Great Books that are must-read ?

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I like dostoevsky better too .. dostoevsky and wittgenstein marked the transition to a new era.. .. tolstoy is kinda like dreams of red chamber or romance of three kingdoms .. not the kind of thing for me tbh..

kortie puts Myshkin to shame.

Wittgenstein's religious beliefs (or lack of them) were strongly influenced by the thought of Dostoyevsky, as with most fideist apologists since that era, as well as by Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief and Thirty Stories but these views never became mainstream among theologians - not as serious apologetics, anyway.


Mr Kortie is a jolly good fellow - I'll leave it at that.

I'm up to chapter 19 of WH and feeling slightly more sympathetic towards Heathcliff than before. I'll have a five hundred to a thousand word essay on the novel once I complete it (great way of retaining details about and boosting understanding of a novel).

I do the same by writing notes, cross-references and essays after reading. I assume that at Chapter 19 you are reading the one-volume second edition, edited by Charlotte, and that Isabella Linton has escaped Heathcliff's violence?

-Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

-The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/道可道，非常道；名可名，非常名.2995105/

It's one of my personal favourite Wittgenstein quotes. I was entranced by W's fideistic theology for a year or two after reading the Tractatus, before realising how little of any worthwhile God remains after that sort of treatment. I actually think there are good rational, positivistic reasons for belief in God now, as well as good arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but no church wants me.

I've not read any of Wittgenstein's later work, though I know he repudiated a lot of what he had written in the Tractatus. It would be interesting to know how his theology developed.



Yes. I tried to get hold of the edition you recommended, but couldn't find it anywhere.

It's a powerful and terrifying novel, and yet I can't help escaping my original conclusion that it's also an immoral novel; there's something of de Sade - something Satanic even - about it.

Perhaps you can infer why I chose my username.
I agree it's diabolical, and it only gets worse for Catherine's daughter.

I don't see the "immorality" in all this----but, in the 19th century, there certainly would have been enough "immorality" to go around.

I tend to believe that the formation of characters such as this serve as a representation of a certain aspect of the personality of the writer, or of some people the writer knew. and/or, perhaps, an archetype.

Every person, really, has a side which can be said to be immoral or amoral. In Freudian terms (basically)---the "Id."

Heathcliff is considered a Byronic hero. Emily read a considerable amount of Byron but also German literature (Romantic and Gothic) as a young child. There are also astounding parallels between Wuthering Heights and Henry Kirke White's Remains, most notably his verse "Clifton Grove", which Emily's mother left to her in 1821 as a treasured keepsake.

I just think that literature should serve a moral, expansive purpose - and yet this isn't the case with Wuthering Heights. Not only is it not a novel which one goes away from having grown, but I think it's a novel that, like Goethe's Sorrows, one could go insane from reading. One sees in WH all his deepest fears and darkest thoughts laid bare on a canvas. You can just feel the presence of Heathcliff's seething evil, and in this, a prefigurement of the evil of modern times - Heathcliff seems an archetype of the psychopathic antihero who is, in modern times, a perverse substitute for the real hero.

Publication: Graham’s Lady’s Magazine (USA)
Date: July 1848
Reviewer: Anonymous
How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors….

My favourite review, from 1848 ^

I believe it would be nice for literature to serve "a moral, expansive purpose." Personally, I don't care too much for works which don't serve that purpose. There is a strong air of sentimentality to me. And I believe strongly in strong morals/ethics.

However, there exists great literature which is not "moral" or "expansive" in the least. At times, this sort of literature explores "new ground." And could serve as an antidote to the didactic for some. It could be the "sweetener," so to speak, which hides the unpalatable aspects of the didactic and of the "heavily moral."

Like I said, I'm a strong believer in morals, and a strong believer in didactic forms of instruction. I would have made a great polemicist during the Enlightenment. My temperament is more suited to the Enlightenment than the immediately subsequent Romantic period.

You would have to have lived my life to know that people like Heathcliff exist.

I like to say that the subtitle should be: "Because Psychopaths Fall in Love, Too".

Oh people like Heathcliff exist, no doubt, but it's the inversion of value - the inversion of morality - that's implied in having Heathcliff held up as a hero, a man of real, dynamic power - it's this that makes the novel so terrifying and diabolical.

https://www.friendsofnationallibraries.org.uk/remains-henry-kirke-white-annotations-bronte-family

Henry Kirke White's book was one of Maria's only possessions to survive shipwreck. As a child Emily wrote copious marginalia on the relic, similar to Catherine's notes and drawings inside the box-bed Bible in WH.

But, who holds him as a hero? He wasn't seen as a hero in Victorian England; in fact, he was considered terrifying much like Frankenstein's monster.

Hollywood perverted the novel as a romantic love story but Heathcliff is clearly an anti-hero. None of the Hollywood images of Catherine and Heathcliff embracing outdoors in the wild are accurate. In fact, no such scene occurs in Wuthering Heights. Hollywood has propelled this novel to a false standard.

Read the novel as an expression of the 18th Century Romantic tradition (the duality of earth and heaven, man and beast), and view Heathcliff as a metaphor for jealousy and revenge. At its core, this is an ironic novel meant to question human pride.

I'm also fascinated by its concentric narrative technique, as we've discussed before.