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/lit/ - Literature


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13339404 No.13339404 [Reply] [Original]

>Let’s be clear: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is not a children’s book. It is an adult fairy tale, that is often read by children in wildly different — and sometimes profoundly damaging — ways.

>Some of that damage is obvious: the black child who has been verbally abused by being called a “nigger” in the schoolyard could be more hurt hearing that word taught in the classroom, for instance. Another kind of damage less often discussed is how the text encourages boys and girls to believe women lie about being raped.

>Or imagine instead that you are an impoverished, white eighth-grade girl in New York today, asked read "Mockingbird." Perhaps it fuels your growing suspicion that people don’t believe girls who say they have been raped — and that, should you be raped and try to tell people about it, people will have reason to doubt you like the book says everyone should have doubted Mayella Ewell.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-are-we-still-teaching-kill-mockingbird-schools-ncna812281

Is she right? Is it time to pull this book from the shelves?

>> No.13339414

>>13339404
>Let’s be clear:
I didnt read any further on principle of people who say this being insufferable faggots

>> No.13339425

>>13339404
poor URL hygiene, Ms. Randall
>https://unv.is/nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-are-we-still-teaching-kill-mockingbird-schools-ncna812281

>Some of that damage is obvious: the black child who has been verbally abused by being called a “nigger” in the schoolyard could be more hurt hearing that word taught in the classroom, for instance. Another kind of damage less often discussed is how the text encourages boys and girls to believe women lie about being raped.

Yawn.

>> No.13339427

>>13339414
If it’s posted on 4ailchan, it’s sure to be insufferable faggotry.

>>13339404
>Is she right? Is it time to pull this book from the shelves?
It’s time to pull you

>> No.13339455
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13339455

>>13339404
>Or imagine instead that you are an impoverished, white eighth-grade girl in New York today, asked read "Mockingbird." Perhaps it fuels your growing suspicion that people don’t believe girls who say they have been raped — and that, should you be raped and try to tell people about it, people will have reason to doubt you like the book says everyone should have doubted Mayella Ewell.

I am constantly bewildered by the Progressive inclination to self dissolution

>> No.13339456
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13339456

>>13339404
This geriatric loafabout hasn't the faintest idea what is appropriate for an educational curriculum. I'm fine booting Mockingbird out of interest for something else but the reasoning and criteria outlined by Randall are so tiresome. I think she can be counted among the vast majority of people in the country who haven't a sense of what's important, let alone what's essential to tell children. The focus on better business for universities and better test performance for preparatory education have either made obvious the vacuity rampant in the academic environment or else laid bare the measure of its decay. I always expected our culture to incentivize and reward rebellion, almost for its own sake, and that this would keep things dynamic, adaptive, somehow more connected to reality. But Randall's article is as lucid as a bong hit. If her preferences are somehow closer to a better way, its unclear based on her reasoning why this is the case.

>> No.13339459

>>13339427
why don't you address the topic of the thread instead of being the insufferable bitch you always are

>> No.13339467 [DELETED] 

Will Jews ever shut up and leave us in peace?

>> No.13339472
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13339472

>>13339404
Imagine reaching sixty years old as a sinecured Ivy mouthpiece and prescribing anything with an earnest expectation to be received gracefully by the three hundred million people wholly unfamiliar with any cultural basis to afford your position the prestige it enjoyed not ten years ago.

>> No.13339495

>>13339459
It’s an insufferable infantile thread. Quit your bitching about other stupid people bitching and go read something you enjoy.
Come back with stories you enjoyed. You people are what brings this place down. It isn’t me. It is you.

>> No.13339501 [DELETED] 

>>13339404

For someone who wrote a book so subtly lampooned the sinecure suburban consumer of whitewashed history that was the audience of "Gone with the Wind" she is so remarkably consistent in her reactions to be damn near a conservative if not in her beliefs, at least in her unflinching and tiresome dedication to the dogma of the cause.

I call these people "conservative liberals".

I heard from a friend that she was against the Union at Vanderbilt because unions traditionally eschewed black participation.

Maybe her next book will be from the point of view of the bird...

>> No.13339508

>>13339404
While I can't say her theoretical readings of the book are interesting, they do provoke the question of how accurate they are in general, which is to say, how much of a child's worldview is dependent on the literary works we make them suffer with in the classroom.
Considering the ever declining state of education in the United States, I don't think it would matter if you made them read some Satanic work, Biblical passages, or anything else in lieu of most accepted educational literature.
So I must reject her assertion that To Kill A Mockingbird is inappropriate for classroom reading due to values it in imparts because I do not believe that any works are imparting any values (or have value in particular) to children in our classrooms.

