I’m on the board for our church’s women’s group’s monthly “enrichment” meeting, and our theme this month is Literacy. I volunteered to talk about literature. It’s all very open-ended and I don’t have a specific assignment, just something about literature. These are mostly moms with varying degrees of education, so I want to find something that will be at least somewhat applicable to them. I’ve thought about calling it something like “why do people write and why do we care?” and talking about some works that have been especially influential. I’d also like to touch at least briefly on the development of English–Old English and Middle English and Early Modern English, since a lot of people don’t know what that is and think that the King James Bible is written in Old English.
In our planning meetings, one of the girls said, “We could get someone to talk about great books.” In trying to pin her down as to what exactly she meant, I asked, “You mean like the kind of thing they’d have questions about on Jeopardy?” But I don’t want to just give them a bunch of titles (though I could prepare a handout as well, for them to take home).
Now, not asking any of you to do my homework for me, but does anyone know of any books (preferably short) that would give me a brief survey of English literature for the layman? I have an English BA and I have all my old textbooks, but I was hoping to approach this from a less academic standpoint.
Hmmm. The Princeton Review study manual for the GRE in English lit has a short survey of major authors. I know that sounds more academic than what you’re looking for, but it’s irreverent and very readable – it’s meant, after all, to fill you in on the stuff you slept through in college.
However, I wonder if it would be a better idea to pick one author or work to talk about in depth – maybe read an excerpt and tell them a bit about the writer’s life and times. It’s fairly hard to make a survey anything other than dry, but much easier to choose a book or a poem you’ve really enjoyed and convey your own enthusiasm to the audience. Just a thought.
Daniel Boorstin wrote The Creators which is a survey of western art. It’s not specifically geared towards literature since it discusses music, architecutre, painting, etc. as well as literature. But it has a lot of good overviews of what he considers to be the great writers.
I’m with the Porp. When you’re talking to a group about [air quotes] “Literacy”, and [air quotes]“Literature”, it’s always best to keep it simple. Pick one book, along the lines of Tom Sawyer or something–not, say, Shakespeare–and just study that one book. Otherwise, you can swamp your audience and turn them off [air quotes] “Literature” and send them fleeing in terror right back to Danielle Steele.
I put “Great Literature” into Google, just for the heck of it, and up popped a list of someone’s personal Great Literature list (that also all happen to be available on-line).
My mother was once in a church ladies’ reading group just such as you describe, and the leader spent most of the time pontificating about [air quotes] “Litt–teratchyure”. Boring as all get-out, Mom said. Eventually, as attendance dropped relentlessly, week by week, the leader took the hint and handed the leadership baton to someone else, and they all happily went back to talking about Sarah Ban Breathnach.
Pick up a copy of Clifton Fadiman’s THE NEW LIFETIME READING PLAN or Kenneth Rexroth’s CLASSICS REVISITED. The former for a more bourgeois group, the later if you want to go Bohemian.
Might be fun to go on about some non-Western literature…it’s more likely to be new even to the better-read ladies, and it’s fascinating. Fadiman includes essays on The Book of Mencius, The Ramayana, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and Lu Hsun’s collected stories, among many other works.