English literary canon since the Renaissance, and gave
critical support for the novel as a distinctive English genre.
Jones, Terry (b. 1942): Welsh, Oxford-trained scholar of medieval literature, political commentator, and writer/director of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which he played Sir Bedevere.
Joyce, James (1882–1941): Irish writer; defined the Modernist movement with Ulysses (1922) and spent the rest of his
career in Paris working on the experimental novel Finnegans Wake.
Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961): Swiss psychologist and scholar of world religions; introduced the notion of the “universal
unconscious” as the source of artistic creativity and promoted “archetypal” criticism; instrumental in the history of
Alcoholics Anonymous.
Lachmann, Karl (1793–1851): German philologist; pioneered new editorial methods for the New Testament as well as
Homer, Latin poets, and medieval German literature.
Langland, William (c. 1330–c. 1400): Credited with authorship of Piers Plowman, the first national bestseller in English
and the founding text of the Puritan literary tradition.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716): German mathematician, philosopher, and polymath whose Théodicée (1710)
proposed “the best of all possible worlds” satirized by Voltaire’s Candide; he invented calculus and discovered the binary
number system that would become the basis for modern computers.
Leontius Pilatus (d. 1366): Taught Greek to Boccaccio, translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into Latin, and was struck by
lightning while sailing to visit Petrarch in Venice.
Lewis, C. S. (1898–1963): Oxford scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, Christian apologist, and friend of J. R. R.
Tolkien, whose fantasy fiction inspired his “Chronicles of Narnia.”
Longinus (probably fl. 1st century A.D.): Classical literary critic whose On the Sublime emphasized the artist’s “genius” and
the spectacular effect of “sublimity.”
Mann, Thomas (1875–1955): German novelist and political exile; started Magic Mountain as a companion piece to the
homoerotic classic Death in Venice, won the Nobel Prize for bestseller Buddenbrooks, and later wrote his own Doctor
Faustus.
Marcion of Sinope (110–160): Rejected the Old Testament and established an early “canon” of the New Testament
comprising only the Gospel of Saint Luke and the 10 letters of Saint Paul.

Marx, Karl (1818–1883): German economic historian whose Communist Manifesto announced a “world literature” spread
by global trade; in 1849, he settled in London to continue his research at the British Library.
Melville, Herman (1819–1891): American author; won his reputation as a sex symbol with his early Polynesian novels
Typee and Omoo before publishing Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Milton, John (1608–1674): English humanist scholar; educated at Cambridge, became a civil servant in the Puritan
Commonwealth, and, after going blind, composed Paradise Lost by dictating to his daughters.
More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535): English courtier under Henry VIII, friend of Erasmus, Catholic martyr, and author of
Utopia; his biography was written by son-in-law William Roper.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900): German Classical scholar and philosopher, early champion of Wagner’s operas; wrote
The Birth of Tragedy, distinguishing creative Apollonian and destructive Dionysian strains, as well as Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and The Will to Power; retired to Italy and died of syphilis.
Ondaatje, Michael (b. 1943): Canadian writer born in Sri Lanka of Dutch-Portuguese parentage whose lyrical novel The
English Patient won the Booker Prize and was made into an Oscar-winning film.
Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 254): Greek scholar and author of 6,000 theological works; improved the text of Septuagint
and combined the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in a single codex.
Ovid [Publius Ovidius Naso] (43 B.C.–A.D. 17): Assimilated Greek and Roman mythology in the Metamorphoses, was
exiled by Emperor Augustus for the immorality of Art of Love, and influenced every later European artist from Chaucer,
Botticelli, and Shakespeare to Franz Kafka, Salvador Dalí, and Ted Hughes.
Petrarch, Francis (1304–1374): First-ever international literary celebrity, friend and senior colleague of Boccaccio; he
invented the sonnet sequence, pioneered rediscovery of the Classics, was crowned as Poet Laureate for his Latin epic Africa,
and was the first to dismiss the medieval period as the “Dark Ages.”
Plato (c. 427–c. 347 B.C.): Student of Socrates; authored the 25 dialogues, as well as The Apology of Socrates, that serve as
the foundation of Western philosophy.
Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1823): English novelist whose Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) popularized Gothic fiction; influenced Sir
Walter Scott and Mary Shelley, but was lampooned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.
Richard II (1367–1400): King of England, patron of the Gawain Poet and Geoffrey Chaucer, and subject of a tragic history
by Shakespeare.
