The Western canon is the embodiment of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western hemisphere , such works having achieved the status of classics .
96-627: Venizelos ( Greek : Βενιζέλος ) is a Greek surname. It may refer to: Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936), Greek politician Sofoklis Venizelos (1894–1964), Greek politician, son of the above Evangelos Venizelos (born 1957), Greek politician, unrelated to the above Andreas Venizelos, a fictional character in the Honorverse See also [ edit ] Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, Crete [REDACTED] Surname list This page lists people with
192-683: A canon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture . In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library , scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes ["the admitted", "the included"] to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as
288-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,
384-615: A canon of literature is the question of authority; who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading? Charles Altieri , of the University of California, Berkeley , states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society. American historian Todd M. Compton argues that canons are always communal in nature; that there are limited canons for, say
480-537: A commonplace writer"). Such classification were initiated with the Greeks' ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard"). Similarly, early Christian Church Fathers declared as canon the authoritative texts of the New Testament , preserving them given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in
576-477: A critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked. One of the main objections to
672-558: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in
768-508: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on
864-540: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near
960-455: A general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. However, in Britain and America at least women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century, and many major nineteenth-century British novelists were women, including Jane Austen ,
1056-523: A hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a 'high Anglican and royalist literary history' on 17th-century English poetry. The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939 an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry , which would exclude the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser . Winters claimed that
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#17327652978421152-584: A literary style labeled as magic realism , which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca ), and most of them explore the theme of solitude . On his death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos , the President of Colombia, described him as "the greatest Colombian who ever lived." Mario Vargas Llosa , (b. 1936)
1248-408: A literature survey class, or an English department reading list, but there is no such thing as one absolute canon of literature. Instead, there are many conflicting canons. He regards Bloom's "Western Canon" as a personal canon only. The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopher John Searle has said, "In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there
1344-501: A narrow interpretation of the West, dominated by British and American culture, at least under contemporary circumstances, prompting demands for a more diversified canon amongst the hemisphere. A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second-century Roman miscellany Attic Nights , Aulus Gellius refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not
1440-609: A profound influence on medieval scholarship. Their influence extended from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance , and his views were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics . In metaphysics, Aristotelianism profoundly influenced Judeo-Islamic philosophical and theological thought during the Middle Ages and continues to influence Christian theology , especially
1536-615: A student's education, such as Plato's Republic , or Dante's Divine Comedy . Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of
1632-579: Is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature . One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his books have sold over thirteen million copies in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the author of novels including The White Castle , The Black Book , The New Life , My Name Is Red , Snow , The Museum of Innocence , and A Strangeness in My Mind . He
1728-547: Is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature . Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom . Upon announcing
1824-790: Is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World , Modern Library , Everyman's Library or Penguin Classics ), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom 's ), or be the official reading list of a university. In The Western Canon Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as Dante Alighieri , Geoffrey Chaucer , Miguel de Cervantes , Michel de Montaigne , William Shakespeare , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , William Wordsworth , Charles Dickens , Leo Tolstoy , James Joyce and Marcel Proust . A university or college Great Books Program
1920-525: Is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s by John Erskine of Columbia University , which proposed to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins , Mortimer Adler , Stringfellow Barr , Scott Buchanan , Jacques Barzun , and Alexander Meiklejohn . The view among them
2016-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout
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#17327652978422112-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During
2208-604: Is different from Wikidata All set index articles Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized : Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized : Hellēnikḗ ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of
2304-466: Is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki ,
2400-519: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to
2496-831: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern European canon Recent discussions upon
2592-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,
2688-702: Is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University , where he teaches writing and comparative literature . Born in Istanbul , Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger , 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour , and 2003 International Dublin Literary Award . Octavio Paz Lozano (1914–1998)
2784-674: The Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from
2880-634: The Brontë family , Elizabeth Gaskell , and George Eliot . There were also three major female poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson . In the twentieth century there were also many major female writers, including Katherine Mansfield , Dorothy Richardson , Virginia Woolf , Eudora Welty , and Marianne Moore . Notable female writers in France include Colette , Simone de Beauvoir , Marguerite Yourcenar , Nathalie Sarraute , Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan . Much of
2976-624: The Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are
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3072-578: The Chinese classics . With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino , and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including T. S. Eliot , Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve , Michael Dirda , and Ezra Pound . The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon"
