How does /lit/ feel about the havard classics/five feet of books? It it outdated for a modern person?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics#Contents
No, I don't think classic literature can ever be outdated, otherwise we would have forgotten it by now.Enjoy this video of two Boston Brahmins discussing literature, descendents of founding stock Americans who still have an English accent. Found it interesting.https://youtu.be/HwvONJXJUO4?si=cula-ffazfIxi8lNMy ancestors settled in the 13 Colonies but were poor indentured servants. These guys were the type to set up the very first industries of each time and things like that. Of course they are well read, New England old money.
>>24704791Those aren't penguin classics or pelicans.
>>24704818This old book collection makes me think of New England WASP elites, which was apparently a marketing point. I'd price the whole set at two hundred US dollars, and that would keep my lights on here in rural Alabama for about a month with some change left over.Keep my computer running and my pop tarts toasted, my tea boiling and my phone charged. Shoveling coal, building cabinets, selling books its all the same for the little slips of green paper with grim faced WASPs printed on the front and stately government buildings on the back.As I am only a man, as you are, and in this settled land we trade our time for bank notes as every acre is now accounted for and living on the fish and deer has become a crime.I'd reason that I'm speaking to Yankees as it is. You would probably not understand my dialect, it does not sound like how I write. I write like this from years of writing to survive. Books and articles mostly. Dry material, business and that kind of thing. This is not bitter, cynical malice. Yankees are alright, good schools as well. Just spinning a yarn to read.
is voyage of the beagle worth reading?
>>24704791>It it outdated for a modern person?Classics are classics because they don't become outdated. People still read Thucydides and the ancients just fine
>>24704791As a collection, it is very good. Lots of variety in there. I think if a student applied themselves to it, following one of the reading plans or just bouncing around, they would get a good education.If I were to improve it, I would bring it up to about 1970-80 for material. Even if you look at the original collection, the absence of Aristotle, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are obvious.It would be an interesting exercise to make a new Harvard Classics while still holding to the 5 foot bookshelf limit.
>>24704874>It would be an interesting exercise to make a new Harvard Classics while still holding to the 5 foot bookshelf limit.We should make a thread on this. What kind of rules would we have? Like 50 volumes with 500 pages max?
>>24704791>Burke, Carlyle, Darwin, Renan, &c.Is this just the canon for twitter conservatives?
>>24704791Mogged by Adler's team several times over
>>24704791>It it outdated for a modern person?Some of those works are from over 2000 years go. If they ever went out of date, it didn't happen in the 21st century
>>24704916It could be beneficial to have a rationally-sized reading list for anons to study. As fun as collections like The Great Books etc. are, they are simply to large for anyone to ever study. The whole reason for the 5-foot book shelf was to limit the collection to a size where a working man could complete it in several years. Some anons would say that our top 100 lists are our version of that.
>>24704791Most suitable for a real person but not terrible for a modern person, kind of useless for a contemporary person.
>>24705482In what way?
>>24705501It was a joke, realists, modernists, and how most uses of modern are actually an ignorant way to say contemporary and the slant towards realism (justifiable given the times) of the Harvard Classics.
>>24705517oh hahahaha>I'm going to need more coffee, it seems
>>24704791It's almost wholly not a matter of 'outdated'-ness, but instead that many selections simply aren't that great or that important (toss out The Journal of John Woolman, Browne's Religio Medici, some of Milton's poems; we don't need an entire volume dedicated to Robert Burns; Sheridan's The School for Scandal, Byron's Manfred, Manzoni's I promessi sposi, and many, many more).I won't give away my exhaustive thoughts on the matter, but I will simply ask this: how would any educated person defend the inclusion of the above over Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War?