Rushdie, Salman (b. 1947): Indian-born writer educated at Cambridge whose Midnight’s Children became a landmark
Postcolonial novel and whose Satanic Verses earned him a death sentence for blasphemy against Islam.
Sappho (c. 610–c. 570 B.C.): The greatest of the early Greek lyric poets; her works were almost completely lost, perhaps
because Christians objected to their erotic content or because her obscure Aeolic dialect forced dropping her poems from the
Byzantine curriculum; the term “lesbian” derives from her home island of Lesbos.
Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150–c. 1220): Danish historian whose Gesta Danorum provided the earliest version of the Hamlet
story.
Schliemann, Heinrich (1822–1890): German businessman and amateur archeologist; led early excavations at Mycenae and
Troy to demonstrate the historical basis for Homer’s epics.
Shakespeare, William (1564–1616): English playwright and theater professional; wrote successful tragedies, histories, and
comedies during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, but his collected plays were only published seven years after death in
the First Folio.
Smollett, Tobias (1721–1771): Scottish writer; translated Don Quixote (1755) and pioneered the “picaresque” novel with
Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker.
Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.): Greek playwright; added the third actor and brought Athenian tragedy to its apex with Oedipus
the King, Aristotle’s favorite.
Stanley, Sir Henry (1841–1904): Welsh explorer and journalist; found Dr. David Livingston in 1871 and returned to Africa
with 180 pounds of books, including Shakespeare, to advance Belgium’s colonial ambitions in the Congo.
Stendhal (1783–1842): One of many pen-names of the writer Marie-Henri Beyle, author of travel writings, biographies, and
criticism, as well as the “Romantic realist” novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Tacitus (56–c. 117): Roman historian; wrote Germania as an ethnography describing the pagan practices of Germanic
barbarians.
Thespis (fl. c. 530 B.C.): Legendary founder of Athenian tragedy; made the protagonist a solo performer with the chorus.
Thucydides (c. 460–c. 395 B.C.): Athenian historian; wrote Peloponnesian War, concerning the long period of warfare
between Athens and Sparta that spilled over to Sicily.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1892–1973): Oxford English professor and fantasy writer; championed Beowulf as a literary masterpiece,
edited Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and wrote his own heroic epic The Lord of the Rings, which became one of the top-
selling publications in Western history.
Tolstoy, Leo (1828–1910): Russian aristocrat and writer whose classic novels War and Peace and Anna Karinina were
followed by spiritual books like Resurrection and the early Postcolonial novel Hadji Murád, inspired by his military service
during the Crimean War (1853–1856):
Virgil [Publius Virgilius Maro] (70–19 B.C.): Wrote pastoral poetry before being commissioned by Augustus to produce
the Aeneid as a Homeric epic celebrating Rome’s origins and future greatness; died while returning from a research trip to
Greece.
Voltaire (1694–1778): Pen-name of François-Marie Arouet; author of hundreds of plays, histories, poems, philosophical and
political tracts, and 20 satirical novellas, including Candide; made a fortune through shrewd financial dealings and box-office
hits in Paris.
Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941): English novelist and critic; published lyrical novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
which were printed by her husband Leonard’s Hogarth Press; she was the inspiration behind Michael Cunningham’s The
Hours; her Room of One’s Own (1929) became a feminist manifesto.
Wyclif, John (c. 1325–1384): Oxford theologian; condemned religious corruption and papal power, encouraged the
Reformation movement, and championed two complete translations of the Bible into English during the 1390s.

Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. The poet wanted no biography, and his estate did
everything possible to hinder efforts at this first-rate attempt at connecting the author’s life and works.
Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, The Persians, translated by Philip Vellacott. London:
Penguin Books, 1961. This clean, agile translation is prefaced by a helpful introduction, play by play.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, translated by John Ciardi. London: NAL Trade, 2003. This is my favorite translation,
faithful to the original, yet stunning as poetry, with just enough endnotes.
Alter, Robert, and Frank Kermode, eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
More than two dozen international specialists contributed to this introduction under the guidance of the eminent literary critic
Kermode and biblical scholar Alter.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial
Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. This comprehensive study opens up debate about the relationships of emerging
literatures of India, Africa, the West Indies, and Canada as context for the achievements of Rushdie and Ondaatji.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Fiftieth-anniversary edition, 2003. This text remains the single most respected volume
of literary criticism from the 20th century, doing much to define the Western canon from Homer to Virginia Woolf, and is
itself now a canonic masterwork.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 3rd ed. Edited by Donald Gray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Contains family letters,
biography, early writings, and selections from modern criticism.
Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. This classic study sets War and
Peace in the context of the European novel and elevates Tolstoy to the status of Shakespeare as supremely retrospective of
writers.
Bell, Quentin. Bloomsbury. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Written by Virginia Woolf’s nephew, her first
biographer.
Beowulf: A Verse Translation, translated by Seamus Heaney, edited by Daniel Donoghue. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
Includes the Nobel Laureate’s bestselling translation, as well as J. R. R. Tolkien’s landmark lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics” (1936).
Bercaw, Mary K. Melville’s Sources. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987. This indispensable volume includes
reports of the original whale “Mocha Dick” and the sinking of the Essex.
Berlin, Sir Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. 1953. Reprint, London: Phoenix
Books, 1999. Tries to categorize thinkers either as hedgehogs who know one big thing (Plato and Dante) or foxes who know
many things (Herodotus, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Joyce).
Besterman, Theodore. Voltaire. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. The most informative biography.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. Views the
European tradition as a father-son competition between powerful authors, over many centuries, centered on Shakespeare.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron, translated and edited by Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1977. Selections, also including Petrarch’s letters to Boccaccio, four early biographies, and Auerbach’s chapter from
Mimesis.
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Theological Tractates and Consolation of Philosophy, translated and edited by H.
F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester. Loeb Classical Library, 74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Facing
Latin and English texts of the Consolation as well Christian treatises like On the Trinity.
Bowers, John M. Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2007. Asks why Chaucer became the “Father of English Literature” instead of his London contemporary, William Langland,
author of the more influential and widely read Piers Plowman.
———. The Politics of “Pearl”: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Asks why the
author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains anonymous and his brilliant poetry survives in a single modest
manuscript.
Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991–2000. This biography
received rave reviews even from the German literary establishment; a third volume is projected.
Brewer, Derek, and Jonathan Gibson, eds. A Companion to the “Gawain”-Poet. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Contains
important studies of “Authorship,” “Manuscript,” and “Historical Background.”

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Drawing richly upon the
Confessions, this beautifully written biography has become a classic in its own right.
Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the
Twentieth Century. New York: Knopf, 2008. Uses the two Greek historians as the alternative models for all later history
writers.
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Hardly sheltered, Austen learned much
about her era’s political and philosophical controversies from other novels.
Calvino, Italo. “Guide to New Readers of Stendhal’s Charterhouse.” In Why Read the Classics?, translated by Martin
McLaughlin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. This collection includes other lively, loving essays on the Odyssey, Ovid,
Candide, and Tolstoy, as well as his exploration of Charterhouse as perhaps “the best novel ever written.”
Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–. Series includes excellent, up-to-date
collections of essays on (in chronological order) the Bible, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, St. Augustine, Beowulf, Dante, Cervantes,
Jane Austen, Goethe, Melville, Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, Cather, and postcolonial literary studies.
Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Written with family support by
someone who knew Tolkien personally, this biography does a brilliant job of shedding light on the relation between the
Oxford professor’s life and the contents of his works.
Casson, Lionel. Libraries of the Ancient World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. This brief book provides a
smart overview of the earliest libraries of Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, imperial Rome, and the early Middle Ages.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990. Bare text without introduction or
annotations.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote, translated by Burton Raffel and edited by Diana de Armas Wilson. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1999. Contains “Don Quijote across the Centuries” and criticism by Carlos Fuentes, Harold Bloom, and Michel
Foucault, plus Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”
Chadwick, Henry. Boethius: The Consolation of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
Discusses the career of Boethius as a Platonist who happened also to be a Christian.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. The standard
scholarly edition containing the complete works, minus Equatorie of the Planets.
Dalley, Stephanie, trans. and ed. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000. This affordable paperback provides background myths made more readable by advances in
scholarship on the ancient languages.
Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 2007. Telling the story backward to the historical king around 2700 B.C., Damrosch spins a captivating yarn of
West meets East, with the Mosul-born archeologist Hormuzd Rassan as the key 19th-century figure.
Durant, Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Voltaire. The Story of Civilization, IX. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.
This bestselling overview of the man and his century, engagingly written, makes Voltaire come alive.