>> No.13339510

>>13339495
>It’s an insufferable infantile thread.
How so?
>Quit your bitching about other stupid people bitching and go read something you enjoy
Impressive. The irony of your own statement is completely lost on you, isn't it?

>> No.13339537
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13339537

>>13339510

>> No.13339544
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13339544

>>13339404
>>13339414
>>13339425
>>13339427
>>13339455
>>13339456
>>13339459
>>13339467
>>13339472
>>13339495
>>13339508
>>13339510
>>13339537
Stop posting about outrage culture.
Stop acknowledging outrage culture.
Stop participating in outrage culture.

>> No.13339552

>>13339544
There is nothing but outrage culture, that's all there is.

>> No.13339554

>>13339495
>an insufferable infantile thread
having a thesaurus doesn't make you smart

>> No.13339592

>>13339508
This. As a parent, my children will never see a classroom. It's such a waste of the child's time, not even considering how precious the various windows are for their learning. There is no urgency in education, so there's no surprise that some Emeritus stooge is wondering whether we've gotten something wrong with the latest couple thousand cohorts of children we've churned through our industrial bandwidths. Why, what if there's something so subtly yet terribly awry that you must spare no expense to hire these most exotic and exclusive consultants and experts and special firms to help remedy the situation?
If that was ever the case, us dumb-dumbs should find ourselves quite thankful at the feet of Mrs. Randall, thank you for saving us from the bad books, finding the time to spare us those mysterious indignities and oppressive forces detectable most readily by those like Ms. Randall, those who have cultivated a most peculiar sensitivity to a set of completely set aside "not even wrong" diversions and digressions, imperiously intoned to us in the most shameless programmatic pushes and presses.
Ignoring them imperils children. We're foreseeing the terminal moments of the bleeding out street youths, all the useless white authors flickering in their fading minds. If only they knew of Wakanda and a melanated Harry Potter! Or else whichever books Mrs. Randall's friends prescribe, because, let's be clear about the most severe and preponderant of conditioning phenomena: survival amidst capitalism rules every registered and enrolled student and even Mrs. Randall. And therefore the theatrically reluctant pruning of Mockingbird or Twain is ultimately an exercise in turnover and obsolescence. We need books that acknowledge emojis, being a good buyer and being a good fan.
We need to purge illustrations of violence, even if that violence is a fictional biological woman carrying a pregnancy to term. Whatever the pretext, these virtuous crusades clear out whole shelves, to be replaced with your sexdoll romance genre, cricket dump-cake recipes and whatever formalized religious doctrine is codified by the last literate American leftists before its all implanted neural nets singing tinnitus-tuned ballads synchronized to your highly important social work shoveling the week's human bodies into the Amazon cobalt pit.

>> No.13339600

why is it always lighter-than-average mixed people engaging in this kind of shit? what's their problem?
>hey check out this shitty op-ed
hey go fuck yourself

>> No.13339628
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13339628

>>13339554
>intimidated by a vocabulary

>>13339600
But OP is anonymous

>> No.13339630

>>13339544
I quite enjoy these "release valve" type memes. They are like macrophages in being these engulfing, subtle things, meant to take in whole the ire's ironies and salient truths and so metabolize them into your palpable relief that, yes, it was all just a dream, just a minor fugue. Or else, if you cannot distract yourself from the horror show perhaps embrace a comedic coping mechanism, as in the "clown world" deflection. And I hope that you're a well meaning person sick of the storm. I understand that and sympathize, but have not your wiring. You cannot expect people to un-learn things, not the lessons that have been conditioned upon them by whichever survival they have so far eked out. I'm not sure where you hail from but there have been thousands of my countrymen slain in hideous manners that are in full compliance with every institution, agency and power in the United States. Surrounded by liars, idiots and miscreants, you've them all to wade through just to take a stab at one of the bad actors, if you can ever find them. I think you're right to condemn "outrage culture" as there isn't much of a point beyond continuing the alarm. Similar to how someone might send a radio broadcast on repeat to bleat warnings of a plague inside and for the outside world to stay away, I think our outrage serves much the same purpose. All our best ideas, all the Pinkerist platitudes, they'd all have financed their own parades if any of them were worth a damn. But they are not and we know it. The discovery of new ideas, or the discovery of which of the old ones are good to keep, that triage can only proceed upon our acceptance of a grave situation.

>> No.13339646

>>13339414
This and "Make no Mistake" tend to be good signs to stop listening to someone.

