Comments | annwfyn: To Kill A Mockingbird

annwfyn

To Kill A Mockingbird

Jun 30, 2010 08:32

So, it's the fiftieth anniversary of 'To Kill A Mockingbird', and there are lots of essays on it all over the internet. Some of them are very clever, so I linked to them here.

Reconstructing Atticus Finch. Was he really that good a lawyer?

Malcolm Gladwell on Atticus Finch and Southern liberalism.

A defense of To Kill A MockingbirdI must admit, ( Read more... )

books, ponderings & meanderings

Comments 5

dainul June 30 2010, 08:07:46 UTC

I actually quite liked the book, but then I a) had lived in America, albeit a long way in culture and distance from where the book was set, so it felt less distant and b) I read it myself over Easter/half-term before we started it in school. It made the class-readings even more dull, but meant I could actually enjoy the book without the issues associated with a teacher trying to present it to a class.

madwitch June 30 2010, 08:07:52 UTC

I think I will always love that book. We studied it at GCSE as well, but that just made me more fond of it.

sl4irl June 30 2010, 10:16:05 UTC

I honestly didn't find the cultures in question all that alien at all when I studied TKAM for GCSE. Different climate, but ultimately there's plenty of "shared humanity wide" stuff in there.

Anyway, I enjoyed the Malcolm Gladwell article. It's a pretty depressing one though, in its jist: cultural/structural disadvantages to poverty really haven't gone away, at all.

wraithwitch June 30 2010, 16:38:08 UTC

Even something about British history in that time period, like the 'Jewel in the Crown' series might have been a bit more useful...

Because the Deep South is alien but a fictional bit of India in 1950 with the social values of 1900 is totally understandable? =P

But my school determinedly decided to teach us about racism, focusing on racism in the American Deep South.That rather sounds like you wish they hadn't tried because it was all too embarrassing - nice privileged white people trying to get across the evils of racism to a bunch of kids who've likely never been discriminated against in their lives. Fair enough, but what else are they meant to do? Short of organising a field trip to a ghetto/slum/cornerofhell, I think it's always gonna be a slightly foreign concept to nice sheltered middle class children ( ... )

annwfyn July 1 2010, 08:02:22 UTC

I dunno. Something I think is an issue with British attitudes towards race and racism, which I've seen come from a lot of people, is the view that racism is an American problem, that it's something that happened in the Deep South, that it isn't something that happened here.

The Jewel in the Crown maybe does have a different resonance for me as my family are Anglo-Indian in parts. There are probably better books than that. Overall, I still think that American racism is a bad thing to teach kids about before British racism.