Reading for English //rant

xcellerate

xcellerate

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Why is it in school we never read anything newer than like 1950? We always read things in dialectics no longer spoken, about people who no longer exist, that controlled lands which have long since been turned into movie theatres, with humor that is no longer funny. I just don't understand it, the only conclusion I can come to is that these authors were the first to do 'something'.

But who cares? Would you rather be in a wreck while in the first car that ever had an airbag or in a 2007 mercedes S-class? Just because you were the first to do something, doesn't mean you're the best at it. A lot of these stories are mind-numbingly boring, they use humor that isn't funny, and tell stories that I've already heard a trillion times. (Yes I realize they INVENTED the story, but who the fu** cares! I've already heard better versions of it!) A hundred years ago watching a man walk into a door was funny, try that in a movie today and watch how many people walk out.

I realize these stories were probably fantastic in 1312, but regardless of what my English teacher tries to trick me into believing, this isn’t 1312. I’m not excited, entertained, or interested in reading boring stories, about uninteresting people that aren’t funny when I have exciting and better (in every sense of the word) stories coming out now! When will our required reading be on the “best sellers list”? When will our required reading be less than 10 years old?

There has not been a single story I’ve read in any of my English classes that I couldn’t have stopped reading at any time and never even given a second thought too. Sure, maybe this writer I'm reading now wrote 5 acts in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets, but his technical abilities don't impress me. I can rhyme two lines at any given time too. (yea, it's slightly more technical than that, I know)

…sorry for the rant I just had to take a break from this incredibly titillating story and write a few words. Now I have to get back to Mirabell, Millamant, Marwood, Wilfull Witwoud, Waitwell, and Wishfort. I’m just glad the writer didn’t make characters that have similar names or anything…

I've just never finished reading one of these stories and thought to myself, "wow that was fantastic" or "holy crap what a crazy story", hell I've never finished one and even wanted to think about what I just read (other than to prepare myself for the required quiz)...

...this probably makes me closed minded or ignorant or something. I guess I'm a simple mind; I need things that spin and make pretty colors and funny noises.

Now I guess I just wait for somebody to tear me apart?
 
Well, it's because the Freemasons don't want you to get any ideas too soon, and also because they like torturing people.

Yeah.
 
the reason we read old old stories is that they have stood the test of time and usually reappear in society through books revolutions arts design and etc. it depends on your teacher too if they like the books just as much. also most of the old authors are masters at what they do its hard to find really good modern stuff to compare it too other than some really good ones like catch 22 their eyes were watching god and etc etc.
 
like nofx said, longevity.

also, if you're not interested in books you've read in english, i just feel sorry for you is all

this year of senior ap literature (british lit, like huxley and orwell and shakespeare) has been the first year i've ever actually wanted to go to class because its so interesting
 
I personally find some of the books pretty good like Hamlet (well, the story, not the damn language of Shakespeare's days), Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and a couple others I forgot the names of.
 
the classics are "classics" for a reason ..you're reading literature not books ..there's a world of difference ..besides you need some sort of foundation so that when you go to college/university and you read modern literature you'll have an understanding because you read those books
 
DEATHMASTER said:
I personally find some of the books pretty good like Hamlet (well, the story, not the damn language of Shakespeare's days), Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and a couple others I forgot the names of.
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Yeah me too, I had to do Catcher in the Rye for my English Literature course, and I'm really glad I read it. I think about it occasionally, it's that kind of book. Although that is considerably more recent compared to some of the other novels discussed. :)
 
Because they are good literature.

I'm sorry to tell you, but novelists from hundreds of years ago are not only the foundations of literature, but they are excellent, well written pieces of literature. They are making you read it not to enjoy it, but to understand the basic principles of literature.

