To Read is Human

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.

Study center staff member Bill Boyd met with with Dr. Thomas Pfau of Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill to talk about the formative personal and cultural discipline that is "reading.” More at ncstudycenter.org/news

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. 🙂

Interested in more?