Well, then, I guess my English teacher was in the right. Doesn’t mean this isn’t putting kids off reading. Which is sad, because there are lots of classics out there that are great reads. I have no idea why we can’t chose to teach criticism through books that are both appealing/accessable and critically aclaimed. Why must we make reading/learning seem like punishment?
I’m at the head of the *queue * for my lousy spelling. :smack:
And here we learn why kids get turned off reading. And I’ll disagree, a little bit. They don’t stay classics if they’re not fun to read, at least for some readers. Would you disagree that Dumas and Dickens were the most popular writers of their day? Weren’t all those books listed in the other thread popular in their day?
I have a problem when people who diss things out of hand, with no expressed reason.
But you know what? Sometimes it annoys me when people diss things by coming up with convoluted explanations and rationales, like having a subjective opinion is the most awful thing in the world. I don’t like asparagus (at least canned asparagus). If I’m telling this to someone, I don’t have to launch into a dissertation for why I don’t like it. Just like I don’t have to explain why I don’t particularly care for “Dark Side of the Moon”. Nor do I need to have a reason for why I like something. I like the color lavender because I simply like it, not because it’s superior to salmon or magenta in any measurable way.
I like John Steinbeck as a writer, for instance, but personally I despise The Red Pony. If someone were to ask for my opinion of it, I’d say it was boring and maudlin, and I don’t recommend anyone read it. I wouldn’t say “OMG it’s horrible!!” but only because I don’t tend to communicate in that style. But that’s how I would be feeling inside.
Yeah, the standard pedagogical approach tends to sound like Calvin’s father cheerfully explaining “it builds character!!!” to do that which makes you miserable, even if it’s not the same thing. Ideally you should mix enjoyable/appealing classics with “mental workout” classics, and be honest with the student about what you’re doing when assigning one of the Books of Dread. "We’re doing this in order to learn to pick apart a style we don’t completely understand or an argument we have not heard before. The book may bore ya, that’s fine, that’s not what I’ll be grading you on, but on whether you can tell me WTH is the writer talking about. "
I was a bit high-handed in my pounding on the difference between criticism and review. Dickens and Shakespeare damned well were popular authors of their era, and there are plenty of people who really enjoy reading their works. (Myself among them, as a matter of fact.)
But there’s something beyond enjoyment to be gained from them, which is why they’ll be rembembered in another three centuries and Michael Crichton won’t be. I like Crichton, I think he’s a good read on a lazy afternoon or evening, but I don’t have anything to say about the subtexts in his work or the depth of his characterization. In a century, the only people reading him will be antiquarians and the antiquated.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, can be analyzed and discussed long after his jokes have gone stale and his word-play needs lengthy glosses. ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Othello’ aren’t characters, they’re archetypes and cultural touchstones. His universal themes in those plays alone of reason and passion, trust and suspicion, and courage and cowardice can be picked up, dusted off, and made into new fiction that glitters as brightly as his plays did nigh-on four centuries ago.
So someone comes along and says that Hamlet is just a teenage wasteland: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Does that negate or in any way reduce the impact those plays have had, and will continue to have, on human discourse? Of course not. Does it make Hamlet less worth reading, even if you don’t enjoy it? No. You should read it because it says things that will always be true of humans regardless of time or place. You should read it because classics are made when people see themselves in art that was made in a distant era, a past they can only see through a glass darkly holds a clear and shining example of something in their own experience.
Can’t you recast those themes in a more accessable work? Yes, but you lose the flavor of the original. All good writers know that language has poetry even when there is no rhyme or meter. Shakespeare is an extreme example of this, but Faulkner and even Hemingway obviously held a respect for the power of language as a mouthful of air.
There’s more to it than that, however: Using quotations from literature and poetry can give perspective and tie the immediate situation into something more universal. All language is code and those quotations encode something powerful, something that has lived for centuries undimmed by change.
So, to return to the Hamlet-hater: Is she wrong? No, de gustibus non est disputandum. She is, however, missing the point. She is confusing her own feelings about the piece with what the piece has to say, and letting her tastes blind her reason. As I have learned in my years here watching debates in GD and elsewhere, even your most odious opponents can have valid points. And if she vented in GD, the people there would be able to deflate her arguments with citations and logic as opposed to mere aesthetic judgement. That is the essence of criticism.
On the other side of the coin, there are enough worthy pieces of literature out there that students should have more of an option in high school English classes. (College-level courses presumably all publish syllabi that detail precisely which works will be studied, so it isn’t a problem at that level.) The criticism itself is more important that which works are used, and giving the students more choice can only help them feel more involved in what literature is.