In praxis "law-of-7"/2 for polyliteracy? (Lessons in Polyglottery) Language Learning Forum

In praxis "law-of-7"/2 for polyliteracy?
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Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery

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Zwlth
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Message 49 of 49

29 August 2011 at 11:51pm | IP Logged

Iversen wrote:

just above the 'combined standard canon' you find the following quote:

The great books of the Western world as they form the curricula at colleges around the United States, and as they are comprised in the encyclopedic publication of the same title, in effect form a canon of some 100 primary works or authors. As they are not quite the same at all institutions, I have combined the reading lists of a good number of programs (Columbia, Malaspina, St. John's, the Great Books Foundation, etc.) to find a general canon of closer to 150 works, 154 to be exact.

So Professor Arguelles has based his "combined standard canon" on preexisting lists, but it is his compilation and his annotations, and therefore I'm perfectly entitled to refer to it as his list.

When you add emphasis (bold, italics, underlining, or capitalization) to a quote, you must, according to all proper and established conventions of citation, indicate that you have done so in brackets directly afterwords. Otherwise, you imply that your emphasis is the author's emphasis, which is misrepresentation.

Anyone truly interested in this matter and who has not done so already should spend his or her time reading the original rather than our bickering. If you do this and then bother to return to this spat, you will have noticed that there are two lists for Western civilization, plus mention of other lists (including links that used to work and hopefully will do so again soon) for a 20th century list and lists for 3 other civilizations.

So, when there are two or more lists, to refer to one of them without further qualification as his list implies that it is the only one, which is misrepresentation.

If you or anyone else wish to refer to the Combined Standard Canon of Great Books of the Western World as "Arguelles' compilation" or "his compiled list," that would be one thing. But, to refer to it simply as "his" list (i.e., his only one), and to further imply that you have spotted conspicuous omissions in it, is flat out wrong.

Anyone who has read that page will have observed that there are two lists for Western Civilization: the mentioned above of 154 works, compiled by simply combining existing established lists, and another 833+ work Expanded Comprehensive Canon for Western Civilization described as follows:

Alexander Arguelles wrote:

Principles for Expanding the Canon
Thus, I have set about trying to comprise a list that would be more representative of the entire true great books heritage of Western Civilization. I have done this by adding copiously from my direct experience of deliberately searching out the greatest texts from the entire heritage by reading literary, intellectual, and cultural histories of all of the languages of Europe. As attempting to keep the list to 100 or 150 greatest works would have entailed an impossible constant paring down, I saw no sense at all in doing this, but rather simply expanded the list. I am more than willing to continue doing so as it only stands to reason that as time goes by, more and more classics will have been written. Still, in compiling my lists, I have attempted to follow a principle learned from Schopenhauer, which the compilers of the original lists seemed to heed not at all, namely: nothing should be considered a classic until its author has been dead for 100 years. Thus, I have deleted many names from the standard canon and placed them on a separate "20th century waiting list" (also given below) until a century has elapsed since their deaths.

As it stands, I now (in 2010) have over 833 entries on my list of Great Books of Western Civilization [emphasis added]. Obviously, this can no longer form the core of a unified college curriculum for seminar discussions, but rather the guidelines for a life-time of reading.

I am sure that any fair and objective reader must agree that, in this context, "his" list, i.e., Arguelles' list of Great Books for Western Civilization, cannot mean the one that he merely compiled, but must mean the one that he personally modified and greatly expanded.

Well, I find arguing about the semantics of basic words like "his" quite tiresome, but thankfully

Iversen wrote:

I do recognize that I should have used the extended list further down...

So I hope we can consider the matter closed.

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