Posted on 08/28/2011 10:38:21 AM PDT by ken21
I had 4 years of Latin and two of French in school, but never mastered either, even though I took two more of French in college.
American Lit dead? Phooey, I still write!
No, seriously folks, when American Lit is Tom Wolfe’s Three Stooges, and mediocrities like Vonnegut (Thank you Joseph Epstein for finally making this public), then good riddance to bad rubbish!
There are plenty of good writers out there, you just have to go out and look, read reviews, become snobbish in the eyes of the Hairy Potty, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy readers, and you’ll find them. The same applies to popular music and other arts. If it’s popular there must be something wrong with it, said once a relative of mine. Exceptions abound: the Beatles, Umberto Eco (new novel coming out soon), but essentially it’s true.
The article reminds me of a conversation with an old art teacher at a community college. Someone asked him about applying to the once renowned art department of a local university. He told him to forget it, he wouldn’t make it there, it’s all conceptual art that is taught there and appreciated.
Still, Kindle and Nookie are selling well, aren’t they? What do people read on them, porno?
I particularly enjoy his "Thank God It's Only Chlamydia!"
I think I’m the one with the problem, not the language. I’ve got an unusual gift for memorization, but putting it all together was the problem.
...Personally, I like S.L.Clemens...
As my Grandfather used to say, “ Billy, have you noticed only the frogs speak French, every one else learns English.”
I hate to rain on the parade, although I enjoyed the Wall Street Journal article.
Yes, tripe is produced, much of it academic, and lots of that concentrating on gender, race, sexuality, and all the other categories lined up for polite comment. As I was reading this, I recalled the time one of my professors imposed on the class the writings of Dewey and Thorndike to inform the young teachers in the room about the theory behind modern education. This professor told us that no one really understood Dewey, but we should try to absorb the wisdom of the prose. That was in 1981.
I also thought about medieval theologians arguing about the essence of heaven and hell and angelic bodies, and the Marxists of the early 20th century, and the turgid incomprehensible writing of Gramscii. My guess is that every era contains intellectuals who fall so deeply in love with their ideas and beliefs that they lose all contact with the real world, and so we have Nobel laureates writing fictionalized account of Central American dictators passed off as actual events, and no one minds.
Anyone can try to ignore reality, but in order to really accomplish the task, you need to have the intellectual muscle to rationalize the fantasy. The job of the fine arts department is to train students in that rationalization.
About 200 years from now, people will recognize the great literature of our time... which reminds me of the books recognized as great literature in one of those Star Trek movies (I think Jacqueline Susanne was mentioned). Otherwise, I expect a fair number of thinkers in every era to produce dense dreck, some to produce good works, and time to sort it out.
>>>I always thought that a language that had 500 Irregular verbs had a problem.<<<
Try to memorize the articles and endings in German. LOL
As a freshman, I studied Shakespeare and Homer as well as plays by Edwin Granberry ("A Trip to Czardis"), James Barrie ("Shall We Join the Ladies?"), and others. The next year brought more Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevskii, Orwell, and Karel Čapek. In my junior year, we read Melville, Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and early twentieth-century writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Thornton Wilder. We also read the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, Edward A. Robinson, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. In addition, I wrote papers on George Stewart, a noted mid-20th century novelist who is probably largely forgotten, and Hector C. Bywater, whose novel The Great Pacific War; a History of the American Japanese Campaign of 1931-33 (London: Constable, 1925) was must-reading among Japanese naval officers in the 1930's.
So-called "young adult" (YA) novels by writers such as S. E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, Paul Cormier, J. D. Salinger, etc.--which are in vogue in many high school English curriculums today--were not covered in any of my English classes, although many students read them on their own. I read mostly nonfiction in my spare time, but I did read one YA novel on my own--Don Robertson's The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (New York: Harper, 1968)
I would like to add that I graduated in 1969--a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..
As to the book in question I have little comment, not having read it and not, I fear, having bookshelf space sufficient to put it by until I'm so desperate I've run out of cereal boxes to read. Its organization, however, is wearily familiar.
