One of my favorite activities while on vacation is to visit University Bookstores and browse-sometimes purchase-textbooks are required for their courses, particularly in the English Department (I also purchase a folder, binder, pen, or two!). On my recent visit to Baylor University [my Alma Mater] Bookstore, I began to wonder how many of these required readings were considered “Classics” by the Professors, or Departments, that assigned them. This led to a brainstorming session of “Why Read the Classics”! This blog is a product of this exercise (thank you, Husband, for being a willing participant in this discussion for the following four hours of our car ride home).

Some of the Universities I have visited through the years!

In our modern day, everyday-knowledge has become dumbed down by television, advertising, streaming, social media, and news headlines. Gone are the days of literary pursuits, for the most part. According to Os Guinness in Invitation to Classics, “Many contemporary literary critics look at Classic as just the product of a historical, economic, and social force rather than a masterpiece born from an individual’s brilliance”. Classics are only for scholars. This is very unfortunate. Classics provide lyric beauty, aching tragedy, probing intellectual inquiry, profound imagination, sympathy, and wisdom (17).

Should We Read Classics?

According to Mark Twain, a Classic is “a book that people praise and don’t read”. This seems to be the case. But why “don’t people read Classics”?

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a more romantic idea towards the Classics. The writer of literature was a genius with a pioneering mission of “self-expression”. Literature was “divine” and “redemptive” and had a moralizing influence on society to impart knowledge and wisdom to the public. Literature was seen as a vehicle for social change. Is this still true today?

 How do we recognize a Classic?

Are Classics determined by our Literature teachers in High School and Lit Professors in University? Hopefully. [I would like to think so as I promote and require “Classical Literature” in my World Lit courses!!]  Is a “Classic” work determined by Bestseller Lists? Would Plato’s works have been on a Bestseller List in his day?

New York Times Bestseller List for July 21, 2023: #1 Fiction on the NYTimes Bestseller List for this week is Happy Place by Emily Henry; #1 Non-Fiction is BEYOND THE STORY by BTS and Myeongseok Kang.  Will these become Classics? I am unfamiliar with these titles so I will leave this to your discretion!

Who Are the Writers of Classics?

Plato

I would like to first examine one of the ancient writers that today is still considered as “Classic” : Plato, who wrote his dialogues between 399 BCE and 347 BCE as a form of conversations between Socrates and various other characters, exploring philosophical ideas and concepts. These dialogues cover a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, ethics, politics, epistemology, and aesthetics. Plato’s writings have had a profound and lasting impact on Western philosophy because of their depth, complexity, and enduring philosophical insights.

Unfortunately, in the early Middle Ages, at the time that Plato wrote these dialogues, access to writings was limited due to the decline of classical learning and the scarcity of ancient texts. His works were rediscovered during the Renaissance when Scholars began to study ancient Greek and Roman texts more extensively. Some of Plato’s most famous dialogues include “The Republic,” “Symposium,” “Phaedo,” “Apology,” “Phaedrus,” “Meno,” and “Timaeus”.

Other Classic writers were not fully appreciated until after their death such as Shakespeare whose works were decried by authors of the eighteenth century and Melville whose American Classic novel, Moby Dick, (my favorite!) was dismissed entirely until the 1920’s (23). On the other hand, the Classics Iliad and Odyssey have been prominent since Plato cited Homer nearly twenty-five hundred years ago! [Homer has a permanent place in my World Lit Curriculum, along with Shakespeare!]

There is no canon of great works, no set of number of privileged texts. People themselves authorize the classics. “Books are kept alive by readers—discriminating, thoughtful readers who will not let a chosen book die but manage to keep it in the public eye (22)”.

What great works come to mind when you think of a “Classic”?

*The Confessions, *Utopia, *Pensées, Faust, *Pride and Prejudice, *Wuthering Heights, *Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch, Candide, Anna Karenina, *Les Misérables, * The Picture of Dorian Gray, *To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, *A Separate Peace, Lord of the Rings?

(*My favorites) Are any of these works in your personal library? What was the last “Classic” that you read?

A list of Authors of Classics since Antiquity which have been categorized by Os Guinness (1998) include:

Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Thomas More, Martin Luther, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Calvin, Miguel de Cervantes, John Donne, John Milton, Blaise Pascal,  John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Jonathan Edwards, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexander Hamilton, Jane Austen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Emily Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Soren Kierkegaard, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Mark Twain, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce,  Franz Kafka, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, C. S. Lewis, William Faulkner, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Flannery O’Connor.

And Contemporary International Authors who are currently being considered as writers of Classics: Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and Naguib Mahfouz [Africa];  Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar [Argentina]; Italo Calvino [Italy], Gabriel Garcia Marquez [Colombia]; Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Gloria Naylor, Rita Dove, Robert Haydn,  Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison , Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison [African-American]; Wole Soyinka [Nigeria]; Ngugi wa Thiong’o [Kenya]; Salman Rushdie [India];  Octavio Paz [Mexico] ; Adrienne Rich [U.S.]; Derek Walcott [St. Lucia]; Seamus Heaney [Ireland], and Joseph Brodsky[expatriate Russia](361-365).