>> No.13339663

>>13339646
>just
>look,
>i mean,
are much the same, although I moreso try to not say these things myself and don't really judge harshly anyone who uses them.

>> No.13339673

>>13339628
You’re literally a child in an adults body

>> No.13339744
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13339744

>>13339673
Why thank you

>> No.13339872

>>13339600
They aren't black enough so they think they've got something to prove

>> No.13339893

>>13339872
I like calling lighter skinned colored folk, "Lactaid Motherfuckaz" because it really hammers home the fact many of them also have an at best ambiguous if not often perilous relationship with dairy, or as I like to call it, Caucasoid cave milk and Caucasoid cave fungus. Lactaid motherfuckaz are a sad case of Melanation being corrupted by cave genes and I can sense in each of them their brittle calcified pineal tissue, an inert stone rattling in their dormant degenerated wokeness. As is posed to every person of color, "Why do the Pyramids fly?" elicits the same blank, quizzical stares from Lactaid motherfuckaz as you see in the honkiest mayo bulbs. Its like they don't even know, which I find hard to believe. But why else don't they say anything? This is why when I see a fractionally Melanated sister, I want to help her as a human being but her minge is a horror Muppet factory and I feel every Caucasoid dilution of Melanation closes the portals by one more radian. I really need to shoot some hoops.

>> No.13339920

>>13339592
You okay there?
Also, send your children to school not because they need to learn the curriculum but because they need to learn how to socialize. Learning how to behave around other people, having friends and being a part of a community is by far the most important skills to teach a child.

>> No.13339944

>>13339920
The extent and richness of alternatives to "public school" are quite compelling. It will vary by area but the Internet actually helps these decentralized communities find one another and leverage resources together. It's still in its infancy but I see improving the non-public school infrastructure as important as decentralized food and energy systems. Most schools do not have the resources required to make competitive children, let alone learned ones. The extent of systematized waste blasting talent and aptitudes out of our children cannot be understated. There are no virtues to "surviving" the "socializing" and "behavioral" alignment that is much the unwavering goal of our educational policies. It's crushing for many to behold all this and resist it they do.

>> No.13341125

>>13339920
90% of people who go to public school become total losers

>> No.13341260

>Like most parents who have, against all odds, preserved a lively and still - evolving passion for good books, I find myself, each September, increasingly appalled by the dismal lists of texts that my sons are doomed to waste a school year reading. What I get as compensation is a measure of insight into why our society has come to admire Montel Williams and Ricki Lake so much more than Dante and Homer. Given the dreariness with which literature is taught in many American classrooms, it seems miraculous that any sentient teenager would view reading as a source of pleasure. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class - the last time many students will find themselves in a roomful of people who have all read the same text and are, in theory, prepared to discuss it. High school- even more than college - is where literary tastes and allegiances are formed; what we read in adolescence is imprinted on our brains as the dreamy notions of childhood crystallize in to hard data.

>The intense loyalty adults harbor for books first encountered in youth is one probable reason for the otherwise baffling longevity of vintage mediocre novels, books that teachers may themselves have read in adolescence; it is also the most plausible explanation for the peculiar [1998] Modern Library list of the" 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century," a roster dominated by robust survivors from the tenth-grade syllabus. Darkness at Noon, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, and The Studs Lanigan Trilogy all speak, in various ways, to the vestigial teenage psyches of men of a certain age. The parallel list drawn up by students (younger, more of them female) in the Radcliffe Publishing Course reflects the equally romantic and tacky tastes (Gone with the Wind, The Fountainhead) of a later generation of adolescent girls.

>Given the fact that these early encounters with literature leave such indelible impressions, it would seem doubly important to make sure that high school students are actually reading literature. Yet every opportunity to instill adolescents with a lifelong affinity for narrative, for the ways in which the vision of an artist can percolate through an idiosyncratic use of language, and for the supple gymnastics of a mind that exercises the mind of the reader is being squandered on regimens of trash and semi-trash, taught for reasons that have nothing to do with how well a book is written. In fact, less and less attention is being paid to what has been written, let alone how; it's become a rarity for a teacher to suggest that a book might be a work of art composed of words and sentences, or that the choice of these words and sentences can inform and delight us. We hear that more books are being bought and sold than ever before, yet no one, as far as I know, is arguing that we are producing and becoming a nation of avid readers of serious literature.

>> No.13341267

>>13341260
>Much has been made of the lemminglike fervor with which our universities have rushed to sacrifice complexity for diversity; for decades now, critics have decried our plummeting scholastic standards and mourned the death of cultural literacy without having done one appreciable thing to raise the educational bar or revive our moribund culture. Meanwhile, scant notice has been paid, except by exasperated parents, to the missed opportunities and misinformation that form the true curriculum of so many high school English classes.