3168-627: The Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of
3264-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It
3360-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as
3456-511: The Middle East , and South America. Writers from Africa, Turkey, China, Egypt, Peru, and Colombia, Japan, etc., have received Nobel prizes since the late 1960s. Writers from Asia and Africa have also been nominated for, and also won, the Booker prize in recent years. Susan Hardy Aitken argues that the Western canon has maintained itself by excluding and marginalising women, whilst idealising
3552-831: The Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church . Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as "The First Teacher" ( Arabic : المعلم الأول ). His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics . The vast body of Christian philosophy is typically represented on reading lists mainly by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas . The academic canon of early modern philosophy generally includes Descartes , Spinoza , Leibniz , Locke , Berkeley , Hume , and Kant . Major philosophers of
3648-602: The Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of
3744-421: The Renaissance include Niccolò Machiavelli , Michel de Montaigne , Pico della Mirandola , Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno , Marsilio Ficino and Gemistos Plethon . The seventeenth century was important for philosophy, and the major figures were Francis Bacon , Thomas Hobbes , René Descartes , Blaise Pascal , Baruch Spinoza , John Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz . Major philosophers of
3840-483: The humanities ). Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males" as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical culture to modern society. Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle , Professor of Philosophy at
3936-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in
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4032-491: The surname Venizelos . If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name (s) to the link. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Venizelos&oldid=1254516332 " Categories : Surnames Greek-language surnames Hidden categories: Articles containing Greek-language text Articles with short description Short description
4128-468: The wider African diaspora of writers in Britain, France, Latin America, and Africa. This correlated largely with the shift in social and political views during the civil rights movement in the United States. The first global recognition came in 1950 when Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Chinua Achebe 's novel Things Fall Apart helped draw attention to African literature . Nigerian Wole Soyinka
4224-485: The 1990s the concept of the Western canon was vehemently condemned, just as earlier Modern Library lists had been criticized as "too American," Modern Library responded by preparing new lists of "100 Best Novels" and "100 Best Nonfiction" compiled by famous writers, and later compiled lists nominated by book purchasers and readers. Some intellectuals have championed a "high conservative modernism" that insists that universal truths exist, and have opposed approaches that deny
4320-478: The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Many philosophers today agree that Greek philosophy has influenced much of Western culture since its inception. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "The safest general characterization of
4416-602: The Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller . He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan , of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum . In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952)
4512-618: The European intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for African-American political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades, most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois . Since the 1960s the Western literary canon has been expanded to include writers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This is reflected in the Nobel Prizes awarded in literature. Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972)
4608-693: The European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato ." Clear, unbroken lines of influence lead from ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers to Early Islamic philosophy , the European Renaissance , and the Age of Enlightenment . Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens . He is widely considered
4704-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit
4800-495: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in
4896-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow
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#17327652978424992-685: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community
5088-659: The Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement had been undervalued and argued that George Gascoigne (1525–1577) "deserves to be ranked […] among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher". Towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was increasingly disputed. In the twentieth century there was a general reassessment of the literary canon , including women's writing , post-colonial literatures , gay and lesbian literature , writing by racialized minorities, working people's writing, and
5184-718: The Souls of Today's Students (1987), argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture. Bloom further comments: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied." His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored by cultural relativists . Classicist Bernard Knox made direct reference to this topic when he delivered his 1992 Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in
5280-593: The University of California, Berkeley, has written: There is a certain irony in this [i.e., politicized objections to the canon] in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers , through the writings of Mill and Marx , down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating
5376-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),
5472-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of
5568-700: The best in the Spanish language , he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature . García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing
5664-480: The central figures of the British renaissance canon remain, Edmund Spenser , Sir Philip Sidney , Christopher Marlowe , William Shakespeare , Ben Jonson , and John Donne . Spenser , Donne , and Jonson were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poet John Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute, while
5760-455: The claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture." African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity." This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with
5856-424: The core of canon music and remains mostly unchanged to our days. It integrates a huge body of works starting from the 17th century and are reproduced on an ensemble of all acoustic musical instruments that were common in that century's Europe. The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to distinctly canonize the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Ludwig van Beethoven as