Edwards, Robert R. Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Shows the two great
authors as rivals (on Chaucer’s end) but also collaborators inventing modern literature.
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems, 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. These 221 large-print pages show a
poetic output that has become more valuable for containing so few major works.
———. Selected Essays: New Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. The author’s poems are illuminated by
these essays, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Hamlet and His Problems,” “Dante,” and “The Metaphysical
Poets.”
———. The Waste Land, edited by Michael North. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Contains a large number of sources for
the poem, also a wide span of criticism from Virginia Woolf onward.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Perhaps the best literary
biography of any modern author—truly magisterial.
Eusebius. The History of the Church, translated by G. A. Williamson and Andrew Louth. New York: Penguin, 1989. Pages
88–89 cover the canonic books of the New Testament as well as those excluded as non-canonic.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury, edited by David Minter. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Contains
important Faulkner background materials, as well as classic criticism by Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Cleanth Brooks,
and even Jean-Paul Sartre.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. This book shocked its first
readers by discovering “innocent homosexuality” as a central theme in classic American fiction.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 2005. These lectures contain the seasoned
wisdom and insights of a master fiction writer.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. 1963.
Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Explores the institutionalization of modern man in a “carceral society.”
Gallagher, Joseph. A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” Forward by John Freccero. Liquori, MO:
Triumph Publishing, 1999. With a forward by the dean of Dante studies in America, this inexpensive volume was
consistently awarded five stars by Amazon.com customers, one praising it as “arguably the finest introduction to Dante in
English.”
Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Reads The Lord
of the Rings in light of the author’s experiences as a veteran of World War I.
Gibson, Margaret, ed. Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Commemorating the 1500th
anniversary of the author’s birth, this collection starts with an expert introduction by Henry Chadwick and ends with Anthony
Grafton on the Boethian legacy in the Renaissance; the biographical essay by John Matthews places the writer’s career in
context of his senatorial background.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: A Tragedy, translated by Walter Arndt and introduction by Cyrus Hamlin. 2nd ed. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Contains important modern criticism from Stuart Atkins, Jaroslav Pelikan, Benjamin Bennett,
Franco Moretti, and Jane K. Brown.
Grafton, Anthony, and Megan Williams. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library
at Caesarea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. This fascinating “archeology” of early biblical editing is
especially helpful in the introduction “Scholars, Books, and Libraries in the Christian Tradition.”
Graziosi, Barbara, and Emily Greenwood, eds. Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western
Canon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Taking exception to Harold Bloom’s claim that every Western reader is a
descendant of Homer, the editors assemble new essays on the “bumpy ride” that Homeric epics traveled to arrive in the
contemporary world—and how difficult it is to see these literary works clearly through intervening texts like Joyce’s Ulysses.
Greaves, A. E. Stendhal’s Italy: Themes of Political and Religious Satire. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995. This
political reading of Charterhouse also manages to bring art and opera into the discussion.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. This mass-
marketed publication contains a fascinating chapter, “Speaking with the Dead,” on the Ghost in Hamlet.
Hardie, Philip. Virgil’s “Aeneid”: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. No longer a dark pessimist, Virgil
is seen as optimist about the grandeur of Augustan Rome, marshalling religious tradition and natural philosophy to support
the imperial agenda.
Hardie, Philip, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, eds. Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the “Metamorphoses”
and its Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999. These 18 essays focus on current concerns like the
poet’s use of time and his self-fashioning as a poet of exile, with Hardie’s especially fine discussion of Ovid’s influence upon
Petrarch.
Heller, Erich. The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976.
Heller sums up Goethe’s theological paradox: “What is Faust’s sin? Restlessness of spirit. What is Faust’s salvation?
Restlessness of spirit.”
Herodotus. The Histories, translated by Walter Blanco. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. This volume contains Plutarch’s
essay “On the Malice of Herodotus” and Oswyn Marray on “Greek Historians.” Interested readers should also consult The
Landmark Herodotus (2008), with its maps and explanatory notes.
Hexter, Ralph. A Guide to “The Odyssey”: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald. New York:
Vintage Books, 1993. After introductory sections on archeology, geography, religion, and family organization, Hexter
proceeds with succinct explorations, book by book through the epic.
Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York: Viking, 1978. Puts Milton’s career in context of the Puritan
movement against England’s royal government.
Hollander, Robert. Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. The
great scholar and translator explores Boccaccio’s pervasive responses to his predecessor, Dante.
