/lit/ - Literature

>>18112493
Proust
Shakespeare
Aquinas
INFP
Song for Zula - Phosphorescent

>>17950576
>>17950998
In answer to the girl's question, I would smile happily and show that kind of eager, quivering passion which comes out of everyone when they are questioned directly on a topic they love, and which invariably mollifies those who ask, if not piquing their own curiosity. I'd explain how ancient Greece formed the cradle of the Western world, how literature - that is to say, the expression of our deepest, loftiest, noblest thoughts, dreams, feelings - coursed through Hesiod and Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; how philosophy bloomed under Plato and Aristotle. I'd tell her stories from Herodotus, about the armies who got up in full battle dress and marched to face the winds, or about the dog-headed men, or other such curios speckled amongst the descriptions of ancient war and custom. I'd talk about how movies, if she's into movies, owe their conception to the Greek dramatists, just as later plays and novels do. I'd mention stories from Greek Mythology and recount the fall of Troy. Anything and everything. But then, since my predilection is for later English literature, I'd use it all as an excuse to get onto the Renaissance and talk about Shakespeare. But, truly, anything can be made interesting if you find it interesting yourself. That has been my experience.

>>17861730
I just love it and I love talking about it. And I'm convinced the people who don't love it haven't given it a chance.

Take pornography. I teach mainly 16-18 year old and a lot of the young men I deal with can't really appreciate sonnet 73 in the way I do because they haven't struggled with illness like I have and they can't fathom aging. But so many of them are exposed to pornography and I know from a few I've mentored that it's a source of shame to them, but they can't articulate that. So I make a point of including Sonnet 129 (pic related) in my lessons. They'll laugh it off, but their analysis of that sonnet is usually a lot more insightful than their analysis of 73. Many of them are blown away that Shakespeare could have struggled with the destructive nature of lust in the same way they do. Of course, most schoolchildren nowadays scorn any display of genuine emotional feeling, so they might articulate it as 'so Shakespeare also thought with his dick?', but I can see, I can SEE in their eyes, and in the way the more capable students talk to me after lessons, and in essays and assignments, that it remains with them. And like all poems, they get to keep it, get to remember it, get to furnish their minds with beauty. They better understand themselves and know they're not alone, because they're human, and to feel these things is human. That they're okay.