A stranger, freshly arrived from another planet, if offered as his introduction to the United States only this book, would come away with a picture of a country founded on violence and expropriation, stoked through its history by every kind of prejudice and class domination, and populated chiefly by one or another kind of victim, with time out only for the mental sloth and apathy brought on by life lived in the suburbs and the characterless glut of American late capitalism..."How would [this volume] be organized," one of its contributors asks, "if race, gender, disability, and sexuality were not available?"
It is simply the case that viewing a country through the lens of its literature is compromised when that lens itself is regarded only through the even more restrictive one of class oppression. One's image ends up bleary and out of focus, and that is a fairly good working description of some of the academic lit-crit to have crossed my reading table in the last decade or so. And it's cheating. Finding feminist themes in Willa Cather's work, to use the author's example, is really no more difficult nor innately important than enumerating the instances of the word "the". What is gained is a sort of amateur poor-man's sociology; what is lost is the story. Good God, no wonder nobody wants to study this stuff!
And so the teaching of this wonderful subject takes on the consistency of pablum: leafy spinach to strained baby food the poor undergraduate has to choke down and wonder where the crunchy bits went. Sorry, kids, it's all been predigested for you:
Two or three times a week one would sit in a room and be told that nothing that one has read is as it appears but is instead informed by authors hiding their true motives even from themselves or, in the best "context-centered" manner, that the books under study are the product of a country built on fundamental dishonesty about the sacred subjects of race, gender and class.
The regurgitation of which, to strain an already disgusting metaphor, will garner a grade and a deep suspicion that academic life consists less of actual study and analysis than it does of cant and pure bullshit. That may, in some instances, be a valid conclusion but it's the death of intellect.
Literature is, in my opinion, too vast a subject to be taught at all. The function of higher education in this regard is to teach the ability to learn it for oneself. If, given the tools and techniques taught there, the reader still comes to the conclusion that Cather is really Marx writ small, then fine, he's an idiot, but at least an honest one. Teaching that student that there is no other valid means of regarding Cather is a crime.
ping
My family came here dirt poor, refuges from an oppressive regime, UK, and we prospered, grew, and multiplied.
It proves that when one wants to communicate a complicated idea, he must use good prose.
Yet. I always enjoy the new authors that say. Oh well here's my story. Deal with it. Haha. A good story always builds a following if it gets out there and with the internet it is made a bit more easier.
Apologies for my poor writing . It has been a long one today and I sent quickly before editing. Haha. So much for my post about rewrites. :-) Have a great week.
Borders went bust and is in liquidation
Yes, they keep sending me emails about it.
I went to a Borders today and bought several books at half price. I asked the clerk when the final out is, and she only knows that it’s mid-September.
Mailer wrote only one decent novel—The Naked And The Dead. All his other novels are piles of crap. Updike is overrated. Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the funniest book I ever read, but highly unlikely to be listed as one of the great American novels. No leftist novelist, the great bulk of writers, truly understands America or Americans. The America they wrote and continue to write about is not the America I know.
French is quite a nice language and was the language of culture and arts from the end of the time that Latin was commonly understood (around 800 AD) right up until the 20th century.
The Emperor Charles V said in the 1500s 'I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse'
English also borrows heavily from French -- after learning French and German one sees Post Modern English (what we speak, rather than Modern English which is Shakespearean) as an illegitimate daughter of the two :-P
English has lost its use of cases, gender attribution for inanimate nouns etc.
It is an easy language to pick up (from my interactions with tons of non-native speakers), but difficult to master because it is filled with exceptions -- even more so than French.
To give you my favorite example, pronounce the following three words
They are spelt the same yet pronounced completely differently
then, try explaining the differences of simple past, present perfect and past perfect tenses.
Or even the continuous tenses -- they don't exist in some other languages
Also, there is tremendous inconsistency in verbs with lots of irregularities -- like: to spell, I spelled/I spelt. To feel: I felt but not I feeled. To tell becomes I told but not I telt or I telled.
And, if I spell in past is I spelt, why isn't I feel (a tree) not "I felt" :-P
=======================================================================
and in my years (not ears ;P) in England I realized that the language is deviating and then I travelled in India and Hong Kong and there is a gap between American English and British English and Australian English and Indian English (which still uses Victorianisms and Edwardianisms) and Chinglish.
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.