Apres-Juneteenth and Heat

[sartorias]

Last night the power went out for several hours.

Comments

[susankroupa]

I hope you have a lovely, cool day (except for the driving). We get power outages here on such a regular basis (wind and trees) that we keep lanterns on every floor and large packs of batteries and ice chests for the stuff in the fridge.

I missed pretty much the whole 19th century in novels, much to my detriment with the current wip, but the classics that influenced me were plays and poetry. Shakespeare, Ibsen--A Doll's House in particular and Peer Gynt, Ionesco. I was not at all a sophiscated reader of novels--my favorites were things like The Once and Future King, Exodus, The Big Fisherman, Advise and Consent, etc.

[sartorias]

No one seems to read those big, sweeping historicals any more, which is kind of a shame. I remember them fondly.

[avengangle]

I had various levels of English teachers from fifth grade on, and generally, if I liked the teacher, I liked the books s/he had us read. I loved The Chosen (Potok); the next year was American lit and a teacher I didn't like much at all, and so I disliked The Scarlet Letter, Sister Carrie, and Maggie: a Girl of the Streets. (I liked Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, but I'd read them before the class.) I really want to think I would dislike them anyway, as being slammed in the head with symbolism entwined in ten-mile-long sentences with the SAME PHRASES REPEATED OVER AND OVER isn't usually my cup of tea, but I don't know

[sartorias]

Sometimes discovery on one's own is the best way to encounter them...but on the other hand, a great teacher, like you say, can shed so much light on a work and bring so much to it.

[handworn]

I'm kind of of two minds about English classes. On the one hand, I was one of those who loved books too much to take it well when ordered to butcher them and bullshit about the auspices of the entrails. I wanted to grab my English teachers by the lapels, shake them and shout, "It's a story, not a primitively coded message, and even if it's possible to interpret it in themes, it doesn't accomplish anything more than lying back and talking about the shapes you see in the clouds

[mamculuna]

I still teach English (online lit classes at a community college) and I think the main skill that analyzing literature teaches is forming an opinion and backing it up with evidence! I can't speak for all teachers, but I'm fairly happy with any view of the text that means that students have gone beyond summarizing the action so that they can look at specifics, form generalizations about them, communicate the generalizations, and then make their points convincing by using the specifics to support their statements. You're right that it requires one-on-one attention from the instructor, though.

[handworn]

Well, I think we're talking about the same thing, since forming an opinion requires looking at it and seeing patterns, even if a student doesn't describe them as patterns in his or her mind.

[mamculuna]

That's quite true.

[sartorias]

*g*

Thanks!

[mamculuna]

I never read Dickens until I was in graduate school, I think. I had expected him to be all the long convoluted Victorian high-mindedness--very wrong! Sharp, funny, still very fresh. Great Expectations was a real delight.

And the other surprised was Tristram Shandy--maybe the second novel written in English,and immediately destroyed all the conventions of fiction that had just been set up by the first novel(s).Very postmodern. And also funny, quite often.

[sartorias]

Yes! Tristram Shandy is definitely pomo and experiemental (of course everything was experimental in those days) and funny.