>My own two sons, now twenty-one and seventeen, have read (in public and private schools) Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Melville. But they've also slogged repeatedly through the manipulative melodramas of Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, through sentimental, middlebrow favorites (To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace), the weaker novels of John Steinbeck, the fantasies of Ray Bradbury. My older son spent the first several weeks of sophomore English discussing the class's summer assignment, Ordinary People, a weeper and former bestseller by Judith Guest about a "dysfunctional" family recovering from a teenage son's suicide attempt.

>Neither has heard a teacher suggest that he read Kafka, though one might suppose that teenagers might enjoy the transformative science-fiction aspects of The Metamorphosis, a story about a young man so alienated from his "dysfunctional" family that he turns - embarrassingly for them - into a giant beetle. No instructor has ever asked my sons to read Alice Munro, who writes so lucidly and beautifully about the hypersensitivity that makes adolescence a hell.

>In the hope of finding out that my children and my friends' children were exceptionally unfortunate, I recently collected eighty or so reading lists from high schools throughout the country. Because of how overworked teachers are, how hard to reach during the school day, as well as the odd, paranoid defensiveness that pervades so many schools, obtaining these documents seemed to require more time and dogged perseverance than obtaining one's FBI surveillance files and what I came away with may not be a scientifically accurate survey. Such surveys have been done by the National Council of Teachers of English (published in the 1993 NCTE research report, Literature in the Secondary Schools), with results that both underline and fail to reflect what I found.

>What emerges from these photocopied pages distributed in public, private, and Catholic schools as well as in military academies, in Manhattan and Denver, in rural Oregon and urban Missouri, is a numbing sameness, unaffected by geography, region, or community size. Nearly every list contains at least one of Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, in the NCTE report, Shakespeare (followed closely by John Steinbeck) tops the rosters of "Ten Most Frequently Required Authors of BookLength Works, Grades 9-12."

>Yet in other genres - fiction and memoir - the news is far more upsetting.

>> No.13341270

>>13341267
>On the lists sampled, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are among the titles that appear most often, a grisly fact that in itself should inspire us to examine the works that dominate our children's literary education.

>First published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is what we have since learned to recognize as a "survivor" memoir, a first-person narrative of victimization and recovery. Angelou transports us to her childhood in segregated Arkansas, where she was raised by her grandmother and was mostly content, despite the unpleasantness of her white neighbors, until, after a move to St. Louis, eight-year-old Maya was raped by her mother's boyfriend.

>One can see why this memoir might appeal to the lazy or uninspired teacher, who can conduct the class as if the students were the studio audience for Angelou's guest appearance on Oprah. The author's frequently vented distrust of white society might rouse even the most sluggish or understandably disaffected ninth graders to join a discussion of racism; her victory over poverty and abuse can be used to address what one fan, in a customer book review on Amazon.com, celebrated as "transcending that pain, drawing from it deeper levels of meaning about being truly human and truly alive." Many chapters end with sententious epigrams virtually begging to serve as texts for sophomoric rumination on such questions as: What does Angelou mean when she writes, "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is rust on the razor that threatens the throat"?

>But much more terrifying than the prospect of Angelou's pieties being dissected for their deeper meaning is the notion of her language being used as a model of "poetic" prose style. Many of the terrible mysteries that confront teachers of college freshman composition can be solved simply by looking at Angelou's writing. Who told students to combine a dozen mixed metaphors in one paragraph? Consider a typical passage from Angelou's opaque prose: "Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft. Saturdays, however, always broke the mold and dared to be different." Where do students learn to write stale, inaccurate similes? "The man's dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium and too many settled in my belly." Who seriously believes that murky, turgid, convoluted language of this sort constitutes good writing? "Youth and social approval allied themselves with me and we trammeled memories of slights and insults. The wind of our swift passage remodeled my features. Lost tears were pounded to mud and then to dust. Years of withdrawal were brushed aside and left behind, as hanging ropes of parasitic moss:'

>> No.13341273

>>13341270
>To hold up this book as a paradigm of memoir, of thought - of literature is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students. If we want to use Angelou's work to educate our kids, let's invite them to parse her language, sentence by sentence; ask them precisely what it means and ask why one would bother obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously.