Take, for instance, charles dickens. He's a boring read, and if you can't get past the old english its hard to understand, but once you study the fundamentals of his novel writing you realize, he's a really really good freaking writer. I mean seriously, I've read alot of old novels, and every time, I finally "get" the story, and I come to the conclusion "jesus, this old guy was good"

If you want books that make you feel good or are exciting, just pick up a trash novel or a page turner and flip through it, but if you want to understand real english literature, and discover the true art of writing, pick up a massive old english novel.

The thing is, most books, save a few gems never last the test of time. Almost every novel you now think of as "good" will be forgotten in 20 to 50 years, but there will be a few gems, a few brilliant novels that will be studied in english classes for years to come, and kids will be asking why they have to read them.

Another thing, old literature is alluded to alot in new literature. You may be reading a book that is a parody of an old one and not know it, and never get it.

What english classes are really trying to do is to get you to become a good writer yourself. They want to make new great novelists like dickens or hawthorne and send them out into the world to write a moden, great english or american novel. To do that, you either have to be insanely gifted on your own, or study old literature extensively, and learn from it.
 
theotherguy said:
Because they are good literature.

I'm sorry to tell you, but novelists from hundreds of years ago are not only the foundations of literature, but they are excellent, well written pieces of literature. They are making you read it not to enjoy it, but to understand the basic principles of literature.

Take, for instance, charles dickens. He's a boring read, and if you can't get past the old english its hard to understand, but once you study the fundamentals of his novel writing you realize, he's a really really good freaking writer. I mean seriously, I've read alot of old novels, and every time, I finally "get" the story, and I come to the conclusion "jesus, this old guy was good"

If you want books that make you feel good or are exciting, just pick up a trash novel or a page turner and flip through it, but if you want to understand real english literature, and discover the true art of writing, pick up a massive old english novel.

The thing is, most books, save a few gems never last the test of time. Almost every novel you now think of as "good" will be forgotten in 20 to 50 years, but there will be a few gems, a few brilliant novels that will be studied in english classes for years to come, and kids will be asking why they have to read them.

Another thing, old literature is alluded to alot in new literature. You may be reading a book that is a parody of an old one and not know it, and never get it.

What english classes are really trying to do is to get you to become a good writer yourself. They want to make new great novelists like dickens or hawthorne and send them out into the world to write a moden, great english or american novel. To do that, you either have to be insanely gifted on your own, or study old literature extensively, and learn from it.
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i agree with everything except:
What english classes are really trying to do is to get you to become a good writer yourself. They want to make new great novelists like dickens or hawthorne and send them out into the world to write a moden, great english or american novel. To do that, you either have to be insanely gifted on your own, or study old literature extensively, and learn from it.

the purpose of reading these novels is to get you to respond to the book and then to adequately formulate your ideas on paper alot of people have really good solid ideas maybe even ideas that havent been thought of about a particular novel but if you cant do it like montaigne and write your ideas down on paper in a coherent manner, the idea will never be as strong as it could have been (unless its something like music or art -which is why we READ) take for instance these message boards sometimes it can be a pain in the ass trying to explain what music sounds like what art looks like but with literature you can always dissect

also these novels are FULL of rhetorical devices and forces students to view literature in a different light ie symbolism archetypes imagery paradox general rhetorical devices and to realize that most authors dont only write for show and tell they write to demonstrate their sophistication in command of language
 
The reason is because it makes you have an arsenal of universal knowledge. What you read today (As said before) wont matter in a few years, but the classics will always have something to discover again and again. The best is always written as universally applicable. It's much like good poetry- felt before understood, and as far as it goes: most great works cannot be fully understood.
 
is like when they teach you 1+1=2, 2+1=3, etc...
everything starts whit the basics
like in my school that we hav to read this ancient greek book wirted by platon or whoever,so why we read something of like 2000 years old? well cuz is one of the first ones
 
CookieCuttah said:
What you read today (As said before) wont matter in a few years, but the classics will always have something to discover again and again.
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Isn't that relative? Because by that logic, if you lived in Chaucer's time, you could say Canterbury Tales won't matter because you're reading it "today".

and isn't a little unfair to give all the credit to the classics, just because they did it first? Is there NO author that has lived in the past 100 years that could be just as important as the "classic" authors?

