Operable word is “savored,” like fine food or Mexican Coke. I like the way he writes and luxuriate in it.
Ditto, except if I disagree with him I might get capped.
And there was John Astin’s interpretation.
Literature is often badly taught, particularly at the high school level, and the “EVERYTHING IS A SYMBOL BECAUSE I SAY IT IS” approach is an all-too-common flavor of badness. Part of the problem, I think, is that some teachers are not especially proficient at the subject they teach, and are falling back on a single interpretation that they picked up in one of their own classes and teaching it as if it were The One Right Answer, rather than drawing out the students’ ideas, pushing them toward more nuanced and sophisticated interpretations that are still the students’ own, and teaching them how to support those interpretations with evidence from the text. The latter is a lot harder.
That said, students do need to learn how to notice and talk about the nuances of word choice and detail, because that’s what makes a literature class different from a book club (and because that’s how they learn to do neat stuff with language in their own writing), and they usually need a fair bit of guidance and modeling to get there. Students who are reasonably good readers can figure out character and plot on their own, and sometimes they even get to some fairly sophisticated analysis of the big thematic and ethical issues the work raises, but it takes a good teacher to show them HOW it all works, and to point out the cool little touches they might not notice on their own. And yeah, that requires more concentration and more attention to detail than most students naturally want to give, so a lot of them are going to find it tedious at first. (In the right hands, though, it’s also revelatory, in an oh-now-I-see-what-the-author-is-doing-there sort of way.)
I read Moby Dick on my own, after graduating college, and enjoyed it. My favorite line, and no, I don’t remember the context: “Angels are but sharks well-govern’d.”
That said, I love analyzing literature, looking for symbolism, etc. The only books I read in high school and college that I hated with the heat of a thousand fiery suns were As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary.
It’s very big of you not to denigrate “looking for secret clues” in literature. Based on your description of it, it sounds a lot like what some of us call reading.
I agree with the consensus here, which I will summarize as “Many high school English teachers poison great books by their approach. Also, many high school students are not ready for the great books at the point in the curriculum where they come up.”
My example is Jane Austin. My English teacher emphasized the great literature aspects, the depth, and so on. I read the Cliff Notes. Sometime in my twenties I picked up Northanger Abbey, and discovered something my English teacher neglected to mention–Jane Austin is funny. Downright hysterical at times. I don’t know if I would have gotten the jokes in high school, though.
My literature training from high school on up was always to read the book once purely for the story and only once I’d done that, read it again looking specifically for themes, motifs, symbolism and the like. I don’t remember who first told me to do it that way, but it certainly made lit classes more enjoyable.
I’ve said it here on the Dope before, but I’ll repeat it:
The problem with middle/high school “literature” classes is that they put the cart before the horse. They attempt to instill a love of “literature” without first instilling a love of simply “reading”. By forcing Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby and the works of Shakespeare (stories they can barely relate to) upon typical teenagers, and then forcing them through all of that analysis (taking them away from actually enjoying the story), teenagers will get the idea that reading is not supposed to be fun. Those teenagers then turn into adults who have no interest in reading.
Get the kids to love reading by encouraging them to read the kinds of books they enjoy. Then, when they’re adults, they’ll likely seek out the “literature” on their own at some point. It’s worked that way for me, at any rate.
I was delighted when my family moved during the summer between my Junior and Senior years of high school. My new high school had classes like, “Fantasy Literature” and “Science Fiction Literature”. I ended up in the Fantasy class, and we read age-appropriate fantasy novels, which is why I think I love the fantasy genre to this day (I was already a science fiction fan, and had already read most of the works of Asimov before my senior year, so I didn’t need much introduction to that genre).
If you don’t like depressing, you might want to steer away from Steinbeck. Although he has a sense of humor, he also has a great appreciation for “the darker side of human nature.” It’s that appreciation that causes critics to say he has “keen social perception.”
The problem with the 1-2 process is that it takes a fairly long time for a high school class to read a whole book and if it’s not broken into smaller milestones, first, you won’t be able to tell who’s reading it and who’s blowing it off, and, second, more students will succumb to procrastination. Shoot, I don’t have to have it read for two more weeks - I can crank it out in two days.
I agree with Reno Nevada, and think that **Inner Stickler’s **method is a good one. But to use it, the class has to have enough time to allow students to read the same book twice. I can picture some teachers being stuck chopping a novel up just to allow them to generate the numbers (grades) that they’re required to generate.
