How important is it to read the popular classics of philosophy and literature?

Great Debates
21

I say anyone who has read and enjoyed The Brothers Karamazov understands the appeal of great literature.

There is a language barrier with Shakespeare. I’d recommend seeing it live with performers who know what they are doing. I was turned off to Shakespeare for years because I only saw bad performances. Read a summary of the play in question before you go. Don’t worry about spoilers.
I’ll go out on a limb though and say that exposure to calculus and statistics is probably more important than exposure to Shakespeare. Even in a cultural sense. Also, the real risk of being an autodidact involves stumbling into crackpottery. So there’s much value in reading a textbook or attending a series of introductory or intermediate lectures on a subject.

22

Oh yes. I would never recommend that anyone read nothing but The Greats.

23

He said, “I believe I know enough,” describing, I understand, his current state. After the Twitter and all.

I doubt he really feels that way, or he wouldn’t be asking for the argument on what he’s missing.

24

E.g., Tolstoy didn’t.

But George Orwell called him full of shit.

(And Tolstoy’s antipathy appears to be based at least in part on his lefty politics – which Orwell shared, more or less. It is true that in Shakespeare a working-class character is usually a fool or a clown or a villain.)

25

Right – what he means is that without reading the classics he knows enough – knows it from reading non-classic literature and media; which does not rule out a lifelong learning process, only one that requires a classics reading-list.

Scientists and engineers are pretty smart, but I daresay there are many who haven’t looked at a “classic” text since high school.

26

Aw, don’t do that. You can see it again, but you can’t see it the first time again.

OK, what’s the argument for calculus here?

27

BTW, I once worked as a librarian in a public library. In every branch of the system, the Young Adult section included a collection labeled “Classics.” This was not limited to Greek Classics or Shakespeare or Dickens, but was limited to stuff that can seriously be labeled “literature,” stuff you’ll find on summer reading lists, stuff for which Cliffs thought it worthwhile to produce Notes. In essence, “Classics” is library-talk for “books adults want teenagers to read.” And, no, you probably would not find E.R. Burroughs or Lovecraft or Spillane or Chandler in that collection.

28

There are plenty of great movie versions also. But I fulfilled a bucket list item and read all the plays (some for the third or fourth time) and by the end I had adapted to the rhythm of the language and was reading it as fluently as modern English.

There is no reason you can’t do both - though my calculus hasn’t done much for me and I’m in engineering. In my experience engineer either read literature or are somewhat ashamed about not reading literature - at least to the point the average person is. English majors brag about not knowing math - engineers would never brag about not knowing Shakespeare.

29

Yes, and it’s a shame. There’s a difference between being “smart” (in your field) and knowing things. Look at Ben Carson.

30

I find people who blab about Catcher in the Rye to be a bunch of phonies.

31

You’re never going to get on Jeopardy with that attitude.
Value is the wrong thing to consider. How do you know the value without sampling? I read The Brothers Karamazov in high school and didn’t much care for it, so I choose to spend my time reading other things - like Shakespeare. Having heard about it I read Tristram Shandy a while back and found it amazing and fun and, as mentioned in the movie, post modern before there was a modern to be post from. Not that long ago I tried Beethoven and discovered how amazing he was.
The classics are the foundation for a lot of our literature, without knowing them you’ll not truly understand other things you read and see - even Forbidden Planet.

32

I almost saw what you did there. I’ve never read it - in high school we read Thomas, not Tom, Wolfe, not that.

33

Either Wolfe’s signal work is better for you than Catcher.

34

I am confident, of course, that all the GD mods are well versed in the modern classics! :slight_smile:

35

Over time, society grows in complexity and so does thought.

There is profound insight in simplicity. One doesn’t see the growth without first knowing the seed.

36

I cannot agree more. I have yet to find a single Shakespeare play - hell, any play, come to that - that is more entertaining read than watched. They’re dramas, after all; the script is just bones, until the actors flesh it out.

Me, I love Shakespeare’s language, and am sufficiently educated to be able to read him without too much perplexity. But let’s face it, he’s hard to read in the original. His Early Modern English has so far diverged from contemporary English that the average high-schooler can’t simply pick up Hamlet and start reading. The solution? Start teaching Shakespeare in translation. Sure, you miss out on things like:

“O England, model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,
What might’st thou do, that honor would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural!”

but you do get the stories, and the passion, and the drama. Most of all, you perhaps begin to realize that Shakespeare wasn’t just writing for the intellectual and the cultured - he needed to pull in the groundlings, as well, if he wanted to make his beer money. So there are of bawdy jokes, and double entendres, and plenty of out and out humor. How many schoolchildren who’ve been force-fed Romeo and Juliet realize that the first scene, with the Montague and Capulet servants - “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” “Is the law of our side if I say ‘Ay’?” “No.” “No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir… but I bite my thumb, sir.” is supposed to be funny?

Put that in modern terms, though, and the joke comes through: “Are you shooting us the bird?” “Are we cool with the law if I say ‘Yes’?” “No.” “No, I am not shooting you the bird… but I am shooting the bird.”

I see nothing wrong in introducing students to Shakespeare like this, and then, if they’re interested, going on to read them in the original. We don’t expect 10th graders to read Beowulf in Old English, or to jump right in to differential calculus without taking algebra first; why should we expect them to get Shakespeare right off the bat?

37

How important to whom? Should we expect, say, the Japanese or Egyptians to read the “classics” (which, as defined in the OP, seem to be all Western works)? If so, which African or Asian or South American “classics” should they be expecting us to read to be consider intelligent and well rounded?

38

I’m far from fully familiar with every bit of classic world lit. But I continue to discover new “old” stuff–along with my regular nonfiction & light modern fiction reading. And I enjoy looking at art–catching the traveling shows & revisiting the local collections. Why say “this is enough–I’ll stick with the easy stuff from now on”?

But I’m here to chime in on the recurring “let’s dumb down Shakespeare” argument. Baz Lurhmann’s* Romeo & Juliet* boasted eye-popping art direction & contemporary music. But it used the original language. Cut a bit–but most productions do that. When you saw the street toughs say “I bit my thumb at you” it was obviously an insult.

Show the kids a good production–live or not. Give them some background lessons–vocabulary, etc. But don’t sit them down & make them learn “simplified” crap.

39

Well, you seem to know enough about these folks to be able to know they go together. That speaks to a certain level of familiarity with them and what they represent. Or did you just pull these names from of a random “famous people” google search?

I think you know a lot more about the “classics” than you’re acknowledging. Just because you haven’t “read” something doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an influence on you. The knowledge and passions that you have actively acquired were very likely inspired by something “classical”. Fans of jazz are indebted to classically trained musicians and composers, for instance. Programmers are indebted to logicians. Etc.

40

How does “translating” = “dumbing down”? Early Modern English is simply not the same language as contemporary English. It’s about as far from modern English as is Scots.

You’re right, though, that the best way to experience Shakespeare is to see it produced - and that works even if you put a play into a modern setting, but use the original text, as has been done with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Coriolanus, to name just three of which I know.

But when I was in high school, we read the plays. A class period simply wasn’t long enough to show a film, and some versions are inappropriate for a classroom. I would rather a kid be introduced to Hamlet by means of Shakespeare Without Fear (or some other quote-unquote “dumbed-down” version), and perhaps be inspired to experience it in the original, than to read “And thus the native hue of resolution/is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”, think “What the hell does that mean? That’s so lame” and give up on Shakespeare altogether.