Posted on 08/28/2011 10:38:21 AM PDT by ken21
severed from tradition and reali life, literature as it is taught in universities is strictly an intramural game.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Well, don’t forget Shakespeare, the Restoration plays, the Oxford books of poetry, prose and verse. Actually, the list is endless.
Harold Bloom also published one of those list books of what are the greatest books in Western literature.
Thanks to Amazon, you can buy some of these books for a dollar a piece.
almost 8% of college undergrads once majored in literature,
now, 4%.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
almost 100% of college undergrads were once americans,
now, 50%.
And of those 50%, half are only semi literate.
So I would say that 4% of college undergrads being american lit majors is actually an impressive stat.
Sad story. While I personally find Hemingway’s novels heavy-going, his short stories are top notch. As are Fitzgerald’s.
I just finished reading Whittaker Chambers’ book, Witness, and was remarking to my husband how Chambers quoted literary works like he had committed them to memory, Song of Roland, Antigone, Dostoevsky and many more. He was a public school student and I know that much of their education at that time, revolved around reading works of literature and history, and committing poems to memory, but I couldn’t even recall what the works were about, let alone quote them or refer to a specific part of the work, like the second chorus in Antigone.
Young people don’t read and it is a problem because if they don’t read, they don’t learn to think for themselves. The young love to quote that Santayana remark about those who do not learn from history, but the only history that they learn about is revisionist history, so what’s to learn?
Jeff Head is very much alive and was posting here a couple of weeks ago. He has had an amazing recovery and seems to be doing very well.
But he could be richer and more famous if he was dead.... Just pointing that out... he writes good.
/johnny
A year or so ago, we went to Borders, and were asked if we would like to buy a book to contribute to the literary program in the local school district. One of the selections was “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I remember reading that when I was in Jr. High/High School, back in the 70s, so that’s what I contributed to the literacy program.
Of all the “literature” I had to read back in those days, the short Hemingway stories still stand out to me. Well, “Catcher in the Rye” does, too, but for a different reason... reading that book was pure torture.
Hmm... speaking of Borders... I wonder if they still have any good selections left?
Jim Baen also has a creative commons site. And Baen is good, even when he's bad. He's actually better when he's bad.
But there are good American books out there. I'm calling the 60's, 70's and 80's the lean years.
It's better today.
/johnny
1. Academics promote the nutty stuff that seems like "literature" because (a) it's weird, (b) few people "get it," and (c) if you act like you "get it," you can be one of the hipsters that goes to the cool parties and bangs the ennui chicks. That is, if you happen to bang chicks and not dudes.
This turns people off to literature. Shocking.
2. The American publishing industry doesn't give a rat's ass about promoting literature because literature doesn't sell. GUARANTEED some beautiful potential works for the ages are sitting on a literary agent's or manuscript "reader's" desk right now that will never get published (like mine) because some dopey celebrity book/self help book/other piece of trash needs to come out. Gotta recoup that $2.5 mil advance Sarah Silverman got to put out another book on celebrity whining, after all.
Feh.
Pearls before swine.
3. Kids these days don't read. Kids these days don't write. I've tried to hire writers . . . BAs in English, mind you . . . who couldn't string three words together . . . who needed their hands held to write a 300-word blog post.
It's a crying shame, too, because American literature has a great and storied history . . . Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitz, Hemingway, McCarthy . . . quite a list of geniuses there.
Some of the best prose I have read lately is contained in treatises on music theory and analyses of the different chess openings.
The Sun Also Rises?
Old Man & The Sea?
Those and other of Hemingway’s novels are light as mountain air and sea-spray, I would say.
I just read D.M. Thomas’ terrific biography of Solzhenitsyn in which Thomas points out that the great Russian read Hem’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ in the days just prior to submitting ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ for publication.
Thomas indicates that Solzhenitsyn took courage from Hemingway’s story and went to the publisher with this (his first) novel even though he knew the manuscript might send him back to the prison camps.
I don’t mean to gainsay you. I’ve seen your insightful comments here before. Merely chiming in, for discussion’s sake.
I was a history major and a tutor and battled this presumption as well. Got penalized for my troubles, C- and D’s for A level work, but got A’s from the good professors. It’s about half and half between good profs and marxists, but this is when choosing the best courses out there.
Well said. It’s got to the point if someone starts talking about “big L” literature my stiff meter starts to ping. That’s not to say that they are all stiffs, just most of them, at least in my opinion.
Gene Wolfe has a point when he says that all these books about the crushing mundane lives of mundane people being miserable and the academic culture that grew up around them is very new, if you look at the whole of human history. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some works along those lines that are written very well indeed. But give me a little of the fantastic any day, even if most of them maybe aren’t that good. Theodore Sturgeon had something to say about that, “90% of everything is crap”, in reference to “big L” literature vs. sci-fi.
I’ll gladly read KILLDOZER!, one of the greatest scifi novellas of all time in my opinion, over some modernistic boring garbage that some stuffed shirt elbow patched stiff digs.
Freegards
http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520
“CreateSpace, a member of the Amazon group of companies, provides a fast, easy and economical way to self-publish and make your content available to millions of potential customers on Amazon.com and other channels. With the CreateSpace manufacturing-on-demand model, your products will be produced as customers order, so you don’t have to make an up-front investment in inventory. Media formats supported through CreateSpace include books, DVDs, CDs, video downloads and Amazon MP3s.”
“Kids these days don’t read. Kids these days don’t write. I’ve tried to hire writers . . . BAs in English, mind you . . . who couldn’t string three words together . . . who needed their hands held to write a 300-word blog post.”
You still hiring? I’m a kid here, and I’d like to think I can write well. Won a few short story contests.
It’s dead now. :p
Not to bad until the last line you jumped from A to D, the Graphic was out standing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.