These are just preliminary thoughts after scanning through Watson, together wtih reviewing the various Oxford VSI's summary I have done on this blog before
For Western:
- Need to include Freud, seems like natural to displace Nietzsche
The other changes that I have considered, but end up deciding against:
- Proust - long novel not completed and all published in the 1910s; and since Hugo's novel is already included, harder to make case to include Proust. (And inclusion of Hugo also takes out Braudelaire)
- Joyce - say Ulysses is published after 1910s
- Kafka - German modern prose author; clearly cannot displace Goethe. Does Kafka really more representative than either Joyce of Proust?
(- I also thought about including 19th c. Machado de Assis, but does Portuguese deserve to have 2 works in the canonical list, while Spanish and German and Russian all just have 1 slot?)
For South Asian:
- Tagore already got Nobel prize in the 1910s, and Bengali is a key language not yet represented, and Tagore is author of national anthem of both India and Bangladesh. Who does he displace? I am thinking Jayadeva's Gita Govinda.
The other changes that I have considered, but end up deciding against:
- Gandhi: Hind Swaraj was published before 1910, but his autobiography was published in the 1920s
- Iqbal: his major works were actually in Persian, and in a way he and Ghalib are very similar in cultural orientation. If we have Ghalib already, Iqbal may not need to be in
(If we include Hikayat Indraputra for SE Asian Islamic tradition, that probably ends up replacing Shah Walliullah.)
Since it is before 1919, I don't see a need to really modify the East Asian list. The only worth considering was Furuzawa - but does "westernize / modernize" thinkers have a real long-term place in the canon?
Out of the same consideration, I also don't feel Muhammad Abduh needs to be included in CWANA.
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