>>24705591Thats my thoughts as well. The idea behind the Harvard Classics is fine, but the selection becomes more and more strange the longer a person looks at it. Add>Plato's Republic>Some Aristotle ie Politics and Ethics>The Iliad>Thucydides>More Plutarch(?)>The Whole Bible>More Shakespeare Remove>Two Years Before The Mast>Famous Prefaces>Reduce English Poetry from 3 volumes down to 2 (or 1)>Do Emerson and Milton need a full volumes each? Probably not>ManzoniAnother issue is that, where the writers that were selected are fine, the works selected for those authors are usually weak. I notice this when I go through the Dramas and Essays. Even looking at The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. Its a good selection of authors, but the specific works are strange. >Sentimental Journey instead of Tristram Shandy>Guy Mannering instead of Ivanhoe (personal preference desu)>I always felt Dickens wrote better than David Copperfield, but it is always selected as the singular Dickens work>The Mill on the Floss instead of Middlemarch>I dont know if Henry James deserves to be in the lost desuBut I guess there are challenges to having a definite limit on the size of the collection. And everything changes if a person decides to include works up to the mid-20th century.
>>24704874>Aristotle Yes>Freud Jung mogs him >Marxlol, lmao even >NeetcheYes
>>24705591>>24705637Basically these two. Harvard Classics are good but some of the choices when selecting what to include are weird. I have the Harvard Classics Plutarch and I feel like they could have included either a larger selection of lives or even the whole thing like what Britannica's Great Books of the Western World has. Speaking of Britannica's great books, I find their selection to be overall better than Harvard's Classics.
>>24704791>volume 6 is devoted to Robert BurnsOnly in America.
>>24704791They don't mean SHIT if you buy them and don't read them
>>24706577>Great Books of the Western WorldThese have their own problems—Dwight Macdonald, for all his lunacy, was right when he said>A fifth of the volumes are all but impenetrable to the lay reader...the four devoted to Aristotle and Aquinas and the six of scientific treatises, ranging from Hippocrates to Faraday. “There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader,” airily writes Dr. Hutchins. “He can never fully comprehend it. That is why the books in this set are infinitely rereadable.” I found these ten volumes infinitely unreadable. There is a difference between not fully comprehending Homer and Shakespeare (in that one is always discovering something new on rereading them) and not even getting to first base with either a writer’s terminology or what he is driving at. Aristotle and Aquinas should have been included, I would say, but four volumes is excessive. Furthermore, no expository apparatus is provided...Lacking such help, how can one be expected to take an interest in such problems...as “Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?,” “Whether We Should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?,” “Whether Heavenly Bodies Can Act on Demons?,” and “Whether by Virtue of Its Subtlety a Glorified Body Will No Longer Need to Be in a Place Equal to Itself?” In fact, even with help, one’s interest might remain moderate...>The difficulty is much more urgent in the six volumes of scientific work...A scientific work differs from a literary, historical, or philosophical work...partly because it is written in a language comprehensible only to the specialist...and partly because its importance is not in itself but in its place in the development of science...Milton, on the other hand, does not supersede Homer; Gibbon represents no advance over Thucydides. All this is pretty obvious, but in this one instance, the editors of the Great Books exhibit a remarkable capacity for overlooking the obvious. Their dogma states that all major cultural achievements are of timeless, absolute value, and that this value is accessible to the lay reader without expository aids if he will but apply himself diligently. Because science is clearly part of our culture, they have therefore included these six useless volumes without asking themselves what benefit the reader will get from a hundred and sixty double-column pages of Hippocrates (“We must avoid wetting all sorts of ulcers except with wine, unless the ulcer be situated in a joint.” “In women, blood collected in the breasts indicates madness.” “You should put persons on a course of hellebore who are troubled with a defluction from the head.” “Acute disease come [sic] to a crisis in fourteen days”) or how he can profit from or even understand Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat and Huygens’ Treatise on Light without a special knowledge of earlier and later work in these fields.
>>24704791digital is the way
>>24706577>>24706854The Great Books series also contains numerous translations that are simply inferior and pointlessly archaicFor example, pic related, from Euripides' The Suppliants
>>24704791its only excerpts innit?
>>24704791yep you should sell yours
>>24704791I loved the Plato/Epictetus/Marcus Aurelius. The translations are definitely Edwardian but comfy. It got me into philosophy back in high school. I currently have the Franklin/Woolman/Penn and the Dana (these are SUPER common at thrift stores and nobody seems to have read these) in my home library
