Read a Classic Challenge discussion

How exactly are we defining a literary classic in this group? For instance, Joseph Conrad has written some undeniable classics of English literature (namely Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Nigger of the Narcissus and The Secret Agent, to name a few). However, I've recently read Gaspar Ruiz, Almeyer's Folly and A Personal Record by Conrad, none of which are nearly as well known to the general record. However I'd argue the quality of these works are of equal standard to Conrad's best known works. Can you call these classics as well? By the same token I also recently read Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana which has stood the test of time, though many people I know would say that it has not stood the test of enough time... And what of a writer like Mikhail Artsybashef whose work Sanin was very controversial at the time of its publication - enough so that it was banned in Czarist Russia and Bolshevik Russia alike as well as in Germany and Poland. Yet this work, as engaging a read as it was, is not well known today.

Currently I'm in the middle of Theodore Dreisser's Twelve Men. Again, it is not nearly the author's best known work but it is a quality work that is still with us.

Can and would you label works like these classics?

Scott has limited access to the web this week so I will take a stab at answering this.

I think that the group is open to a broad definition of classics. Scott has mentioned that the works should be at least 20 years old and offered a selection of books from his AP literature class as an example (Below). I have found it very interesting myself to explore the back catalog of books by classic authors, or classics in certain genres such as Science Fiction which are more recent than those most often listed as classics.

I find that in many ways classics are often viewed primarily through the lens of western culture or English language. So if we only considered the more prominent books, we may miss out on some of the classics that may only be available in translation or those that explore other cultures (domestically or internationally).

I might recommend checking out the 2012 archive to see what people read last year, the current 2013 list, and the facebook page. There is a great diversity in what people have read as part of this challenge. I believe that is one of the strengths of the idea behind this group.


Here are some options from Scott's English list:

Anonymous – Gilgamesh
Anonymous – The Song of Roland
Anonymous – The Arabian Nights
Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger
Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound
Asimov, Isaac – Foundation
Dante Alighieri – Inferno
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
W. H. Auden – Collected Poems
Jane Austin – Pride and Prejudice
James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room
Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
William Blake – Songs of Innocence and of
Experience
Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre
Robert Burns – Poems and Songs
Julius Caesar – The Gallic Wars
Willa Cather – My Antonia
J.M. Coetzee -- Disgrace
Willkie Collins – The Woman in White, The Moonstone
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Phillip K Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Charles Dickens – Bleak House, Great Expectations, Hard Times
Emily Dickenson – Collected Poems
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Alexander Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo
George Eliot – Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss
T.S. Eliot – Waste Land and Other Poems
Ralph Ellison – The Invisible Man
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self Reliance and Other Essays
William Faulkner – Collected Stories
Ford Maddox Ford – The Good Soldier
Graham Greene – The Quiet American
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, Collected Poems
Nathaniel Hawthorn – The Blithesdale Romance
Ernest Hemmingway – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Victor Hugo – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Robert Heinlein – Starship Troopers
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Song of Hiawatha
James Joyce – Ulysses, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Franz Kafka – Collected Stories
Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince
Sir Thomas Malory – Le Morte d’Arthur
Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus
Hermann Melville – Moby Dick
Toni Morrison – Beloved
John Milton – Paradise Lost
Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Flannery O’Connor –Everything that Rises Must Converge (complete short story collection)
George Orwell – 1984
Ovid – Metamorphoses
Edgar Allen Poe – Essential Tales and Poems
Abbé Prévost – Manon Lescaut
Jean Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract, Justine
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra – Don Quixote
Sir Walter Scott – Ivanhoe
William Shakespeare – Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, King Lear, Measure for Measure
George Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion
Upton Sinclair – The Jungle
Betty Smith – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Sophocles – The Three Theban Plays
Sir Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queene
Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Snorri Sturluson – The Prose Edda
Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
Alfred Lord Tennyson – Collected Poems
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
JRR Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
Mark Twain – Tom Sawyer
Sun Tzu – The Art of War
Virgil – The Aeneid
Alice Walker – The Color Purple
Rebecca West – Return of the Soldier
Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass
Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire
Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway
Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Well I can see that if Isaac Asimov, Ken Kesey, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker all made the list so time couldn't be

...huge factor, though the twenty years struck me as quite soon for a book to be considered a classic. Even cars must wait until forty years.

I would suppose to be a classic a book would have to have resonance with a successive generations, not just the generation that helped the book reach its fame. I know this isn't air tight as some books are "rediscovered" for various reasons and some books make it through generations, I'm convinced, because they are required reading in some programs. (Think "The Jungle" here.)

And wouldn't classics have to be such by general consensus? Going back to a book that I've mentioned before, Joseph Conrad's "Gaspar Ruiz". I have tried discussing this book with a few literature types none of whom had read it and only one claimed to have known of it. So it is arguable that even though it was written by one if the best known authors if his time and was probably a best seller in its day, and even though I enjoyed reading the book if your average 'literary types' hadn't a clue about the book how could we agree that it is a classic?

I do realize that there are classics in national literatures that your average reader may not have heard of. For instance the Vietnamese consider Nguyen Du to be their Shakespeare yet how many outside of Vietnam have heard of, let alone read, his magnum opus, Kieu? And likewise there are unknown books that can constitute classics within genres. In these two examples it is hard to argue against a book being a classic.

I guess there are many parallels between this question and the Great Books arguments that go on in academic circles.

I agree that it is difficult and arguable as to what constitutes a classic. I just mentioned at least 20 years, because it had been mentioned that in an earlier response on Facebook.

In my own opinion, I think that the older books may perhaps have more leeway in being called a classic, than the more recent ones. I would totally support anyone exploring the back catalog of novels and short stories by authors who wrote early fiction or classics such as the Joseph Conrad example that you mentioned.

The more modern stories, on the other hand, would likely need to have more impact or resonance on society or literature to be considered a classic. For instance Neuromancer by William Gibson is considered one of the first cyberpunk novels. Although it was published in 1984, it has arguably carved out a position of prominence among the science fiction literature. I logged that book last year.

Hope that helps.

I'm back from vacation, and can weigh in here.

Gary,

The goal of this group is to give readers (especially young readers, as I am a high school English teacher) a push to read good, worthwhile, and challenging books outside of their normal comfort zones and genres.

As such, my definition of classic (for the purpose of this page) is pretty fast and loose. Basically, I'll take anything around 20 years old or older that is either by a renowned author (your Conrad certainly counts) or has generally received critical acclaim. I'll also, from time to time, make an exception to the 20 year rule.

This is for fun and to challenge you as a reader, so feel free to narrow my definition any way that you desire. I think it's important to challenge ourselves and expand as readers. For example, I'm in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov right now, and am enjoying it immensely, though the size of the book itself has always dissuaded me from selecting it in the past. I may move on to War and Peace soon.

I hope you're having a wonderful summer and that you decide to join us.

Regards,

--Scott

I can proudly say that I have finished War and Peace. Unfortunately, that was long, long ago so I can't count it. (Darn.) Maybe I will give it another go soon.

I had this exact discussion on a another group thread. My suggestion is thirty years. Generally one generation to determine if it is a classic. There doesn't seem to be a good definition that I have found, except that either the general public or academics make the determination. I also suggest breaking it into genre, modern, "classics", and others not named here. I love the idea of getting youth to read outside their comfort zone. You will catch a few here and there to read other titles than they would otherwise. What a great idea.