In my previous post, I foolishly boasted to an empty and uncaring cosmos that I had recovered from a serious injury and would be able to continue work. There shall be a bright shiny nickel for whichever clever young lad or lady can guess what happened the very next day.
Yes, I've been struggling with the legendary Rhinovirus Prime, a disease long thought extinct by all but the most unhinged of medical professionals, but STILL IT LIVES! And I have bested it. It took two weeks for my heart to start pumping blood instead of mucus, and I never would have survived had George Harrison not taught me the secret of extracting zero-point energy from the cosmic mandala, but this is the kind of thing you need to know as a literationer.
Anyway, the Iliad. I probably should give a detailed synopsis of events of the story, but I'm not going to. This isn't SparkNotes. Besides, any meaningful commentary on the Iliad would need to be as long as the original work itself, if not longer. So let's kick meaningful to the curb and go for unthinking irreverence!
To be honest, a synopsis wouldn't even be that worthwhile. The entire first half of the story is about the Greek gods forcing a stalemate between the Greeks and Trojans. The Trojans march out, the Greeks fight them, there are some speeches, an inconsequential to the resolution and everybody goes home for the night. This happens five times.
The only truly interesting thing in the entire first half of the book is Diomedes, and that's only because he's so far beyond anything that could exist in a rational universe that he exists as some kind of attention singularity that no fascination can escape from.
Diomedes exists to be better than everybody else. He's a better fighter than Achilles or Ajax, more cunning than Achilles, brings more ships to the battle than anyone save Agamemnon and Nestor and while he takes part in the battle he gets more kills than anybody else. Several of the Trojan commanders declare him to be a more dangerous fighter than Achilles. He has several speeches where he directly states the author's viewpoint, including getting an enemy to stop fighting and work out their differences peacefully in the middle of a war. At one point he engages in single combat with Ares, the god of war, and wins. And this is a man with no special Divine origin of any kind. Even his name, "Dio-metis" is Greek for "The skill of God," which is a common Greek expression meaning "Chuck Norris."
If you've ever heard the phrase, "Even Homer sometimes nods," they were probably talking about Diomedes. Even in an epic poem where it's possible for the invulnerable son of a water nymph to meet and kick the ass of a sentient river and the pagan incarnations of the sky and the sun can come to your house for tea and motivational speeches, the mere existence of this Diomedes person completely destroys any sense of verisimilitude. Disbelief not only suspended, it's been hung, drawn and quartered. Which, for those who've never been to a public execution, means that disbelief has hung by its neck until half-dead, emasculated with a blunt knife, eviscerated while still alive, killed by removal of the heart, and had its cut into quarters and its head mounted on a spike. They'd do this in the public square, people would bring their children to watch.
Now, we can't really blame Homer for this, as such. The Greek Oral Tradition is much closer in practice to writing history than writing narrative, and certain things can't be removed to fit the demands of a story. Also, Homer might not have really existed, and it's hard to blame a fictional character, which takes the fun out of things.
It's very likely that a historical Diomedes existed, and he really was so awesome that Helios had to wear sunglasses when looking at him. But from a literary perspective it weakens the story because he makes no significant contributions to any event and cripples the argument that Achilles was so balls-nasty that the Greeks couldn't win the battle without him.
In other words, just because something actually happened, that isn't justification enough to include it in your story.
There was a WWII soldier by the name of Audie Murphy, a 5'5", 110 lb 16 year old kid who had Malaria all through the war. He once defended his entire military company from a massive German infantry and armored attack, by himself, for over an hour, using a .50 caliber machine gun that was on fire at the time. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and literally every other medal the US had. He got five of them twice. But when he played himself in the movie version of his autobiography, he had the filmmakers tone things down significantly so that people wouldn't call him a liar.
The real world doesn't have to be nearly as believable as a fictional work does. People in this world don't have the eye of God, but a writer is the creator of their own universe. Not only do they have the divine sight, they have to transfer their perspective to the reader.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Great Works #1: The Iliad, Part 1
Well, I've learned not to start my new weblog while deathly ill. But I've survived my bout with the Whooping Pox, and am now ready to begin. Again. Properly.