>Narrated affably enough by a nine-year-old girl named Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird is the perennially beloved and treacly account of growing up in a small Southern town during the Depression. Its hero is Scout's father, the saintly Atticus Finch, a lawyer who represents everything we cherish about justice and democracy and the American Way, and who defends a black man falsely accused of rape by a poor white woman. The novel has a shadow hero, too, the descriptively named Boo Radley, a gooney recluse who becomes the occasion for yet another lesson in tolerance and compassion.

>Such summary reduces the book, but not by all that much. To read the novel is, for most, an exercise in wish-fulfillment and self-congratulation, a chance to consider thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would harbor the racist attitudes espoused by the lowlifes in the novel. We (the readers) are Scout, her childhood is our childhood, and Atticus Finch is our brave, infinitely patient American Daddy. And that creepy big guy living alone in the scary house turns out to have been watching over us with protective benevolent attention.

>Maya Angelou and Harper Lee are not the only authors on the lists. The other most popular books are The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the Catcher in the Ryu. John Steinbeck (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, The Grapes of Wrath) and Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Beloved) are the writers - after Shakespeare - represented by the largest number of titles. Also widely studied are novels of more dubious literary merit: John Knowles's A Separate Peace, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and Something Wicket This Way Comes. Trailing behind these favorites, Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm) is still being read, as are the Brontes (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre).

>> No.13341278

>>13341273
>How astonishing then that students exposed to such a wide array of masterpieces and competent middlebrow entertainments are not mobbing their libraries and bookstores, demanding heady diets of serious or semi-serious fiction! And how puzzling that I should so often find myself teaching bright, eager college undergraduate and graduate students, would-be writers handicapped not merely by how little literature they have read but by their utter inability to read it; many are nearly incapable of doing the close line-by-line reading necessary to disclose the most basic information in a story by Henry James or a seemingly more straightforward one by Katherine Mansfield or Paul Bowles.

>The explanation, it turns out, lies in how these books, even the best of them, are being presented in the classroom. My dogged search for reading lists flushed out, in addition to the lists themselves, course descriptions, teaching guides, and anecdotes that reveal how English literature is being taught to high school students. Only rarely do teachers propose that writing might be worth reading closely. Instead, students are informed that literature is principally a vehicle for the soporific moral blather they suffer daily from their parents. The present vogue for teaching "values" through literature uses the novel as a springboard for the sort of discussion formerly conducted in civics or ethics classes - areas of study that, in theory, have been phased out of the curriculum but that, in fact, have been retained and cleverly substituted for what we used to call English. English - and everything about it that is inventive, imaginative, or pleasurable - is beside the point in classrooms, as is everything that constitutes style and that distinguishes writers, one from another, as precisely as fingerprints or DNA mapping.

>The question is no longer what the writer has written but rather who the writer is - specifically, what ethnic group or gender identity an author represents. A motion passed by the San Francisco Board of Education in March 1998 mandates that "works of literature read in class in grades nine to eleven by each high school student must include works by writers of color which reflect the diversity of culture, race, and class of the students of the San Francisco Unified School District .... The writers who are known to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, shall be appropriately identified in the curriculum." Meanwhile, aesthetic beauty - felicitous or accurate language, images, rhythm, wit, the satisfaction of recognizing something in fiction that seems fresh and true - is simply too frivolous, suspect, and elitist even to mention.

>> No.13341284

>>13341278
>Thus the fragile To Kill a Mockingbird is freighted with tons of sociopolitical ballast. A "Collaborative Program Planning Record of Learning Experience;' which I obtained from the Internet, outlines the "overall goal" of teaching the book ("To understand problems relating to discrimination and prejudice that exist in our present -day society. To understand and apply these principles to our own lives") and suggests topics for student discussion: "What type of people make up your community? Is there any group of people ... a person (NO NAMES PLEASE) or type of person in your community that you feel uncomfortable around?"

>A description of "The Family in Literature," an elective offered by the Princeton Day School- a course including works by Sophocles and Eugene O'Neillbegins: "Bruce Springsteen once tried to make us believe that, 'No one can break the ties that bind/You can't for say-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yake the ties that bind.' He has since divorced his wife and married his back-up singer. So what are these ties and just how strong are they, after am" With its chilling echoes of New Age psychobabble, Margaret Dodson's Teaching Values through Teaching Literatyre, a sourcebook for high school English teachers, informs us that the point of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is "to show how progress has been made in the treatment of the mentally disadvantaged, and that more and better roles in society are being devised for them [and to establish that mentally retarded people are human beings with the same needs and feelings that everyone else experiences."

>An eighth-grader studying Elie Wiesel's overwrought Night in a class taught by a passionate gay-rights advocate came home with the following notes: "Many Jews killed during the Holocaust, but many homosexuals murdered by Nazis. Pink triangle - Silence equals death."

