I've just recently finished all my reading and essay-writing for my Bachelor of Arts degree, and after four years of education, I think that I'm in the right place to look back on my life at University and say in all honesty that you can never really get a complete education in your Undergrad. This goes without saying (after all, that's what Grad School/The Real World is all about), but I don't just mean in terms of classes and writing papers; I mean what you're actually learning. No, I don't mean that in the "yarr kids don't learn about life in university yarrgh" grumbling sense, but in the sense that you don't really read as many books as you could to give you a wide-ranged understanding of how to learn things.
I was also lucky enough, in my first year, to take Arts One, an 18-credit course at UBC that introduced first-year Arts students to English, Philosophy, and History. The format of the course was the smartest that I've seen in a class of that kind: each section had about 100 kids who would read a different book every week. At the beginning of the week, one of five professors (or on occasion a guest lecturer), would lecture on the book that the class was reading. Then each prof would have a group of 20 kids in a seminar that discussed the work for the week. Every two weeks, each student would write a 5-7 page paper on one (or both) of the two books that they had read, and late in the week, the professor would split the seminar into five-person tutorials, and the students would read and comment on each other's essays. The class not only taught me to read and work at a faster pace than in high school, but how to read critically, and how to write a university-level paper. I certainly peaked early, there hasn't been a class since then that I think compared. The reading list was exceptional, many of the works that we read were far and above our reading level. The two-week sessions were staggered, too; we read Rousseau with Descartes, and later, Nietszche with Hamlet.
Also, I should note that the inspiration for the name of this blog, Arts Deux, came from that class: the idea is that it's a place where one moves from the Arts One setting. Even though I've steered it in the wrong direction many times, I hope to get back on that track, now, by creating
The Arts Deux Reading Challenge
How about we create an Arts One-style reading list, but with my post-undergrad knowledge? The following is a list of recommendations that, even though they will most likely not be taught at the undergrad level for people seeking a BA, will nonetheless help broaden their understanding of what the Arts is all about. My Arts One course was called Reason and Madness, and I am calling this one The Imagination and The Self: it will cosist of ten two-book sections, each focusing on a different aspect of how the concept and use of the imagination feeds into a persons self-awareness and identity. The readings will deal with psychology, racial and sexual identity, introversion, and the impact of societal practices (such as war and the societal identifying of "the other") upon self-identity, as well as nationalism versus individualism. Of course this is the tip of the iceberg, make of the readings what you will. I recommend that you read these books in the order that I've placed them, I think that they'll complement each other best this way.
Part One: Symbolism
1) Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols
If you're going to start somewhere with symbolism, it might as well be here, the foundation of how we understand the meaning of symbols today. Symbolism, I have noticed, is strangely ignored by a lot of undergrad profs as a serious means of interpretation; still, having a strong foundation in the importance of symbols and, more importantly, why we use them, changes the way that one reads books, looks at paintings, or even understands the day-to-day life.
2) Kate Chopin: The Awakening
The book that ruined Chopin's career, The Awakening is now seen as one of the founding works of feminism. Written on the cusp of the twentieth century (1898), Chopin's book is not only about a woman's sexual awakening, but her more personal and sensual understanding of the world. The symbolism in apparent in the book, and it also contains several themes which will be expanded upon later on in the list.
Part Two: Sexuality
3) Sigmund Freud: Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex
The criticism that people who don't read Freud make of Freud is that he "makes it all about sex", meaning that Frued perverts every aspect of life in order to fit it into his theories; the Oedipal Complex being the most famous of these stereotypical arguments. In fact, what Freud was doing was not encouraging or obsessing over sexual deviance, but simply using the growth of natural human sexuality in order to explain many aspects of the human condition. The reason why people think it's dirty is because they shrink so easily away from any mention of sexuality (a reaction that Freud explains herein). Nonetheless, by being comfortable with the sexual aspects of out existence, we can start to look at our individuality in a more comfortable light.
