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Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Greece

                      

History

     Greece, Roderick Beaton

      Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: a history of ancient Greece, Robin Waterford

     From Alexander to Cleopatra: the Hellenistic World, Michael Grant

     Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life, Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire, Bethany Hughes

     Why Homer Matters: a history, Adam Nicolson

     The Peloponnesian War, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, Thucydides: the Reinvention of History, Donald Kagan

      The Ten Thousand, Michael Curtis Ford

       Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece and the end of the Golden Age, Dividing the Spoils: Alexander the Great’s Empire, Taken at the Flood: the Roman Conquest of Greece, Robin Waterfield

     A History of Ancient Greece in Fifty Lives, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, Looking at Medea, Looking at Antigone, David Stuttard

     Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria, Ki Longfellow

     Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece, Ian Worthington

      Alexander the Great, Philip Freeman

     Cleopatra: histories, dreams, distortions, Lucy Hughes-Hallet

     The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe, Mark Mazower

      Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres

     Classical Mythology in Literature, Art, and Music, Mayerson

     Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Grimal

      Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, Athene: Virgin and Mother in Greek Religion, Hermes: Guide of Souls, Apollo: The Wind, the Spirit, and the God: Four Studies, Zeus and Hera, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (with C.G. Jung), Oedipus Variations (with James Hillman), Karl Kerényi

     Pan and the Nightmare, James Hillman

    Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Susan Rowland

                    Philosophy

     The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, Arthur Herman   

     The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone

     Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus, John Cooper

     Plato’s Republic, Alain Badiou

     Plato: Complete Works, Plato, John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson (Editors) Hackett Publishing Co 1997

     Aristotle for Everybody, Mortimer J. Adler

     The New Hackett Aristotle: Rhetoric, Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Metaphysics, De Anima, Physics, C.D.C. Reeve translator

     Action, Contemplation, and Happiness: An Essay on Aristotle, C.D.C. Reeve

             Modern Reimaginations of Classical Myth and Literature

   The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso

    Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes

    Hercules My Shipmate, Homer’s Daughter, Robert Graves

     Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo, The Praise Singer, Mary Renault

    Medea, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, Christa Wolf

    Circe, The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

    Alcestis, Katharine Beutner

     Antigonick, An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Autobiography of Red, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson

     The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker

     The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

     House of Names, Colm Toibin

                     Literature

     Iliad, Odyssey, Homer, Fagles trans.

     The Odyssey, by Homer, New English translation by Emily Wilson

     The Orestia, Aeschylus, Fagles trans.

     Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus

     The Three Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, & Antigone, Sophocles, Fagles trans.

      The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Aeschylus, Robert Fagles (Translator),

The Cure at Troy: Sophocles’ Philotectes, The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone, Seamus Heaney

     Theogony, Hesiod

     The Metamorphoses, Ovid, Charles Martin trans

     The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus, Robin Hard trans

     The Bacchae, Euripides, Arrowsmith trans.

      Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text, Charles Segal

     Three Comedies, Aristophanes, Arrowsmith trans.

     History, Herodotus

     Thucydides: a guide to the Peloponnesian War, Strassler ed.

     A History of my Time, Xenophon

     Dialogues, Plato

     Lives, Plutarch

     Collected Poems, Walking in Athens with Constantine Cavafy, Cavafy

     Poems, Seferis

     The Axion Esti, Elytis

     The Odyssey, a modern sequel, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis

     Something Will Happen, You’ll See, Christos Ikonomou      Damascus, Christos Tsiolka

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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