>It's cheering that so many lists include The Adventures of Hucklebeery Finn, but not when we discover that this moving, funny novel is being taught not as a work of art but as a piece of damning evidence against that bigot, Mark Twain. A friend's daughter's English teacher informed a group of parents that the only reason to study Huckleberry Finn was to decide whether it was a racist text. Instructors consulting Teaching Values through Teaching Literature will have resolved this debate long before they walk into the classroom to supervise "a close reading of Huckleberry Finn that will reveal the various ways in which Twain undercuts Jim's humanity: in the minstrel routines with Huck as the 'straight man'; in generalities about Blacks as unreliable, primitive and slowwitted .... "

>> No.13341286

>Luckily for the teacher and students required to confront this fictional equivalent of a minstrel show, Mark Twain can be rehabilitated - that is to say, revised. In classes that sound like test screenings used to position unreleased Hollywood films, focus groups in which viewers are invited to choose among variant endings, students are polled for possible alternatives to Huck's and Tom Sawyer's actions - should Tom have carried out his plan to "free" Jim? - and asked to speculate on what the fictional characters might have or should have done to become better people and atone for the sins of their creators.

>In the most unintentionally hilarious of these lesson plans, a chapter entitled 25 “Ethan Frome: An Avoidable Tragedy," Dodson warns teachers to expect resistance to their efforts to reform Wharton's characters and thus improve her novel's outcome: "Students intensely dislike the mere suggestion that Ethan should have honored his commitment to Zeena and encouraged Mattie to date Dennie Eady, yet this would surely have demonstrated greater love than the suicide attempt."

>Thus another puzzle confronting college and even graduate school instructors - Why do students so despise dead writers? - is partly explained by the adversarial stance that these sourcebooks adopt toward authors of classic texts. Teachers are counseled "to help students rise above Emerson's style of stating an idea bluntly, announcing reservations, and sometimes even negating the original idea" and to present "a method of contrasting the drab, utilitarian prose of Nineteen Eighty-four with a lyric poem 'To a Darkling Thrush; by Thomas Hardy." Why not mention that such works have been read for years - for a reason! and urge students to figure out what that reason is? Doesn't it seem less valuable to read Emily Dickinson's work as the brain-damaged mumblings of a demented agoraphobic than to approach the subject of Dickinson, as Richard Sewell suggests in his biography of her, on our knees? No one's suggesting that canonical writers should be immune to criticism. Dickens's anti-Semitism, Tolstoy's overly romantic ideas about the peasantry, Kipling's racism, are all problematic, and merit discussion. But to treat the geniuses of the past as naughty children, amenable to reeducation by the children of the present, evokes the educational theory of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

>> No.13341289

>>13341286
>No wonder students are rarely asked to consider what was actually written by these hopeless racists and sociopaths. Instead, they're told to write around the books, or, better yet, write their own books. Becky Alano's depressing Teaching the Novel advises readers of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar to construct a therapeutic evaluation of its suicidal heroine ("Do you think she is ready to go home? What is your prognosis for her future?") and lists documents to be written as supplements to Macbeth (a script of the TV evening news announcing the murders; a psychiatrist's report on Lady Macbeth, or her suicide note to her husband; Macbeth's entry Who’s Who in or his obituary).

>How should prospective readers of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl prepare? Carolyn Smith McGowen's Teaching Literature by Women Authors suggests: "Give each student a paper grocery bag. Explain that to avoid being sent to a concentration camp, many people went into hiding. Often they could take with them only what they could carry .... Ask your students to choose the items they would take into hiding. These items must fit into the grocery bag." A class attempting to interpret an Emily Dickinson poem can be divided into three groups, each group interpreting the poem based on one of Freud's levels of con- sciousness; thus the little ids, egos, and superegos can respond to the Dickinson poem according to the category of awareness to which their group has been assigned.

>Those who might have supposed that one purpose of fiction was to deploy the powers of language to connect us, directly and intimately, with the hearts and souls of others, will be disappointed to learn that the whole point is to make us examine ourselves. According to Alano, The Catcher in the Rye will doubtless suggest an incident "in which you felt yourself to be an 'outsider' like Holden. Why did you feel outside? What finally changed your situation?" Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage should make us compare our anxieties ("Describe an event that you anticipated with fear. ... Was the actual event worth the dread?") with those of its Civil War hero. And what does The Great Gatsby lead us to consider? "Did you ever pursue a goal with single-minded devotion? ... Would you have gained your end in any other way?" Are we to believe that the average eleventhgrader has had an experience comparable to that of Jay Gatsby - or F. Scott Fitzgerald? And is it any wonder that teenagers should complete these exercises with little but contempt for the writer who so pointlessly complicated and obfuscated a personal true story that sixteenyear-olds could have told so much more interestingly themselves?