Who would you add to this list?

Who determines if a work is a Classic?

According to Guinness, the designation of a work as a “classic” is not determined by a single authority or organization. Instead, it is a collective judgment that emerges over time from various sources, including literary scholars, critics, readers, and the general public.

Os Guiness gives us a rubric for identifying Classical Literature.

The Classics:

  • Create whole universes of imagination and thought
  • Exhibit distinguished style, fine artistry, and keen intellect
  • They portray life as complex and many-sided, depicting both negative and positive aspects of human character in the process of discovering and testing enduring virtues
  • Have a transforming effect on the reader’s self-understanding
  • Adapt themselves to various times and places and provide a sense of the shared life of humanity
  • Are considered “Classics” by a sufficiently large number of people: enduring popularity
  • Their appeal endures over wide reaches of time (21).

In addition, I believe a Classic is determined by: 1) its cultural and historical significance—it provides insights into the human condition or significant historical events (In Les Miserables, Hugo gives us his personal experience and opinions of the French Revolution); 2) Literary excellence—I look for unique literary styles, especially in the original translations; 3) have these works influenced and inspired other authors?

What about Non-Fiction Classics?

Due to my personal preference for non-fiction, I strongly believe that these works also merit inclusion in the Classics category. I have given each of these works the litmus-test for Classic categorization: The Republic by Plato, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, The Confessions by St. Augustine, The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, Goethe’s Essays on Literature and the Arts and The Study of World Literature ,What is Literature and Writing for One’s Age by Sartre, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Aldous Huxley, The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester, Napoleon III and The Rebuilding of Paris by Pinkney, A Grief Observed and Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

Why Read Classics? Should everyone read Classics?

According to Guinness, these works are intended for all, they have been tried and tested and deemed valuable for the general culture; therefore, yes, everyone should read Classics.

Why? The Classics have been found to enhance and elevate the consciousness of all conditions of people who study them, to lift their readers out of narrowness or provincialism into a wider vision of humanity. They lead those who will follow into a perception of the fullness and complexity of reality (Guinness, 23).

“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many common people in America had a knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Italian Opera. There was almost no cultural elite when it came to reading Classics, or reading at all” (17). This is when, according to Guinness, there became a great chasm which opened between the experts of specialized knowledge of the Classics and ordinary people who don’t read them. It is considered “snobbery” to read Classics or quote them. Why should this be the case? Every age has its own outlook, talent at seeing certain truths, and proneness toward particular mistakes.

“We need the books, therefore, that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period…that means old books”, argues C. S. Lewis. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can only be done by reading old books” (18).

But, who am I to judge if Classical Literature should be read? Classics have their own authority and speak best for themselves! They will always outlast their critics and lead generation after generation to fresh levels of discovery and appreciation.

Classics are not always easy to read

It was not until I was in my late thirties that I really began to appreciate Classic Literature. A list of the top 100 Classics of all time was published by the New York Times Book Review around this time. Upon reviewing this list, I realized I had only read 15 of these Classics, and I had been required to read most of them as part of my English Lit classes at Baylor. It was my intention to read all 100 Classics by the time I turned 50. After two decades, I still have half of the list to complete.

This is partly because Classics are hard to read.

For me, reading advanced literature can be achieved in several ways:

  • Original works: Read physical copies of the original work in the original language. I try to use this method and find copies in the original language if possible. [Abebooks is a great resource!]
  • Critical Essays from Journal Essays: Read Critical Essays of these works and Authors in Academic Journals from Databases JSTOR or EBSCO.
  • Anthologies: Read these Classics in Anthology Textbooks that I use in my courses. There are great study guides which cover: Analysis of texts, various genres, themes, and are classified by time periods such as Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, etc. Anthologies also feature works from diverse regions and languages and are translated into English.
  • Annotated or Study Editions:  Some editions of classic literature include annotations or critical analyses, making the reading experience more enriching and accessible, especially for first-time readers (Cliff Notes, No Fear Shakespeare, etc).
  • YA Editions: In recent years, I have greatly benefitted from YA abridged editions of such Classics as Moby Dick, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as I have Read-Aloud Sessions with my grandchildren.

Guinness guides us to “read as a three-year child” by not imposing our own opinions, evaluations, and interpretations until we have finished the work. In addition, he encourages the use of a “pencil in hand” as we underline and annotate in a conversation with the text (24).

A Classic beckons to thought, not action. A Reader is introduced to a realm above the ordinary hurly-burly of life, where they can reflect on their own insights and come to some sense of the powers of the mind and heart (25).

Work Cited

Louise Cowan and Os Guinness (1998) Invitation to the Classics: A Guide to Books You Have Always Wanted to Read. Grand Rapids: Baker Books Publishing.