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I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

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Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#141

Post by smelendez »

ydat wrote: post #130
ninalanyon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit. Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers. Performance isn't just rote recitation.

Frankly, Shakespeare is one of the few things I enjoyed reading in school. It was classic American novels I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t tell you why, but getting through something even as simple as Tom Sawyer was such a chore for me.

Twain can be tedious because he’s a humorist and we’ve heard those jokes a million times by now. Also he writes speech in dialect which now means nothing to us and makes him harder to read. I find him easier to read as an adult but he can still be a slog.

I think a lot of classic American lit is hard as an American kid because it’s removed enough from today that you don’t get the nuances and also so influential that the storytelling feels trite, even if it was revolutionary at the time.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#142

Post by bloomca »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?

Well, you probably had some history classes, maybe watched a movie or two, heard something, maybe asked your parents or the teacher, etc. Also the books usually do set the scene by describing the environments, so you can infer from them.

It also works the other way, after reading that book it gives you some foundation for when you consume other media related to that period/place.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#143

Post by Folcon »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #74
thrtythreeforty wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lake?

No, the very first meeting with the Emergents, where ... I forget the character's name (Trixia?), but she's a linguist and she figures out that there's something odd about the painting-carvings in the Emergent habitat. She can't put her finger on it until she spends more time studying their language, and figures out that they... well, we're getting into spoiler territory, so rot13: Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobh…

Well that's a new experience, I naively googled for "Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq" and gemini responded to the text without rot13ing it, so I had no idea why it was telling me what it told me, I had to decode it to make sense of it's answer

TIL Gemini can respond to rot13

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#144

Post by aidenn0 »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #124
aidenn0 wrote: post #114

But when I see something incomprehensible, is it thick, or is it just stupid? Surely the literary field has its cranks that believe they have made something deep, but have just made something nonsensical? What's the literary equivalent of TimeCube or chemtrails?

Probably Finnegan's Wake

I have a visceral hatred for Joyce so, even if I were a literary expert (which I'm not), I doubt I could judge it in an unbiased manner.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#145

Post by outside1234 »

ninalanyon wrote: post #128
pavel_lishin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning. The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it ou…

Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit. Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers. Performance isn't just rote recitation.

The teacher makes a huge difference. My kids teacher somehow made The Odyssey a page turner for them and when the movie came out they were able to critique and delta the way the movie and book portrayed Odysseus. I was pretty impressed, because like the parent, The Odyssey and Shakespeare was a form of torture when I was in school.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#146

Post by RealityVoid »

serbuvlad wrote: post #138
lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

Because the book tells you? To my shame I've never read Dickens, but I did read the Romanian canonical authors (I am Romanian), and a lot of them, the ones I liked, gave you a very real sense of the life of the people at the time. Ion, for example, is basically a tragedy about the titular character scheming to marry a woman whom he doesn't love (but who loves him) because he's poor and she's "rich" (owns land). And t…

Oh, such a day, a talk about Ion on HN.

I get your point, and the book does say that. It's just... For a teenager, it rarely lands. And connecting context is super important. I mean, sure Ion wanted land, but you really can't contextualize that kind of desire when your needs and desires are completely different.

Maybe you were more capable of empathy or better at contextualizing what you were reading. I sure as hell was not. And only now later in like I think I am able to read and understand books. And really get them at a much deeper level. I do wonder though if without going through the motions of reading stuff you contextualize poorly if you ever gain the capability to understand. Or if it just makes no sens to engage with certain material until mature enough, in the right frame of mind and, importantly, _interested in it_.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#147

Post by Ar-Curunir »

Bratmon wrote: post #49

In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great". You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 sha…

I don’t think that’s true. True masters will create works that enable additional interpretations, perhaps beyond or even contradictory to those intended by the original authors. I doubt 50 Shades of Grey enables such a multitude of additional interpretations.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#148

Post by edgarvaldes »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

>there isn't time for that

If there is one thing I miss about my adolescence, it is the vast amount of free time. I have never again been able to devote hours upon hours to reading. I used to be able to finish entire books in a couple of days, or a week at most.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#149

Post by anonlinc77 »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

100% agree. The best literature class I ever had was in college. In class our professor spent very little time discussing the book and spent most of the time discussing the author's life and historical context. I understood those books way more than I had ever understood classical literature before.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#150

Post by Syntonicles »

sigbottle wrote: post #119
allturtles wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? We did talk about these things in English class in high school. The teachers would lay out the historical/social/cultural context of each book we read. Did your school not do that?

It still feels academic though. Suppose your response to that is, "Well, suck it up, its formalized". I'd argue that it'd be worse if you could teach your book, and a 50 year old who both has rich lived experience and grew up in the time period the book was talking about has the exact same understanding of said book as a bored edgy 16 year old. Either you're a godly teacher, or chances are the book doesn't have much…

There are books that I read every decade or so, and there is always new insight. Sometimes I will identify with an older character and see the entire story through their eyes.

Often times an interesting novel will prompt me to study the cultural context independently.

There was still tremendous value in exposing myself to Dostoyevsky as a teenager. I have observed myself make the same mistakes as his characters, blinded in the moment by emotion. He had so much insight into human nature - but even if forewarning doesn't prevent us from folly, it can highlight a path to acceptance, repentance or redemption that otherwise may take a lifetime of self-reflection.

I don't mean that in a religious context, if that matters.

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