<RJMC> said:
is like when they teach you 1+1=2, 2+1=3, etc...
everything starts whit the basics
like in my school that we hav to read this ancient greek book wirted by platon or whoever, so why we read something of like 2000 years old? well cuz is one of the first ones
Click to expand...

And while I agree, I think it would be more appropriate to say:
I+II+III = VI
Because the basics of English are written very differently than we write now. So it's like studying something we don't do anymore to understand how we do things now.
 
DEATHMASTER said:
I personally find some of the books pretty good like Hamlet (well, the story, not the damn language of Shakespeare's days), Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and a couple others I forgot the names of.
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Lord of the Flies was the worst fucking book I've ever read.

To make an entire book a metaphor about modern day society is the dumbest concept ever.
 
Yes.

Is the giant, bolded text too... confronting?

EDIT: K, toned it down.
 
It reminds me of my Sanskrit classes for three years. Why f*cking learn obsolete shit? These languages have gotten better with time, yet we insist on teaching the older stuff because of some kind of emotional attachment.

And it's not just that. The stories i had to read had to be a form of torture. At age 14, i was forced to read a story about a clay toy. A F@$##$% CLAY TOY!!! :frown:

Another story deals with how a princess is tricked into marrying a loser. What does she do then? She gets a job, works hard and makes money, while her loser of a husband continues to live off her. Inspiring, isn't it?
 
Jesus, what have you guys been reading? I cannot agree with you. D:

There is a reason these stories have lasted. You know why Shakespeare (for example) is often considered the best playwright ever? It's not because the entire literary world is full of sycophants (though maybe it is). It's because the man had an utterly legendary command of his craft. It's because the plays are intellectually challenging. It's because they are dramatic and poetic masterworks. It's because four hundred years later, people are still talking about them, and still finding new things about them, and still wrestling with the ideas that they express.

Besides, the language isn't inpenetrable - you might have to think about it, but it's never too hard to work out what they're saying (especially with notes to explain old words), and the more of him you read, the easier you'll find it to wade through the lexicon.

The same goes for the rest of the canon. This is not to say the old authors are untouchable, or that you have to like 'em (personally, I get really bored with Jane Austen). But man, read anything by Joseph Conrad, or Charles Dickens, and they are really good.

And also, loads of literature before 1950 is 'modern' - George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and J.B. Priestly come to mind. Hell, Conrad is a modernist and he died in the 20s - in The Secret Agent (a book about terrorists and police in 1890s London), he plays tricks, flicking from character to character and backwards and forwards in time like it's Pulp Fiction or something.
 
Sorry Sulk, but Charles Dickens? We read that in English, and anyone who wrote purely because they got paid by the word, is going to write pretty shitty stories. I'm talking mainly about Great Expectations here. I thought Muppets Christmas Carrol was pretty decent.

I like most English things. Recently I went to London to watch Shakespear's Titus Andronicus - The most bloody shakespear play ever - in the Globe theater. And it was awesome cool, but really I agree that the older, and apparently, 'classic' writers don't stand up when you're comparing old to new. I mean this is all opinion, but I think I have a rather modern humour, and don't find much of the old stuff funny. Often times I've seen remakes or rehashes of existing old 'classics' under different names, so I find the originals outdated.
 
who exactly do you consider to be a modern master? I cant think of any mainstream writer that belongs amongst the greats
 
What do you mean by 'mainstream', Stern? Mainstream like Graham Greene, Martin Amis or Ian McEwan... or mainstream like Dan Brown?

Dekstar said:
blah blah blah Great Expectations
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See, that's the one I haven't read. I tried to read it once when I was a kid, and because of that attempt, I had expected him to be extremely dry, boring and long-winded. Well, he could be more succinct, but dry and boring he isn't. I mean, I'm thinking Bleak House - it's one of his best and also (I think) his shortest. Or A Tale of Two Cities, which is pretty awesome (French Revolution). The masterful opening few chapters and the running description of the storming of the Bastille stand out particularly in my memory.

