In Danse Macabre, Steven King has this to say about too much of what passes for literary analysis:
[QUOTE=Steven King]
I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than [previously quoted paragraph]; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit.
Having said that, let us analyze this paragraph a bit. I promise not to kill it or mount it, however; I have neither the skill nor the inclination (but show me any graduate thesis in the field of English/American lit, and I will show you a mess of dead butterflies, most of them killed messily and mounted inexpertly). We’ll just stun it for a moment or two and then let it fly on.
[/QUOTE]
Oh. That’s never good unless the critic is talking about a satire, and then you still need a solid grounding in the times to get the jokes, a grounding kids lack.
I believe that something vital a young reader needs to know about, say, Dickens, is that he was paid by the word and the book needed to be sliced/padded into neat instalments. The “authorial intent” was to make money.
I really enjoy Dickens (again, largely because I’ve picked his stuff up as an adult), but holy crap I don’t understand how he made it into the pantheon of Great English Literature. It’s good stuff, don’t get me wrong. But he was the Dan Brown of his day. He was writing potboilers for the most part. And it shows a lot of the time.
I was very much only into science fiction in High School, and the closest I could get was the occasional opportunity to choose something from Vonnegut.
Science-fiction should definitely not be the beginning and the end of what is literature, but, back then, it was for me.
I somehow managed to luck into a tremendously talented teacher in Junior year (he had a doctorate, BTW, for those who read that thread). I distinctly remember Ethan Frome coming to life for me and awakening me to new heights of literary beauty and creativity. The other works (Virginia Woolf! Dealth of a Salesman!) we covered in that class went similarly, where I was somehow turned on to aspects of fiction that were other than science fiction.
But that teacher’s very favorite author was Fitzgerald, and his very favorite book was Gastby, and no amount of magic or talent or enthusiasm could turn me on to that piece of shit.
And this is coming from someone who totally grooved on Ethan Frome.
Know what’s on the reading list for teens? Twilight. The Hunger Games. The Ranger’s Apprentice. Ender’s Game. The Giver.
Know what kids say about these books in school? The exact same shit. High school English class is toxic by virtue of being school. But they try so hard.
Wuthering Heights is a pretty trashy romance novel, and Jane Austen is supposed to be FUNNY. Dickens wrote newspaper serial pulp! And John Steinbeck got his books burned. And the Bell Jar got crazy. People taught these books because they were popular fiction in their day, not just because they’re classics now. But why teach them so seriously?
I hated English class, got a D, but I’m in my 30s and discovering that “classics” in general are pretty great.
/my young adult teacher in library science school wrote her thesis on Sweet Valley High, ffs.
I remember having Pride and Prejudice and various Shakespeare plays rammed down my throat in senior school. Every chapter or line was analysed in excruciating detail that managed to remove any joy and excitement from the original text.
Ten years later I finally reread Pride and Prejudice and found it to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. I now adore Jane Austin and the majority of the classic books I’ve read.
Something like that would work. But you can’t intelligently discuss a book without actually reading it in advance. I can’t (off the top of my head) think of a real-world example, but consider this hypothetical example of the read/discuss a chapter before moving onto the next one, never having read the book before.
Teacher: Students, you should all be done with Chapter One of Thomas Hardy’s great classic I Hate Anyone Who Reads, So I’m Going To Torture You. Who noticed the recurring theme of cleansing on page 3 as Bess UberVile is forced to scrub floors to clean them of dirt. Anyone? It’s clearly reflected in chapter three (which you haven’t read yet) when Bess scrubs herself after Ludwig the uncouth houseboy touches her inappropriately in chapter two (which you haven’t read yet). Anyone?
Students: < crickets chirping >
Teacher: Well, what about the use of foreshadowing: In chapter one Bess picks up the hatchet and lops the chicken’s head off. This clearly is a brilliant ploy on the author’s part to set up Bess’s drunken murder of Ophilia Glutenshnabble, the horrid gossip in chapter seven (which you haven’t read yet). You all picked up on that, right?
Students: < crickets chirping >
etc.
You can laugh at the specifics, but that’s the way my high-school literature classes went. Not only was it impossible to discuss without seeing the future, any good parts of the book were spoiler-ed by the teachers who’d happily ruin any suspense or surprise the author may have intended by discussing events that we hadn’t read yet. Yes, yes…“reading for plot” is so terribly dreary and bourgeois, but…if you want people to enjoy the book, let 'em read the book before cutting it up into little bits like a swan being vivisected.**
PS: Tess of the D’ubervilles is the worst book ever written and I’m completely convinced Hardy wrote it while possessed by some Lovecraftian Eldrich Abomination to torture students who’d have to read it for generations to come. If you’ve read Douglas Adams and are familiar with Vogon poetry, Vogon poetry doesn’t come close to Tess.
I think there’s two problems with literature as taught in school (besides the inherent poison of SCHOOL! UGH! in many students.) One can definitely be the material selection. Some books (and plays and poems) simply don’t or can’t connect with the reader. Personally, I couldn’t stand Catcher in the Rye when I was a teenager and assigned to read it. I have no idea what I’d think of it now with another 15+ years of experience. I didn’t like A Separate Peace. Romeo and Juliet might have been okay if I hadn’t had to read it three times in different schools. So that right there are three works that are supposed to connect with teenagers somehow.
Shakespeare, for instance, I think is hurt by play selection. I had Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and MacBeth. I’m not saying that schools should be teaching the histories but for me it was basically all tragedies. Personally I’d suggest Hamlet or maybe King Lear instead of MacBeth and a comedy or two instead. The Bard was writing to entertain and put butts in the seats, after all. Not everything was super serious.
The other problem is that the symbolism, as mentioned by the OP, can often seem and perhaps is suspect at best and completely specious at worst. I remember my teacher trying to make some big Christ-figure thing out of The Grapes of Wrath regarding Jim Casy, the initials J.C., and the number of people traveling in the Joad’s party, which completely set off my BS meter. Now, if that’s a common analysis, I might owe her an apology, but somehow I doubt it. I often get the feeling that textual analysis is often nothing more than the equivalent of all those crazy numerology theories about the Great Pyramid of Giza. Play around enough with the available material and ignore the parts that don’t fit. The same sort of thing that started with Darby about the Book of Revelation. It can’t just be an apocalyptic (using the original meaning of “hidden”) telling of the events described in Maccabees but instead has to really be about the future and the end of the world.
I’ve had some books and authors ruined for me due to the classroom, but I admit I would have found some of them boring as heck anyway. However, literature classes have introduced me to some delightful books and authors, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, made more wonderful by the TA suggesting that we try to match some of the absurd characters with those in our own lives. And I can never thank my Freshman English Professor enough for introducing me to the wonderful Ursula K. LeGuin.
By the way, since this thread is likely to be populated by people who might be interested in catching up on old classics, I’m going to plug a resource I’ve found valuable: Librivox. It’s basically the Project Gutenberg of audiobooks. Volunteers record audio versions of books in the public domain, and the audio recordings are also then released for free and without restriction. The quality of the readers varies from pretty bad to fair-to-middlin’, but you get what you pay for. I find audio books are a great way to plow through some of these books you’ve always intended to get to, but never found the time for.
I got a very bad grade on a paper in my freshman comp class for expressing that opinion. In fact, I used *Moby Dick *as my example. It seems I gored the professor’s sacred ox, because it was the only paper on which I failed to make an A that semester.
False to the first, true to the second. (cite, cite) In this, he’s not really any different from today’s television shows that have to fill up 45 minutes each week. In fact, of all the classic novelists, Dickens strikes me as the one who would have been most likely to be writing for television if he were around today.
