Things I Learned In K-12 School Lit

Oct 09, 2008 23:20

I never liked my literature classes in high school. This is funny, because I've always loved reading. But I think I've pieced together why I never liked those classes. At first I was sure it was the "classic literature" angle that did it, because I can't stand contemporary or classic stuff; call me a philistine, but my tastes are 90% fantasy. I ( Read more... )

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Comments 18

profhauke October 10 2008, 15:46:11 UTC
There are a few very moving pieces of literature. The first one that came to mind as I read your rant was a book I "had" to read in a jr. high class, My Antonia by Willa Cather. I read it again this summer, more than 20 years after the first time I saw it, and it was still good.

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soreth October 10 2008, 16:21:53 UTC
Yeah, almost all of the assigned reading from high school and so forth was depressing crap. "Classic" yes, well-written yes, but nothing to give to people to inspire any kind of optimism for anything.

Now out of class reading, that was far, far more enjoyable. I spent FAR more time with other books than with the assigned ones.

(That said, I did enjoy A Separate Peace.)

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dragonzuela October 10 2008, 17:27:22 UTC
I remember my favorite book that we read in high school being The Color Purple, and what do you know, it started out with the main character's life sucking horribly, and ended on a very happy note with her having turned everything around.

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frameacloud October 12 2008, 06:04:48 UTC
"... my lit teacher gave me the exact same response: happy endings aren't realistic."

That's really one heck of a statement to challenge, isn't it? A nasty one to tell a young person, too, who should have a long way to go before getting to their own ending. What do we have to do, compile some statistics on what sorts of "endings" exist in real life, and sort them into happy and sad categories? Doesn't anything ever turn out okay?

I had a teacher who told me something like that. This was in elementary school. I was saying something to xir about how terrible it was to be a child. This teacher leaned close to me and said in a low, quivering, furious voice, "It gets worse." That phrase has haunted me for the rest of my life. Xe promised that no matter how bad it was as a child, it would just get more and more horrible as I grew up. There's taxes, paperwork, responsibility, work, no time for play. Somehow xe glossed over the part where grown-ups usually don't need to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, or that if grown-ups hit you ( ... )

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delcan October 16 2008, 01:44:12 UTC
I don't suppose it helps much, but I've never said the phrase when I didn't mean it. Despite everything, I do tend towards the belief that given enough time, anything and everything will come around.

Of course, how much time that takes can be ugly in and of itself.

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frameacloud October 12 2008, 05:46:41 UTC
"No room for happiness in literature; happiness is the pause before the roller-coaster drop, the half-beat before a punchline that draws thousand-yard stares instead of belly-laughs. Comedies don't sell; tragedies draw the big crowds. On that thought, what is it about all of us that gets drawn towards this masturbatory angst more often than we're pulled towards hope and optimism?"

Rob Brezsny's Pronoia talks about this problem at length and tries to help turn it around. You've read it, right? It's all about that very thing ( ... )

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delcan October 16 2008, 01:41:24 UTC
I have not read Pronoia, unfortunately; it's going on the reading list, though, immediately, because I think I'm to the point of needing it.

And as far as philosophy of optimism goes, I could really use an approach that holds strong in the face of ugliness; after a while, it seems like staying upbeat in the world becomes an illogical position. It's times like that when I have to have a good lie down to forget why I reached that conclusion in the first place, because it seems like there's no real way to reconcile it.

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