Questions:
the loss of a common body of knowledge based on the literary classics —
What exactly is that common body of knowledge that we all share from reading classics in high school?
What part of that knowledge could not be replaced by just seeing the movies?
If we assume that we all read something along the lines of this list, which is not too far off of FLG's experience, then we'd all know the following things from the following books:
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth -- Being a Chinese farmer sucks.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. -- Titling at windmills is pointless
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. -- Flatulence was always funny
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. -- People named Pip should be nice to criminals.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities -- Beware of women knitting.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. -- Faulkner is really boring.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. -- It ain't worth dying for some chick named Daisy.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. -- People with glasses who are also named Piggy should remain constantly vigilant for large rocks.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises -- Spain is cool.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. -- Girls can be named Scout and Atticus Finch was a fucking badass.
And so forth...
'What part of that knowledge could not be replaced with the movies?' is trickier. But one would not know, for instance, that Hemingway writes short, declarative sentences and Fitzgerald mellifluously. Also, it's difficult to translate the inner monologue of thoughts common to the written form to the medium of film. Nevertheless, it's hard to argue that the relevant aspects of the shared knowledge couldn't be largely conveyed through movies.
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6 comments:
When you write things for the general public, you often come to a point when some idea or image that would take you paragraphs to describe or argue has already been done more acutely, thoughtfully, and poetically by a work of literature (which you know because you read that work). Then, instead of belaboring your point forever and reinventing the wheel, you can just allude to that work and the allusion will serve as shorthand for that idea or image without taking away any of its original power--as your clumsy paraphrasing or reconstruction of it would inevitably have done. So you can call something an Oedipal dilemma without having to say, "by which I mean, the problem that happens when you have a destiny, but it's bad, so you live your life trying to avoid that destiny, but then it turns out that, actually, the whole process of trying to avoid the destiny led you straight into fulfilling the terrible destiny, but what can you do because if you hadn't tried to avoid the destiny, you still would've fallen into it..." Or, because we all know Freud, we don't have to say, "when you subconsciously want to kill your father and sleep with your mother, as once a Greek mythological figure did for reasons that are too complicated to elaborate here." The problem is, this plan only works if you can reasonably assume your audience will know what you're referring to, otherwise it's back to longhand for you (remember, no footnotes in popular writing).
You could get some of that from seeing the movies, but if one considers a film adaptation to be its own work, then seeing the movie To Kill a Mockingbird is to see something resembling a book by the same name, but that is ultimately a work by Robert Mulligan/Horton Foote/Gregory Peck, and not the work by Harper Lee. The divergence becomes even more pronounced as more time elapses between the text and the film adaption. How much of Homer is to be found in Troy?
Further---what did we get from the movies that we can't get from just reading FLG's list? (incidentally, kudos on coming up with that--impressively pithy.)
Miss SI makes a very nice point--but I have not read Oedipus or Freud (well, maybe Oedipus) and yet would feel perfectly comfortable referring to them in that way. But, trust me, my vague memory of a scene between Oedipus and his mother from a 7th grade CTY summer class is not the thing that makes me comfortable referring to Oedipal dilemmas. I definitely have not read Great Expectations, but can securely laugh at a Miss Havisham joke (which I've never heard anyone make in person, only in books).
So, if what we are really talking about is a shared cultural literacy, is reading the classics in high school actually an effective way to get there? Is that goal really worth the priority it's given and the time it takes? Could the high school English teacher teach those allusions without forcing the reading?
I'm thinking that anyone who *needs* to be able to make those references can pick them up on the fly. Or look them up:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Dictionary-Cultural-Literacy-American/dp/0618226478
Obliquely going back to Withywindle's point---we might get better papers from college students if they didn't think they needed to be applying some grand theme to everything ("From the beginning of mankind..."), a tendency possibly related to the focus on the classics in high school. (I just pulled that one out my ass---I'll have to test it when I am reading essays again)
Dance, what have your international students lost of gained from their culturally specific reading that I assume can differ remarkably from the western "shared cultural literacy"? I have heard a number of people argue that this SCL is necessary to succeed, a claim the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, and many others must marvel at.
Alan, I don't have enough international students to speak to that. Although, upper-class Indians probably pick up a fair amount of western SCL---I think the British influence runs strong still in education there.
Re SCL being necessary to succeed---do people give a reason for that other than "necessary to good schmoozing at cocktail parties"?
And FLG didn't make the argument that these classics teach the grand issues of love and loss and responsibility and self-discovery that are necessary to becoming a mature adult. Which I think is a better goal for high school education than shared cultural literacy, though it's still up for debate whether the classics would be the most effective method.
"And FLG didn't make the argument that these classics teach the grand issues of love and loss and responsibility and self-discovery that are necessary to becoming a mature adult. Which I think is a better goal for high school education than shared cultural literacy, though it's still up for debate whether the classics would be the most effective method."
Right you are.
Besides good schmoozing at cocktail parties there is the need to share an understanding of MSI's references to SCL. The limitation of MSI's shorthand, as she notes, is that good portions of the world will not understand that reference. Given that people now visit this site and hers and yours and mine even (!) from different cultural backgrounds, we might consider limiting our reliance on SCL or even exploring those fundamental issues ourselves, disregarding the risk that we may be retreading old ground of re-inventing the wheel. (And, yes, MSI, cutting out the distracting profanity.)
It may not actually be possible to think very coherent thoughts without SCL, or to have a discussion at anything but a very rudimentary level, which in fact is what does often happen when people from very different backgrounds attempt to discuss abstract things with one another. Reading Oedipus allows you not only to reference Oedipus later to make your writing prettier, but to have the dilemma of Oedipus at your intellectual disposal as you try to clarify related questions about justice and misfortune. It's quite the challenge to even know what to think about if you have no examples of pre-existing thoughts before you, and if we had to individually and repeatedly reinvent every treatment of basic human conundrums that comes up in our shared cultural literature, we would be mimicking a society without not only writing, but even an oral tradition.
Also, I don't see how the fact that people from Malaysia or Burundi having access to my writing ought to change the nature of it. I rarely intend to address the entire planet with any given argument. I address a bounded community--Americans, Washingtonians, grad students, etc--and I make use of SCL as it resonates with these communities. The more SCL we have, the better our debates are. Malaysians and Burundians are perfectly free to read what I write, but the responsibility of acquiring the necessary SCL is on them, just as if I want to participate in their debates, the responsibility to acquire their SCL is on me. But neither of us is obligated to resort to rudimentary grunts and gestures just so everyone in the entire would can feel included in our conversation.
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