The first book on our loooooooooong list of historical texts is Homer's Iliad, arguably the most famous and influential work of Greek Myth and the cornerstone of western literature, rivaled only by its sequel and sister work, the Odyssey. I doubt that anybody reading this wouldn't know of it, of Paris' judging the Goddesses and abducting Helen, racing with her back to Troy. Of the assembling of a thousand ships from all the kings in Greece to fight for her. Of the immortal Achilles dying when a poison arrow strikes his vulnerable heel. And, of course, of the wooden horse, Odysseus's brilliant stratagem to sneak into the mighty walled city of Troy and destroy it from within.
And the truly amazing part is that none of that actually takes place in either one of Homer's poems. These two books are works of such significance that even the supplementary background material has been a landmark of western culture for over three thousand years. I'm just going to give some basic context in this post, so that we can discuss things in more detail later.
As I said, the Iliad is about the war between Greece and Troy, an ancient city in what is now western Turkey. Paris, the prince of Troy, kidnapped Helen, the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Unfortunately, all the city-states in Greece had agreed to make war on any man who abducted Helen, so Paris had called down the wrath of every army in the civilized world upon his city. Because that's the only way things could get any worse than pissing off the king of Sparta.
The Iliad ostensibly has two story lines. The first is of the Greek warrior Achilles, who had been wronged by Agamemnon, the commander of all the Greek forces, and so refused to fight, going so far as to petition the Gods to destroy the Greeks. He's torn between his duty and his pride, and ponders the doom that had been prophesied about him - to either live a long life of no importance or a brief life that would be remembered in song and poetry written about thousands of years later on the internet.
The second is of the Trojan warrior Hector, the brother to Paris. Hector's story is about the conflict between duty and family. Paris had violated the law of hospitality, the central, sacred rule that defined all of ancient Greek culture, and so, by all rights, deserved to be punished. On the other hand, Paris is his brother, and to harm one's own family, no matter the circumstances, is the one crime even more heinous than violating hospitality.
There are several... dozen... dozen other characters, including Ajax, the second-strongest man in the Greek forces; Odysseus, the Greek tactician; Agamemnon, the leader of the combined forces and his second-in-command, Nestor; Patroclus, Achilles'... special friend; Ajax, not to be confused with Ajax; Priam, the King of Troy; Cassandra, the prophet doomed so that none would ever believe her fortellings; and Diomedes. Oh merciful Zeus, is there ever Diomedes. But we'll talk about him next time.
The first book on our loooooooooong list of historical texts is Homer's Iliad, arguably the most famous and influential work of Greek Myth and the cornerstone of western literature, rivaled only by its sequel and sister work, the Odyssey. I doubt that anybody reading this wouldn't know of it, of Paris' judging the Goddesses and abducting Helen, racing with her back to Troy. Of the assembling of a thousand ships from all the kings in Greece to fight for her. Of the immortal Achilles dying when a poison arrow strikes his vulnerable heel. And, of course, of the wooden horse, Odysseus's brilliant stratagem to sneak into the mighty walled city of Troy and destroy it from within.
And the truly amazing part is that none of that actually takes place in either one of Homer's poems. These two books are works of such significance that even the supplementary background material has been a landmark of western culture for over three thousand years. I'm just going to give some basic context in this post, so that we can discuss things in more detail later.
As I said, the Iliad is about the war between Greece and Troy, an ancient city in what is now western Turkey. Paris, the prince of Troy, kidnapped Helen, the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Unfortunately, all the city-states in Greece had agreed to make war on any man who abducted Helen, so Paris had called down the wrath of every army in the civilized world upon his city. Because that's the only way things could get any worse than pissing off the king of Sparta.
The Iliad ostensibly has two story lines. The first is of the Greek warrior Achilles, who had been wronged by Agamemnon, the commander of all the Greek forces, and so refused to fight, going so far as to petition the Gods to destroy the Greeks. He's torn between his duty and his pride, and ponders the doom that had been prophesied about him - to either live a long life of no importance or a brief life that would be remembered in song and poetry written about thousands of years later on the internet.
The second is of the Trojan warrior Hector, the brother to Paris. Hector's story is about the conflict between duty and family. Paris had violated the law of hospitality, the central, sacred rule that defined all of ancient Greek culture, and so, by all rights, deserved to be punished. On the other hand, Paris is his brother, and to harm one's own family, no matter the circumstances, is the one crime even more heinous than violating hospitality.