The problem with this is that literature is entertainment – Just like a movie or TV show is entertainment. If you’re reading literature and enjoying it and not doing anything else, then you are being entertained.
Of course, doing something solely for entertainment value is not allowed in school, so the teachers have to turn it into a “find the super-secret hidden meaning” exercise, just to give the kids some work to do.
No, they should be taught that reading can be fun when they’re in elementary school, so that by the time they get to high school, it can be assumed that they already know that, and can learn about the aspects of literature that go beyond mere entertainment.
My elementary/high school experience was similar - I was bored to tears having to read Les Miserables (I couldn’t believe how my sister loved it, having been exposed to the Broadway musical first) and Old Man and the Sea. Twain, Dickens and Shakespeare weren’t bad experiences, though.
Still, I’m grateful that my sons’ high school English classes lean heavily on Sherlock Holmes stories.
On the whole, I had good to excellent high school English/Literature teachers.
But… while I’m not an author, I do question if the depth of meaning attributed to various things in the works were really there. I’m not at all convinced that Hemingway sat down to write “The Killers” and explicitly had the idea to write about " the failure of the parents of the Lost Generation to provide their children with the means to handle the cruelty and meaninglessness of 20th-century America." (to quote Wikipedia).
That kind of thing seems like a stretch- he may have had the idea that Nick Adams was unusually affected by that stuff, or something along those lines, but I kind of doubt Hemingway took a slug of a Sidecar somewhere in Paris in 1927, and clearly thought about that before he wrote the story.
That’s where I think English teachers go wrong- there’s a sort of Baroqueness to the way this stuff’s taught, where every dinky detail MEANS something, instead of a more minimalist approach, which I think would serve students better.
To be fair, compartmentalizing the reading assignments and stopping to discuss/analyze after each section is, in my mind, the only effective way to teach/discuss a book in a timely manner with 20+ teenagers, each of whom may have different levels of interest and comprehension.
The best thing about the AP English class I took my senior year of high school was the reading list we had over the summer. We came into class having read 4-6 books, and got to discuss them after having read them in their entirety. And, IIRC, even during the year we would read the whole book before starting classwork on any given book. But, we were all either people who already loved to read and think about lit, or at least all motivated enough students that we’d do the work.
Just shows how tastes can vary. I thought Pickwick Papers was one of the funniest books I have ever read. Amazingly funny for an almost 200 year old book. Ive re-watched sit-coms from only a decade or two ago that have not aged so well.
Oh, also, I reject the idea that ‘authorial intent’ is the only valid way to interpret art. It wouldn’t take much time or thought to merely identify all of the things that an author explicitly intended to convey. There are absolutely bad, or at least unuseful/ungrounded interpretations of art, but the line between those and more insightful thoughts is not whether or not the author “meant” to say something.
I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated by schoolboys as Shakespeare is hated. – George Bernard Shaw
Keep in mind that part of it may just be you’re a different person now.
There are plenty of books I read and hated as a teen (on my own, with not teacher interfering) and then loved when rereading as an adult years later. And the reverse is true.
My personal experience is that simply being in a situation to HAVE to read a text makes me not want to read it. Doesn’t matter if I’d otherwise enjoy it or how good the teacher is with it.
But I also think it is more important that students be taught how to think critically and that it is ok to think critically and just not let works pour over your while you do your best to not get in the way. I ran into my share of teachers who thought that once you were thinking critically about a book there was only one correct way to do it, but still, anything that encourages thoughts deeper than “heh, it had boobies so I liked it” strikes me as a good thing.
I’m not planning on reading much of this thread, but I heard from a kid who took this class last year that we should skip to post #37, where there’s a bit about boobies.
Programs like Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” serve this purpose. They are intended to foster a love of reading beginning in kindergarten.
In my school system, at least, classics were first introduced in 9th grade (with intensive literary analysis in the honors track). If a kid gets to 9th grade without reading for enjoyment, it’s pretty safe to say they don’t love reading. I’ve been a reader since I learned the alphabet at 4 years old. On the other hand, my little sister was never going to be a reader, no matter how interesting the material or how novel her lit teacher’s approach.
Of course there are exceptions and late-bloomers, but public education is not always tailored to cater to them.
I seem to be the only person on earth who liked The Old Man and the Sea. However, I was bored silly by The Great Gatsby. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if there was any semblance of a plot in Gatsby, it completely eluded me.