4) John Barth: Lost in the Funhouse
Barth's collection of short stories, aside from being a brilliant treatise on the meaning and format of writing itself, is a wonderful companion to Freud, in that it follows a family through periods of sexual confusion and misunderstanding, focused on the young son, Ambrose. Ambrose's isolation and his sexual awakening is heartwarming and, without the Freudian interpretations, the book itself is a good read.
Part Three: Art and Death
5) Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy
One of Nietzsche's earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy introduces two key terms for understanding art: Apollonian and Dyonisian. These two types of tragedy, which Nietzsche outlines in depth (so I won't explain them here) play into many of the tragic works that appear on the list, as well as bring up heavy philosophical questions (one of which had me and my fellow Arts One-ers arguing at a lunch table for nigh on two hours). As a bonus, by the time you finish reading the book, you'll be able to spell Friedrich Neitzsche in your sleep.
6) Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
The story of a failed novelist's last days on a resort in Venice is one of Mann's most poingnant novels. It's a perfect ending point to the three works of psychology and philosopy that have been on the list so far, dealing with heavy symbolism, questioning the morals of homosexuality, and ending with prose that Nietzsche himself could have based The Birth of Tragedy on, if he hadn't been so obsessed with Wagnerian Opera. Also, this is one book where I'd recommend some extracurricular reading (though not much): Euripides' The Bakkhai, and Freud's work on Eros and Thanatos.
Part Four: Mysticism and the Family
7) Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits
Magical Realism tends to get overlooked for the sake of stupider (in my opinion) genres, like Postmodernism. That being said, Allende's novel about the rise and fall of a family in Latin America is poingnant as it is creative, haunting, and funny. Most people recommend Gabrial Garcia Marqez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as the seminal work of the genre, but I prefer Allende's (even though the books are so similar you could probably exchange one for the other and still get a good feel for it).
8) Toni Morrison: Beloved
Beloved is, hands down, one of the most beautiful work's of American Literature. Like Allende, Morrison deals with family, but her mysticism is based more in a Southern Gothic style. Morrison's protagonists are haunted by both a literal ghost and by the ghost of American slavery, the result is both a chilling horror story and a strongly transcendental take on the most atrocious period of American history.
Part Five: The Female Soul
9) Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
This one might be taught more often than the other books on the list. Woolf's famous essay was a powerful work in modern feminism, not only expressing the importance of a woman as an individual, but of a woman as an artist. It's a work that needs very little introduction, in fact, but one that is essential when approaching both political and artistic feminism.
10) Zelda Fitzgerald: Save Me The Waltz
When F. Scott Fitzgerald learned that his wife had written a novel about their failing marriage, he pulled the manuscript from the editors and cut through it, editing out sections that made him look bad, or that he claimed took too much from his own material – a travesty that Scott himself comitted when he wrote Tender is the Night his own novel on the same subject. Since then, Zelda's novel has fallen by the wayside, only being read in comparison to Scott's work. Even so, Zelda's autobiographical account of her marriage and her attempts to become a ballerina in her late twenties stands on its own as a great work of art, and one of the best examples of an exploration into the woman's soul in writing.
Part Six: The African-American Voice
11) James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time
Baldwin's essay on race is one of the best on the subject: it is written not with anger, but with an attempt to combat the problem of discrimination at its root. The essay itself is short, but illuminating, and I still think bears relevance today.
12) Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
When accepting the National Book Award for this novel, Ellison commented that he was not trying to write another protest novel, that his book could be valued for its intellectual and experimental quality. Still, it is one of the most important novels about racism written in the United States, and stands out as an experimental novel as well; as the protagonist literally calls himself an "invisible man", who blends into his surroundings and cannot be seen by the people around him. This book also serves as a great novel to read alongside the Dostoevsky that appears later on in the list.
Part Seven: Life During Wartime
13) E.E. Cummings: The Enormous Room
Cumming's memoir of being an innocently arrested prisoner of war during the 1910s is an amusing and tragic portrayal of a wartime environment. Cumming's gift is in characterization and his irony, and, like with Cumming's more famous poetry, his innovative descriptions. Fellow war veteran F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Enormous Room the most important book about the first world war.