There are several... dozen... dozen other characters, including Ajax, the second-strongest man in the Greek forces; Odysseus, the Greek tactician; Agamemnon, the leader of the combined forces and his second-in-command, Nestor; Patroclus, Achilles'... special friend; Ajax, not to be confused with Ajax; Priam, the King of Troy; Cassandra, the prophet doomed so that none would ever believe her fortellings; and Diomedes. Oh merciful Zeus, is there ever Diomedes. But we'll talk about him next time.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Let's Begin, shall we?
I used to have one of those twitter things for this, but I could never manage to get into communicating with a bunch of twits. I think I'm simply the kind of person who writes in big nutty chunks rather than a fine, buttery spread. We'll see how long I can hold off the inevitable creative burnout.
My name is D.R. McLeod. I'm a professor. My credentials are around here somewhere, but you don't need to worry about that, and neither do those busybodies at the Accreditation Council. I don't even teach writing, I teach Classics and Language. I'd make a blog about Classics and Language, but then I may as well be giving out credits for free. No, this blog will be about my most major project to date, an embellished translation of the recently discovered "Wizard Diaries," a 6th-century text supposed to be the journals of a dark ages magician. As you may have guessed. I've posted my efforts online for peer review, as well as general nattering.
This will be a much more extensive work than anything I may have done previously, as well as a more creative endeavor, and it - and general laziness - have been giving me a good deal more trouble than I anticipated. But as they say, teaching is the best way to learn, so I hope that by verbalizing the lessons I learn through the process of writing will allow both myself and my audience to learn from my hardships. Several of these will be expanded versions of my twittercations, because sometimes you can't write an essay in 140 characters.
The other thing I'll be using this blog for is commentary. I've decided to start working my way through the reading list from Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doran's "How to Read a Book." It's an excuse to read a great many texts I haven't had the opportunity to pursue, although the list is unfortunately centered on the western tradition. But there's undoubtedly much to be gained by looking through literature that represents the whole of western civilization. For anyone looking to follow along at home, here's the list, as blatantly stolen from Wikipedia.
1. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies
5. Herodotus: Histories
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works
12. Epicurus: Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid: Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius of Perga: Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, The New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth: Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz: On War
93. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron: Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
99. Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James: The American; 'The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
122. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
124. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
125. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127. Lenin: The State and Revolution
128. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
129. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
130. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
131. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
132. James Joyce: 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
133. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
134. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
135. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
136. Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
137. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
My name is D.R. McLeod. I'm a professor. My credentials are around here somewhere, but you don't need to worry about that, and neither do those busybodies at the Accreditation Council. I don't even teach writing, I teach Classics and Language. I'd make a blog about Classics and Language, but then I may as well be giving out credits for free. No, this blog will be about my most major project to date, an embellished translation of the recently discovered "Wizard Diaries," a 6th-century text supposed to be the journals of a dark ages magician. As you may have guessed. I've posted my efforts online for peer review, as well as general nattering.
This will be a much more extensive work than anything I may have done previously, as well as a more creative endeavor, and it - and general laziness - have been giving me a good deal more trouble than I anticipated. But as they say, teaching is the best way to learn, so I hope that by verbalizing the lessons I learn through the process of writing will allow both myself and my audience to learn from my hardships. Several of these will be expanded versions of my twittercations, because sometimes you can't write an essay in 140 characters.
The other thing I'll be using this blog for is commentary. I've decided to start working my way through the reading list from Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doran's "How to Read a Book." It's an excuse to read a great many texts I haven't had the opportunity to pursue, although the list is unfortunately centered on the western tradition. But there's undoubtedly much to be gained by looking through literature that represents the whole of western civilization. For anyone looking to follow along at home, here's the list, as blatantly stolen from Wikipedia.
1. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies
5. Herodotus: Histories
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works
12. Epicurus: Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid: Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius of Perga: Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, The New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth: Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz: On War
93. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron: Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
99. Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James: The American; 'The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
122. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
124. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
125. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127. Lenin: The State and Revolution
128. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
129. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
130. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
131. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
132. James Joyce: 'The Dead' in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
133. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
134. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
135. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
136. Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
137. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward
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