Holy Bible: King James Authorized Version, 1611. Translated during the age of Shakespeare, this English Bible also
benefited from the latest advances in textual editing during the Renaissance.
Jones, John. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Debunks the Neoclassical notion that
Aristotle defined the tragic hero, “fatal flaw,” and three unities of time, place, and action.
Joyce, James. Ulysses, edited by Hans Gabler, introduction by Richard Ellmann. New York: Vintage, 1993. Critical edition
more correct than the text supervised by the author in the first edition of 1922.

Kernan, Alvin B. “The King and the Poet: The Tempest, Whitehall, Winter 1613.” In Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright:
Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Places the play in the precise context
of its original performance at James I’s court.
Knox, Bernard M. W. Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1998. Clears away Freudian interpretations to understand what this play meant in ancient Athens and why it was singled out
for praise by Aristotle.
Knox, Peter E., ed. Oxford Readings in Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Twenty of the most influential studies
published in the last 30 years, but expensive, so get it from the library.
Ladenson, Elisabeth. Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2007. Contains a lively chapter entitled “Leopold Bloom’s Trip to the Outhouse.”
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1997. The best-regarded biography.
———. Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Sees the author as a Modernist whose
novels contain camouflaged desires and suppressed sexuality.
Levenback, Karen L. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Discusses the
author as a civilian “war novelist” and places Mrs. Dalloway in context of post-war England.
Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Based on a series of Oxford lectures, this
posthumously published book provides a fascinating survey of the ancient and medieval concepts of the world, its creatures,
and the encompassing universe—with a good chapter on Boethius.
———. A Preface to “Paradise Lost.” 1942. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Still the most useful, clear-
headed, and entertaining introduction to Milton’s Christian epic.
Luraghi, Nino, ed. The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. International
experts put The Histories in the context of late archaic and early classical Greece.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2005. Awarded the
Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for translation as replacement for the longstanding but problematic 1927 version by H. T. Lowe-
Porter.
Maude, Aylmer. The Life of Tolstoy. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Originally published in 1908–1910 with
assistance from Tolstoy and his wife.
Mazzotta, Giuseppe. The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Scrutinizes the Italian masterpiece not only as a story about people playing but as a book itself playing with medieval
conventions of religion, morals, medicine, law, and human romance.
McDermott, Emily A. Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1989. Helps explain why the Athenian judges were so upset that they awarded the playwright only third prize.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. The
most reliable text, accompanied by background materials on Melville’s reading and his whaling sources, as well as a survey
of criticism from the first, mostly hostile newspaper reviews to the most recent critics like Camille Paglia.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost, edited by Gordon Teskey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Includes biblical sources as well as
criticism by Dr. Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis.
More, Sir Thomas. Utopia, edited by Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Contains Erasmus’s word-portrait
of More, G. R. Elton’s “The Real Thomas More?”, and C. S. Lewis’s comments from English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century.
The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. These texts
provide a striking look into the lost early world of Christian books and readers.
Nobel Prize Library: William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, edited by Alexis Gregory. New York: Helvetica
Press, 1971. Contains presentation addresses, Faulkner’s acceptance speech, and Joseph Blotner’s “Life and Works of
William Faulkner.”
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, The, edited by Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Contains
canonic criticism by Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Dante, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Du Bois, Jung, Woolf,
Eliot, Frye, De Beauvoir, Bloom, Foucault, Said, and Greenblatt.
Norton Anthology of World Literature, The, edited by Sarah Lawall. 2nd ed. Vols. A–F. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
Provides texts of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Oedipus, Medea, The Apology of Socrates, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses,
Confessions, Beowulf, Inferno, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Paradise Lost.
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. New York: Vintage, 1996. Just the original text, warts and all, like the misspelling of
Stendhal’s name on page 273.

Ondaatje, Michael, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding, and Linda Spalding, eds. Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and
Lost, Overlooked, Under-Read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission. New York: Anchor Books,
2001. Ondaatje writes about Bringing Tony Home (1996) by the Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara.
Orchard, Andy. A Critical Companion to “Beowulf.” Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. With a breadth of learning and insight,
this books cuts through scholarly controversies to become an indispensible guide to newcomers and experts alike.
Ovid. Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Lovely translation with a concise
introduction and glossary of proper names.
Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Shows the Knight of La Mancha as the model for comic writing in England during the 18th century.
Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993. Uses The Aeneid as the starting point for reading epic literature as an argument for imperialism.