14) Sebastian Barry: A Long Long Way
A contemporary work about an Irish soldier during the Great War, Sebastian Barry's novel captures in beautifully frightening detail the experiences of one soldier as he fights for and against his own countrymen during the war in Europe and later in the Easter Rising in Ireland. I should note here why I have chosen two accounts from the First World War, instead of works from previous wars, or from later ones in the twentieth century. The reason, to me, is simple: first, it makes the works more available for comparison, and second, because the experience of the First World War was arguably responsible for the world as we know it today; and the personal expereince of a soldier during that time echoes in more contemporary works about the Second World War, Vietnam, or even the Iraq War.
Part Eight: The Interior Life
15) Virginia Woolf: The Waves
And now, a novel by Virginia Woolf. The Waves was her most experimental work, and her greatest triumph in free indirect discourse and stream-of-consciousness writing. The Waves chronicles the lives of six friends, from their childhood until death, and is told completely through interior monologue. More personal and artistic than her more popular To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, The Waves is unfortunately under-studied, and this under-appreciated.
16) Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
One of Dostoevsky's shorter novels, Notes from Underground details a few days in the life of a first-person, nameless protagonist. The Underground man is spiteful but also nihilistically insightful, and the book itself is a well-written piece of Russian literature. Of course, I would include Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in this list instead, but it's too damn long. Notes from Underground could easily be written by Ivan Karamazov; the Underground Man has his sense of atheistic dramaticism.
Part Nine: Poetry and Song
17) Poetry: Sylvia Plath: Ariel and T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems
Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems are famous not only for their beauty, but because they were some of the last things that she wrote before her suicide. Plath's ex-husband Ted Hughes noted that the Ariel poems were her most creative, and that she wrote them without much self-editing, they sprang out of her mind fully-formed. With this, we can look at Plath's last work as possibly her most personal, and they range in their emotive power from the beautiful and calming title poem to the bitter and spitefull "Daddy". Eliot's work, on the other hand, is less emotive, but no less powerful. "The Waste Land" is the keystone of modernist poetry, meaning everything and nothing at the same time. Other poems, such as "The Hollow Men" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are beautifully personal, dealing with the inhumanity of the war and the loss of identity and hope in a modern world.
18) Song: Neutral Milk Hotel: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is one of the best works of independent songwriting produced in the last fifteen years, and Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy albums are close behind it. Both albums deal with an underlying plotline, and the goal here is not simply to enjoy the albums in the format that they are presented, but to look at them in terms of fiction and literature; comparing them to the works already studied. Both can, for example, be read alongside Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, or Nietzsche's philosophical work.
Part Ten: Children's Literature
19) Lewis Carrol: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Why end the series with children's literature? Well, the problem with children's literature is that most adults assume that since the literature was written for children, it has very little meaning for anyone else. This, of course, is far from the truth. After spending eighteen weeks reading some of the best examples of adult literature, reading Carrol's work in this context illuminates the Alice stories in a wholly different way, explaining why the book has become a classic, and why it is used so often today, such as the film Pan's Labyrinth, the novella Coraline, or in Tim Burton's upcoming film adaptation.
20) J.M. Barrie: Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
The final book on the list is one of the most well-known stories in western literature: J.M. Barrie's classic story of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But Peter Pan is more than that; it is not just about children growing up, but a look at childhood, adulthood, society, death, life, and the impotance of fairy tales and fantasy in our everyday lives; the importance of the Imagination in the formation of the Self.
So there you have it! Of course, if there are any other recommendations, feel free to share. What's missing? What's a bad idea? Is the list helpful? As I stated above, I would expect the reader to move at a one book per day pace, meaning that this is a five-month journey into the subject; think of it as a personally administered correspondance course. Luckily for me, I've already read all the books, but I'm more than happy to read them again for the sake of discussion.
Here's an Amazon Wish List with all the books, in order:
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