Fair enough. I am an American literature student (in an English [language literature] department) in an American university, so I'm bound to think of the list through a certain situated perspective.
Furthermore, what I didn't dwell on in the above post, though perhaps I should have, is that the "judges" were British booksellers, meaning they were bound to think of the list through a different certain situated perspective. If mine is no doubt skewed (in ways I am unlikely to preexamine) toward Americanist selections, theirs is inevitably skewed in ways they can't help (or perhaps even account for) toward British selections.
And yet...two interesting questions occur to me: one, what was in fact American about my alternatives? Okay, I implicitly complained about the lack of American novels. But my questions about absences (no Aristotle, no Shakespeare, no Locke, no Kapital) involved all non-American suggestions, except in one case, where I (roundaboutly) suggested the American Douglass as a replacement for the American Stowe.
Two, it is an English list, but it's meant to be a list of books that shaped the World. Thus, it's not surprising that 2/3 of the list is English-language books, but does it not seem non-representative of the world (i.e., the universe of the shapeable) that the list is so largely English-language?
American v. English v. World writing
Rodney Herring Says:Fair enough. I am an American literature student (in an English [language literature] department) in an American university, so I'm bound to think of the list through a certain situated perspective.
Furthermore, what I didn't dwell on in the above post, though perhaps I should have, is that the "judges" were British booksellers, meaning they were bound to think of the list through a different certain situated perspective. If mine is no doubt skewed (in ways I am unlikely to preexamine) toward Americanist selections, theirs is inevitably skewed in ways they can't help (or perhaps even account for) toward British selections.
And yet...two interesting questions occur to me: one, what was in fact American about my alternatives? Okay, I implicitly complained about the lack of American novels. But my questions about absences (no Aristotle, no Shakespeare, no Locke, no Kapital) involved all non-American suggestions, except in one case, where I (roundaboutly) suggested the American Douglass as a replacement for the American Stowe.
Two, it is an English list, but it's meant to be a list of books that shaped the World. Thus, it's not surprising that 2/3 of the list is English-language books, but does it not seem non-representative of the world (i.e., the universe of the shapeable) that the list is so largely English-language?
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