>> No.13341291

>>13341289
>I remember when it dawned on me that I might, someday, grow old. I was in the eleventh grade. Our marvelous and unusual English teacher had assigned us to read King Lear - that is, to read every line of King Lear. (As I recall, we were asked to circle every word or metaphor having to do with eyes and vision, a tedious process we grumbled about but that succeeded in focusing our attention.) Although I knew I would never ever resemble the decrepit adults around me, Shakespeare's genius, his poetry, his profound, encyclopedic· understanding of personality, managed to persuade me that I could that mythical king- an imaginative identification very different from whatever result I might have obtained by persuading myself that my own experience was same the as Lear's.

>I recall the hallucinatory sense of having left my warm bedroom, of finding myself - old, enraged, alone, despised - on that heath, in that dangerous storm. And I remember realizing, after the storm subsided, that language, that mere words on the page, had raised that howling tempest

>Lear is still the Shakespeare play I like best. I reread it periodically, increasingly moved now that age is no longer a theoretical possibility, and now that its portrayal of Lear's behavior so often seems like reportage. A friend whose elderly boss is ruining his company with irrational tests of fealty and refusals to cede power needs only six words to describe the situation at work: King Lear, Act One, Scene One.

>Another high school favorite was the King James Version of the Book of Revelation. I don't think I'd ever heard of Armageddon, nor did I believe that when the seals of a book were opened horses would fly out. What delighted me was the language, the cadences and the rhythms, and the power of the images: the four horsemen, the beast, the woman clothed with the sun.

>> No.13341295

>>13341291
>But rather than exposing students to works of literature that expand their capacities and vocabularies, sharpen their comprehension, and deepen the level at which they think and feel, we either offer them "easy" (Steinbeck, Knowles, Angelou, Lee) books that "anyone" can understand, or we serve up the tougher works predigested. We no longer beheve that books were written one word at a time, and deserve to be read that way. We've forgotten the difference between a student who has never read a nineteenth-century novel and an idiot incapable of reading one. When my son was assigned Wuthering Heights in tenth-grade English, the complex sentences, archaisms, multiple narrators, and interwoven stories seemed, at first, like a foreign language. But soon enough, he caught on and reported being moved almost to tears by the cruelty of Heathcliff's treatment of Isabella. In fact, it's not difficult to find fiction that combines clear, beautiful, accessible, idiosyncratic language with a narrative that conveys a complex worldview. But to use such literature might require teachers and school boards to make fresh choices, selections uncontaminated by trends, cliches, and received ideas. If educators continue to assume that teenagers are interested exclusively in books about teenagers, there engaging, truthful fiction about childhood and adolescence, written in ways that remind us why someone might like to read. There is, for example, Charles Baxter's precise and evocative "Gryphon." And there are the carefully chosen details, the complex sentences, and the down-to-earth diction in Stuart Dybek's great Chicago story, "Hot Ice.”

>If English class is the only forum in which students can talk about racism and 35 ethnic identity, why not teach Hilton Als's The Women, Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge;' or any of the stories in James Alan McPherson's Hue and Cry all of which eloquently and directly address the subtle, powerful ways in which race affects every tiny decision and gesture? Why not introduce our kids to the clarity and power of James Baldwin's great story "Sonny's Blues"?

>My suspicion is that the reason such texts are not used as often as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is precisely the reason why they should be taught - that is, because they're complicated. Baldwin, Als, and McPherson reject obvious "lessons" and familiar arcs of abuse, self-realization, and recovery; they actively refute simplistic prescriptions about how to live.

>> No.13341299

>>13341295
>Great novels can help us master the all-too-rare skill of tolerating - of being able to hold in mind - ambiguity and contradiction. Jay Gatsby has a shady past, but he's also sympathetic. Huck Finn is a liar, but we come to love him. A friend's student once wrote that Alice Munro's characters weren't people he'd choose to hang out with but that reading her work always made him feel "a little less petty and judgmental." Such benefits are denied to the young reader exposed only to books with banal, simple-minded moral equations as well as to the student encouraged to come up with reductive, wrong-headed readings of multilayered texts.

