Study Center staff Bill Boyd met with with Dr. Thomas Pfau of Duke University to talk about the formative personal and cultural discipline that is “reading.” Listen to their conversation on SoundCloud or below.
Authors and works referenced by Dr. Pfau:
Julius Caesar - The Gallic Wars (Latin, De Bello Gallico)
Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Henry Fielding
Thomas Paine - Common Sense
Joseph Andrews - first English novel in 1742, “a comic epic poem in prose”
Tom Jones - bildungsroman and picaresque literature
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
Jane Austen - Persuasion, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey
Stendahl (Henri Beyle) - The Red & the Black (French-English tr. by Margaret Shaw)
Gustav Flaubert - Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good & Evil
Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain
Seamus Heaney - Opened Ground, Death of a Naturalist, North, Field Work, Station Island
Rainer Maria Rilke - The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poetry & Prose (Norton Critical Edition)
William Wordsworth (stop after 1807)
John Keats (start after 1817)
J.M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace
Vasily Grossman - Life & Fate, Everything Flows
Czeslaw Milosz - The Captive Mind, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition
T.S. Eliot - Poems, 1909-1925
This season is the perfect time to go to a local bookseller and buy a “shamelessly canonical” book for a friend or family member. Celebrate the Word made flesh with words made visible in print. 🙂