I wouldn’t say wasted. Many of the classics we had to read weren’t at all interesting to a good number of fellow students. But, read them they did. And Cliff Notes were a very popular thing for everyone to pass around.
For those that didn’t enjoy them, at least they learned things. Like how to finish an assignment you don’t like. How to find meaning (even if Cliff Noting) in certain passages. Sometimes, it even taught a bit of reading comprehension and other worthwhile tools of learning.
For those who did enjoy them (to whatever extent), it opened a world of wonderful possibilities.
So, IMHO, for those who enjoyed or didn’t, I still think it was a valuable experience. YMMV, of course.
Forget the plot. The book isn’t about plot. Guy goes on a boat, the captain goes crazy and chases a whale, the end. There’s your plot. People get confused because the first few chapters start out like a novel with a plot–there’s a guy, he meets a guy, he signs up on a whaling voyage, and so on. That shit gets abandoned pretty fast. The blogging analogy is pretty apt. It starts out like a guy blogging his day to day activities, but then he gets bored with that and starts writing about whatever comes into his head.
Can we talk about what the whale symbolizes yet? Because Melville lays it out plain:
Revenge against God, baby. And Ahab doesn’t give a shit whether the whale is God, or just one of God’s creatures. Either way, killing the whale is spitting in God’s face.
Of Whales and Men, 1954, also talks about eating whale. The claim is made that if well-aged, really well-aged, a whale steak is mighty good eating.
Oh, and I just read Moby Dick for the first time, and I loved it. The digressions are part of the charm; as though you were listening to your uncle telling a story about Back When.
I listened to it as an audio book on my daily commutes. I’m sure that listening to it is a different experience from reading it, but I loved every moment of it.
I don’t know how mature your sophomore English class was, but mine would have dissolved in giggling over how enthusiastically Ishmael was “squeezing the sperm.”
Love Moby Dick. The book is fiction, and Melville was a great con artist, he knew nothing about sailing or whaling or whales having jumped ship only a few months into his 1st and only whaling voyage, wasn’t much of a philosopher or naturalist and seemed to know his characters only from his own reading, but what a great novel! The complaint I’ve always heard is that Ishmael the great character disappears after the first couple of chapters, gets lost in everything boiling up in Melville’s big brain, which is too bad, I think of that Nantucket Inn and a stormy night every time I eat chowder oor go to bed with a cannibal.
I’d be glad to. It was Ascenray who said * Moby-Dick * was “wasted on high-school kids” and I consider * that * an insult. When I was a high-school junior I read * Grapes of Wrath * (in one night, yet!)
What I meant was that the way that classics are taught in high school—Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Melville, Faulkner—in my experience almost uniformly ended up teaching students that the great writers of our culture were boring and irrelevant. Dougie, you might have been an unusually precocious teenager, and I certainly read a lot more than my fellow students, but almost everyone I knew were turned off from good literature at that age, and never ever went back to discover it. There are certain things that require maturity and life experience and I believe that certain types of literature are among those things.
In short, I believe that “forcing” Melville, etc., in high school when teenagers are largely too immature and inexperience to appreciate it is in some significant part to blame for a broad rejection of literature by the general population.
Acsenray: sad agreement. Kids at that age aren’t going to be turned on by a reading assignment. It’s too grating to their self-esteem. “Do I gotta?”
Alas, by the time they’re in middle school, it no longer works to read to them. My sixth-grade teacher read “Island of the Blue Dolphins” to us, and it was magical. That was what turned me into a lifelong reader: I caught on to the magic of storytelling.
But after having to study Romeo and Juliet in high school…I was so pissed, I never touched Shakespeare for another eight or ten years.
(Darn stupid, right? But that’s the thing: kids that age are pretty darn stupid, by and large.)
Okay–I see Acsenray’s point. I was fortunate to have a sophomore English teacher who made Shakespeare enjoyable: We read * Julius Caesar * and we even referred to the play as “Julie Babe.”
I wonder if there is a correlation between teenagers’ disdain for reading and the kind of movies they seem attracted to.
I was a ravenous reader in high school, and loved Moby Dick. But thinking about some of our reading lists, I’m appalled by how depressing some of the choices were: Great Expectations, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, McTeague, The Jungle. I mean, they might be great literature and all, but if you’re trying to encourage kids to develop a reading habit, maybe you should give them some equally great novels that aren’t so filled with disappointment, disaster, and doom.
My high school gave a lot of reading choices, which helped. I didn’t choose Shakespeare, but Beowulf. I believe the people who chose The Sound and the Fury got to write a paper using that novel and “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
When I taught high school English, I had a reasonable amount of latitude in the novels I assigned. There’s a balance to be found between bringing the canon alive and introducing new works that, while probably not as enduring, are engaging to read and can be used to teach the same material (like imagery, metaphors, allegory, point of view, etc.).
I have no idea about movies…but, very, very definitely, a good teacher can, by showing his own enthusiasm, go a long way toward making the course inspiring to most of the students. Teachers who just phone it in are a drag, and can turn even the best books into anchors.
I hated Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” The futility of it all just weighed me down. And, too, the teacher was a dolt, and completely ruined any possible enjoyment. Since then, I’ve never read a word of Hemingway. I know that’s foolish; I’m denying myself a treat.
(It balances out: I had several of the very best math teachers you could ever hope for!)