Dekstar said:
I mean this is all opinion, but I think I have a rather modern humour, and don't find much of the old stuff funny.
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What, you don't like constant, unending nob jokes? :D
 
Shakespeare is just about the only thing I still love about English Literature, i'm getting sick of the subject to be honest. This is bad news as English Literature is one half of my degree programme (and I don't take English Language for the fun of it). I can see how people are disenchanted with the literary canon as it doesn't speak to them... most of the books fail to speak to me. But the situation is far worse at degree level. A lot of the stuff I'm currently reading completely fails to grip me. My attitude is not helped given the fact that Literature students are farmed into Universities as the dumb saps who pay for all the science degrees (7 and a half hours contact time anyone?).

What angers me is that English Literature is clearly just Media Studies with better rep. It's the same sea of critical bullshit that doesn't really mean anything to anyone, applied to texts with the prestige of time, that consequently lack any contemporary application yet MS is the discipline that gets shat on by the media, and Literature students get the jobs (in so far as a Literature degree gets you a job at all. I'm dreading to think how i'm going to differentiate myself from the rest of the people with 2-1s, because that's basically what every Lit student seems to get).

Edit: Don't poo poo Great Sex Positions. It is the one novel I've read this term that didn't bore the hell out of me. Most likely because I'd gone into it expecting Dickens to not get to the point. But then, I have Proust as an Antidote. *shudder*
Edit 2: I also don't mind Jane Austen. Most guys tend to hate her novels as a matter of life. They don't really speak to male audiences :p
 
I'd list a couple modern day writers but I dont want to get my ass kicked
coughNylundandRowling

*runs like hell
 
kupoartist said:
My attitude is not helped given the fact that Literature students are farmed into Universities as the dumb saps who pay for all the science degrees (7 and a half hours contact time anyone?).

What angers me is that English Literature is clearly just Media Studies with better rep. It's the same sea of critical bullshit that doesn't really mean anything to anyone, applied to texts with the prestige of time, that consequently lack any contemporary application yet MS is the discipline that gets shat on by the media, and Literature students get the jobs.
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Eek, what uni are you at?
 
xcellerate said:
Isn't that relative? Because by that logic, if you lived in Chaucer's time, you could say Canterbury Tales won't matter because you're reading it "today".
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You might, if you were too stupid to distinguish between ground-breaking literature and contemporary, non-notable work that does nothing new besides entertain or distract. And also if you were entirely missing the point.

xcellerate said:
and isn't a little unfair to give all the credit to the classics, just because they did it first?
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Er, no of course it's not! The thing is, subsequent writers do the same thing, because they've read and then incorporate (i.e. copy) the ideas, styles and methods into their own work. This isn't to say their work is worthless or that they don't contribute their own ideas, but it is 'fairer' and makes more sense to study the works where the ideas, styles and methods were first used. Another important reason is that the things you're meant to be studying are a bit clearer in the older works, I think.

xcellerate said:
Is there NO author that has lived in the past 100 years that could be just as important as the "classic" authors?
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Maybe, it takes a long time to determine whether or not work should be considered important enough to be a classic. The people who decided what should be studied have to be careful not to choose works that are only popular, rather than genuinely noteworthy. Anyway, plenty of work from the last 100 years are studied, in my experience anyway (Orwell, Seamus Heaney, George Bernard Shaw) so the answer is yes. But to only study works from that time period would be give a very blinkered appreciation of literature.

It sounds like you want to be able to learn about literature by only reading books that will easily entertain you. Sorry, it doesn't work like that.
 
I must admit it can be boring reading about the Irish potato famine. No wonder I failed.