>The narrator of Caged Bird is good, her rapist is bad; Scout and Atticus Finch are good, their bigoted neighbors are bad. But the characters in James Alan McPherson's "Gold Coast" are a good deal more lifelike. The cantankerous, bigoted, elderly white janitor and the young African American student, his temporary assistant, who puts up with the janitor's bullshit and is simultaneously cheered and saddened by the knowledge that he's headed for greater success than the janitor will ever achieve, both embody mixtures of admirable and more dubious qualities. In other words, they're more like humans. It's hard to imagine the lesson plans telling students exactly how to feel about these two complex plausible characters.

>No one's suggesting that every existing syllabus be shredded; many books on the current lists are great works of art. But why not tell the students that, instead of suggesting that Mark Twain be posthumously reprimanded? Why not point out how convincingly he captured the workings of Huck's mind, the inner voice of a kid trying desperately to sew a crazy quilt of self together from the ragged scraps around him? Why not celebrate the accuracy and vigor with which he translated the rhythms of American speech into written language?

>In simplifying what a book is allowed to tell us - Twain's novel is wholly about racism and not at all about what it's like to Huck Finn - teachers pretend to spark discussion but actually prevent it. They claim to relate the world of the book to the world of experience, but by concentrating on the student's own history they narrow the world of experience down to the personal and deny students other sorts of experience - the experience of what's in the book, for starters. One reason we read writers from other times or cultures is to confront alternatives - of feeling and sensibility, of history and psyche, of information and ideas. To experience the heartbreaking matter-of-factness with which Anne Frank described her situation seems more useful than packing a paper bag with Game Boys, cigarettes, and CDs so that we can go into hiding and avoid being sent to the camps.

>> No.13341303

>>13341299
>The pleasure of surrender to the world of a book is only one of the pleasures that this new way of reading - and teaching - denies. In blurring the line between reality and fiction (What happened to you that was exactly like what happened to Hester Prynne?), it reduces our respect for imagination, beauty, art, thought, and for the way that the human spirit expresses itself in words.

>Writers have no choice but to believe that literature will survive, that it's worth some effort to preserve the most beautiful, meaningful lyrics or narratives, the record of who we were, and are. And if we want our children to begin an extended love affair with reading and with what great writing can do, we want them to get an early start - or any start, at all. Teaching students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them acknowledge and accept complexity and ambiguity, and of making them love and respect the language that allows us to smuggle out, and send one another, our urgent, eloquent dispatches from the prison of the self.

>That may be what writers - and readers - desire. But if it's not occurring, perhaps that's because our culture wants it less urgently than we do. Education, after all, is a process intended to produce a product. So we have to ask ourselves:

>What sort of product is being produced by the current system? How does it change when certain factors are added to, or removed from, our literature curriculum? And is it really in the best interests of our consumer economy to create a well-educated, smart, highly literate society of fervent readers? Doesn't our epidemic dumbing-down have undeniable advantages for those institutions (the media, the advertising industry, the government) whose interests are better served by a population not trained to read too closely or ask too many questions?

>On the most obvious level, it's worth noting that books are among the few remaining forms of entertainment not sustained by, and meant to further, the interests of advertising. Television, newspapers, and magazines are busily instilling us with new desires and previously unsuspected needs, while books sell only themselves. Moreover, the time we spend reading is time spent away from media that have a greater chance of alchemically transmuting attention into money.

>> No.13341306

>>13341303
>But of course what's happening is more complex and subtle than that, more closely connected to how we conceive of the relation between intellect and spirit. The new-model English-class graduate - the one who has been force-fed the gross oversimplifications proffered by these lesson plans and teaching manuals - values empathy and imagination less than the ability to make quick and irreversible judgments, to entertain and maintain simplistic immovable opinions about guilt and innocence, about the possibilities and limitations of human nature. Less comfortable with the gray areas than with sharply delineated black and white, he or she can work in groups and operate by consensus, and has a resultant, residual distrust for the eccentric, the idiosyncratic, the annoyingly ... individual.

>What I've described is a salable product, tailored to the needs of the economic and political moment: What results from these educational methods is a mode of thinking (or, more accurately, of not thinking) that equips our kids for the future: Future McDonald's employees. Future corporate board members. Future special prosecutors. Future makers of lOO-best-books lists who fondly recall what they first read in high school- and who may not have read anything. And so the roster of literary masterpieces we pass along to future generations will continue its downward shift, and those lightweight, mediocre high school favorites will continue to rise, unburdened by gravity, to the top of the list.

>> No.13341310

>>13339414
>yikes
>lets be clear
>make no mistake
>not only has x failed to understand y
>its 2019
All phrases that warrant a guided dismissal of whatever article your reading