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#17327652978425952-568: The course of the 1920s, Eliot did much to establish the importance of the metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. However, by 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry." Two decades later,
6048-419: The cultural productions of historically marginalized groups. This reassessment has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary", such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest. The Western literary canon has also expanded to include the literature of Asia, Africa,
6144-459: The curriculum at the University of Chicago . University president Robert Maynard Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public. An earlier attempt had been made in 1909 by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot , with the Harvard Classics , a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view
6240-451: The early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the twentieth century, the Western literary canon started to include African writers not only from African-American writers , but also from
6336-850: The eighteenth century include George Berkeley , Montesquieu , Voltaire , David Hume , Giambattista Vico , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Denis Diderot , Immanuel Kant , Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham . Important nineteenth century philosophers include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Giuseppe Mazzini , Arthur Schopenhauer , Auguste Comte , Søren Kierkegaard , Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche . Major twentieth century figures include Henri Bergson , Edmund Husserl , Bertrand Russell , Martin Heidegger , Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Paul Sartre , Simone de Beauvoir , and Simone Weil , Michel Foucault , Pierre Bourdieu , Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas . A porous distinction between analytic and continental approaches emerged during this period. Classical music forms
6432-466: The existence of universal truths. Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1994 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages , and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions. Allan Bloom (no relation), in his highly influential The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished
6528-679: The first contemporary writers of Arabic literature , along with Tawfiq el-Hakim , to explore themes of existentialism . He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films. Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–2023) was a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature . His novels, short stories, and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory , deal with political, social, and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons , nuclear power , social non-conformism , and existentialism . Ōe
6624-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn
6720-532: The interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury . In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature. Eliot, for example, championed poet Sir John Davies in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926. During
6816-414: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write
6912-410: The matter emphasise cultural diversity within the canon. The canons of music and visual arts have been broadened to encompass often overlooked periods, whilst recent media like cinema grapple with a precarious position. Criticism arises, with some viewing changes as prioritising activism over aesthetic values, often associated with critical theory, as well as postmodernism . Another critique highlights
7008-576: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek
7104-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and
7200-499: The most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition . Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher . His writings cover many subjects – including physics , biology , zoology , metaphysics , logic , ethics , aesthetics , rhetoric , linguistics , politics and government—and constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy . Aristotle's views on physical science had
7296-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks
7392-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as
7488-501: The overall aim of fostering a community of learning. Over 100 institutions of higher learning, mostly in the United States, offer some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students. For much of the 20th century, the Modern Library provided a larger convenient list of the Western canon. The list numbered more than 300 items by the 1950s, by authors from Aristotle to Albert Camus, and has continued to grow. When in
7584-541: The predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation
7680-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of
7776-447: The various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than
7872-529: The vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between
7968-473: The very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora , African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power." In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of
8064-421: The works of European men. Where women's work is introduced it can be considered inappropriately rather than recognising the importance of their work; a work's greatness is judged against socially situated factors which exclude women, whilst being portrayed as an intellectual approach. The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted
8160-401: Was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read. Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature . He is regarded as one of
8256-402: Was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize , the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature , and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature . Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of
8352-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or
8448-568: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of
8544-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe
8640-474: Was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world , where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today". Guan Moye (b. 1955), better known by the pen name "Mo Yan", is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of the U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers ", and Jim Leach called him
8736-548: Was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised." One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of
8832-428: Was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought. The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to
8928-427: Was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986, and American Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to win, in 1993. Some early Afro-American writers were inspired to defy ubiquitous racial prejudice by proving themselves equal to European American authors. As Henry Louis Gates Jr., has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute
9024-466: Was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle : "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books". ("The Hero as Man of Letters", 1840) The canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century has always been in some form of flux and towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers. However,
9120-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect
9216-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage
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