Teacher's Bad Rowling Advice

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

But this academic taste seems also to catch the people’s minds outside the literature departments and academic journals as well. I’d say that the majority of the people with university education (humanistic, scientific, engineering, marketing, juristic, medical…) would answer just like the board of the Randomhouse poll shows even if they would never had studied literature or aesthetics or belonged to those circles. Not to say that they would have actually read the books they deem so worthy of praise.

Yes, Nogrod, I do believe there are requisite works that must be on every given list of literary excellence, whether anyone has read them or not. I believe sometimes folks stock their bookshelves more for the bindings than the content. Milton's 'Paradise Lost' is just such an example. I'm sorry, but Milton's ponderous poem makes one actually wish for death, and head to heaven or hell directly, thus circumventing the dreadful tedium of reading every canto. Even in the 18th century, commentators were aware of this work's odd dual status of acknowledged greatness and unacknowledged dismissal:

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. --Samuel Johnson

Originally Posted by Nogrod

So as you Morthoron protested that your seven year old daughter could teach Paul Klee about perspective, I think you should reconsider. If anyone of you have seen some early works by say Picasso or Kandinsky you know what I mean. They really knew how to paint and they were masters in the art. They just decided consciously to do something completely different – and they had their reasons for it. Just read any of the theoretical discussions there is a wealth of by modern artists like Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso, Leger, Malevich… you name it.

I was being facetious in my comment regarding Klee, Nogrod. I am aware he had to train quite diligently over many years to eradicate his natural aptitude. I myself subscribe to the Al Capp view of abstraction in art:

Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered!

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

Oh, as to "genre fiction"- I love the very, very clever Umberto Eco setting out to give the Literati a finger in the eye over this, boldly writing a historical detective novel that's as highbrow as anyone could want- he even concludes it by quoting Wittgenstein, fer crissake.

'The Name of the Rose' is one of my favorite novels, and perhaps it is because of Eco's genre-bending. It is a wonderfully taut mystery, but it is cherished by many staunch medievalists as well for its attention to detail. I don't believe I've ever read a better fictionalized account of the early 14th century. Not to say there are many out there.

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Oh my! Between all this talk of bullying literati and dumbing down, why, I hardly dare know if I should admit to enjoying such as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare--Abridged. But seeing as its for the stage--always a tart--I suppose it can't be held against me.

As long as you're not referring to the bowdlerized version of Shakespeare. *shivers*

If you have not done so already, take a look at Isaac Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. I used it often in school when stumped by particularly obscure allusions.

In regards to the political polarization of school faculties, as I said earlier, my friend's syllabus for her Master's program is more radical than the same program I took nearly 20 years earlier. I'll ask her for a copy so I can share the ludicrous direction the curriculum has taken. There is virtually nothing pre-20th Century, and if I recall much of the class content dealt with 'Topics in Contemporary Culture', realism, assimilation, naturalism, urbanization, immigration, colonialism, construction and reconstruction. There were some recognizable writers, like T.S. Eliot, Toni Morison and Gertrude Stein (the mama of Dada), and movements like Modernism and Postmodernism and cultural phenomena like reification. It was more an excursion into sociological extremes than literature.

I asked her if she got to read or comment on any good books lately. She laughed and said 'No'.

So, given the seemingly insurrmountable chasm that engulfs this forum's favorite genre, I wonder if fantasy will ever get the respect it is due (at least for the few pearls slung among the swine). Perhaps in another 500 years Lord of the Rings will be likened to Beowulf and become the sole province of curmudgeonly academics clositered away in stodgy studies.

P.S. In regards to modernism and the avant-garde, perhaps the most devastating critique of commonality and stream-of-consciousness writing regarded Gertrude Stein's work and was offered by her own frustrated editor, A.J. Fifield, who was provoked into parody when reading her latest manuscript:

I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot ready your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy could sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.