Reed, T. J. Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Has established itself as the standard
English-language book on Mann’s thought and fiction.
Roper, William. The Life of Sir Thomas More, in Two Early Tudor Lives, edited by Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P.
Harding. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971. Written by More’s son-in-law and member of the family household.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Paperback reprint for mass-marketing the original
1980 text.
Sewell, Richard. In the Theater of Dionysios: Democracy and Tragedy in Ancient Athens. Jackson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
Describes the parallel emergence of democracy and tragedy, with sporting competitions, speculative philosophy, and
especially the fatal Athenian obsession with war.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by Cyrus Hoy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Contains the original story of Amleth
by Saxo Grammaticus, plus classic criticism by Dr. Johnson, Goethe, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis.
———. The Tempest, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Sources are
grouped under the headings “Magic and Witchcraft,” “Politics and Religion,” and “Geography and Travel.” Also contains
several fine articles, including John Gillies’s “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque.”
Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. A professional medievalist explains
what is best and timeless in the writings of another medievalist, Professor Tolkien.
Stanley, Henry M. Through the Dark Continent. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878. See 2:384–386 on Stanley’s
decision to burn Shakespeare instead of his notebook—or his Bible—at the insistence of the tribesmen.
Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma, translated by Richard Howard. New York: Random House Modern Library, 1999.
Wonderful translation with thumbnail introduction, just enough notes, and Howard’s engaging “Afterword.”
Stock, Brian. Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Belknap Press, 1998. Shows how Augustine redefines “reading books” as the means of spiritual self-discovery and personal
redemption.
Strauss, Leo. Xenophon’s Socrates. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Explores the “alternative” and perhaps more
authentic Socrates described by his other student, Xenophon, instead of Plato.
Swift, John N., ed. Willa Cather and the American Southwest. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. This
collection explores the impact of landscape on the author’s 1920s novels, especially Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Taylor, Gary. “Hamlet in Africa 1607.” Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, edited by
Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pages 211–222 investigate the shipboard journals documenting
the first-recorded performance of Shakespeare’s play off the coast of Sierra Leone.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War, translated by Walter Blanco. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. This volume includes
selections from Machiavelli on political brinkmanship, Hobbes on war’s brutality, Francis Cornford on the irrationality of
“luck,” and Walter Karp on Thucydides and the Cold War.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings: Three-Volume Set. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. With maps and end-matter, this
edition provides a text superior to the Ballantine paperbacks.
Tolstoy, Leo. Hadji Murád, in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, translated by Alyner Maude. Introduction by David
Goldfarb. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. Praised as “the best story in the world” by Harold Bloom, also a forerunner of
the Postcolonial novel.
———. War and Peace, 2nd ed. Translated by Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude, edited by George Gibian. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1996. The Maude translation (1923) was endorsed by Tolstoy himself. Contains the author’s comments on
composition, including the 1868 essay “Some Words about War and Peace,” plus valuable criticism by Nikolai Strakhov,
Henry James, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, Kathryn Feuer, and Gary Saul Morson.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. Revised edition. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Written with wit and intelligence,
this biography offers everything that can be known about the novelist and her colorful family connections.
Voltaire. Candide, 2nd ed. Edited and translated by Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Contains Auerbach’s
classic essay from Mimesis as well as contemporary accounts by English visitors Edward Gibbon and James Boswell.
———. The Portable Voltaire, edited by Ben Ray Redman. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. In addition to Candide and
Zadig, this collection includes portions of the author’s Philosophical Dictionary, English Letters, and his poem The Lisbon
Earthquake translated by Tobias Smollett.
Wegemer, Gerald B., and Stephen W. Smith, eds. A Thomas More Source Book. Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 2004. Includes the play Sir Thomas More, written partly by Shakespeare.
Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Regional themes in the
novels are explored through a blend of biography, family history, and Mississippi culture, with particular attention to sex,
race, and community.
Wilson, Emily. The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
The philosopher’s self-inflicted execution is placed in context of long-term Western views on citizenship and celebrity,
heroism and religious conviction, and individual freedom and state control
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Introduction by Maureen Howard. Reprint, New York: Harcourt, 1981. First
published by her husband’s press in 1925, this is one of Woolf’s best-known and most important novels. This edition
contains a fine introduction by Maureen Howard discussing the impact of Mrs. Dalloway on the novel form.

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The Western Literary Canon in Context

Professor John M. Bowers

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