I'd much rather read Neuromancer.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Eek, what uni are you at?
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Sussex. It was AAB to get in, and it recieves high-ish rankings for English degrees. Regardless, it seems that all English degrees are similarly poor from what i've heard.
 
In my school all we ever read was depressing ass stories about white people being racist to black people. The only english class I liked was senior year in HS. We read Hamlet and some Kafka stories amongst others which were all better than racism books.
 
I didn't mean 'you, xcellerate', I meant the hypothetical 'you', same as "if you lived in Chaucer's time, you could say Canterbury Tales..." :)

He didn't mean that it's impossible that contemporary literature will in time be come to be regarded as highly as 'the classics', but it's premature to decide how important a piece of work is when we've only had a few years or decades to reflect on it's influence, as opposed to centuries or millenia. Something written today or tomorrow might be regarded as a classic in a thousand years time. But without that perspective, no-one can say what contemporary work should be as highly regarded as something written hundreds of years ago. You can't know how important a piece of any kind of art is, until you've seen the rest of culture react to it. That takes time, especially with literature.
And so your teachers can't say, "We're going to read this book published last year, the school board think that it's as important as Plato and Shakespeare."
Hope this helps.
 
xcellerate said:
Isn't that relative? Because by that logic, if you lived in Chaucer's time, you could say Canterbury Tales won't matter because you're reading it "today".

and isn't a little unfair to give all the credit to the classics, just because they did it first? Is there NO author that has lived in the past 100 years that could be just as important as the "classic" authors?



And while I agree, I think it would be more appropriate to say:
I+II+III = VI
Because the basics of English are written very differently than we write now. So it's like studying something we don't do anymore to understand how we do things now.
Click to expand...

I am not saying that today's works wont be remembered, some will be classics for sure. Though, it isn't relative, what you find interesting for personal reasons will probably not be found as a good reason to consider something a classic. A classic usually is dubbed that because it includes a reoccuring theme which will concern every generation. It's not so much if it interests you or not, but rather if the author accomplished something everyone could apply to whether they like it or not. Most of today's literature would therefore not be applicable, it might contain extreme, interesting and what seems to you genius thought , but if it isn't actually applicable for the future it will be soon forgotten.
Therefore, it isn't very much relative, because it takes a while for the community as a whole to accept that a said work is worthy of study. The whole idea of a classic is very obvious: popularity and applicability. These factors are not very controllable beyond the Author's ability to read society.
 
kupoartist said:
Sussex. It was AAB to get in, and it recieves high-ish rankings for English degrees. Regardless, it seems that all English degrees are similarly poor from what i've heard.
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Oh dear. Oh well. At least I've been warned. It's weird, though - I can't imagine ever becoming disenchanted with literature or with thinking/talking about it. I mean, I can't identify with what you're saying about many texts with the "prestige of time" being irrelevant and boring to you. But then you speak with the voice of experience I don't have.

You live near me?!?
 
Sulkdodds said:
You live near me?!?
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Just off Western Road, on the edge of Hove as a matter of fact.
Sulkdodds said:
It's weird, though - I can't imagine ever becoming disenchanted with literature or with thinking/talking about it. I mean, I can't identify with what you're saying about many texts with the "prestige of time" being irrelevant and boring to you. But then you speak with the voice of experience I don't have.
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Most of the Thousands of people who do my course every year are completely happy with it. I'm just a weak link in that I chose to do English because that's the way my grades always went, not because I have a rock-solid passion for the subject... because of that, I've always been pretty quick to question the value of what I'm doing to myself and other people, and also the ease with which it is possible to get the top marks. Really I feel I should be doing a science degree or something, but I just found it so much easier to right down any old shit and get a gold star in the Englishes.

I'm only really still at Uni because of the people I've met and the extra-curricular stuff I've got involved in (the newspaper, the musical). But then, these are the things that will ultimately differentiate me from others with the same education, so it's not so bad that i'm clinging onto them.
 
Ever read 'It was on a winters night a travellor?'
 
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