/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14082507]

the more i read moby dick as an adult, the more i realize that i could not possibly have understood it as a high schooler. this has me thinking - a huge amount of canonical works are forcefed to teenagers to whom they have no relevance because of lack of requisite life experience, and it diminishes people's interest in reading. the alternative, though, is ya fiction that makes people think they have an affinity for reading when in reality they just want television b-plots and genre bullshit that makes them feel superior since it's on a printed page. how would you go about fixing school curricula to inspire a lifelong interest in literature given these two premises? feel free to dispute either or both of them, but try to gear your answers towards capturing the average high schooler instead of just hooking precocious ones.

[Anonymous No.14082526]

>>14082507
A lot of the books I read I feel glad to have read now rather than in high school, though I'm sure there are still things that fly over my head

[Anonymous No.14082540]

>>14082526
i agree, and i think re-reading things at various life stages is good. i guess i'm more trying to figure out how do you expose children and teenagers to the history of literature without making them resentful of it as a chore? i tutor kids and adolescents and teenagers right now, and they all seem to groan but still develop competency in math and science while being borderline illiterate in history, geography, and literature, even though all of these subjects are ostensibly covered by school curricula. i feel like actual education in any of the latter subjects essentially starts fresh in university settings where kids self-select into the field and enjoy the struggles it takes to develop deep interest in them.

[Anonymous No.14082557]

>>14082540
I was always interested in history and politics and literature as a kid, and I noticed that a lot of normie-ish people who were relatively apolitical and not so interested in social or humanities stuff during high school get super invested in them when they go to Uni and become like radical feminists and socialists and shit.

[Anonymous No.14082569]

>>14082507
I think there is a healthy middle ground. Literature with real literary value, that even high schoolers with little life experience can identify with.

Although its a bit of a polarizing novel, The Catcher in the Rye is the only novel that most of my 9th grade English class actually read.

I would argue that there are other novels like this and they don't require to have a teenage protagonist. Im sure many introverted and shy kids could appreciate No Longer Human (I first read it in High School on my own accord, and it was the first book I read in one sitting). Akutagawa short stories like the Spider's Web and Hell Screen could also be quite good. Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground could be good as well as something fun an exciting like Les Miserables or Count of Monte Cristo

[Anonymous No.14082574]

>>14082557
i think this is more a phenomenon of social science/humanities fields being these weird oedipal spaces where they can take out their frustration on having to read crusty white guys in high school and then be rewarded for their dilettantism. the literature classes i tried in college were just a bunch of loud undergraduates trying to burn Joseph Conrad at the stake and shit and whoever hated him the most got inducted into the major

[Anonymous No.14082585]

Yeah; I'm in the same boat. 20-30 age is the perfect age to start getting into serious literature. I do wish I started reading sooner though.

[Anonymous No.14082599]

>>14082585
I’ve been watching Harold Bloom interviews and when he said that he got into Walt Whitman “pretty late” and meant age 12-13 I wanted to kill myself.

[Anonymous No.14082607]

>>14082569
This is well thought out and appreciated. The Great Gatsby was quite a hit with my high school class, too. I guess I just wonder if there’s any way to get kids a taste for elevated or more archaic prose and poetry styles, but maybe that’s just me being wistful about my own stupidity and inability to really get into my current favorite works and time periods before the end of college.

[Anonymous No.14082660]

>>14082574
>i think this is more a phenomenon of social science/humanities fields being these weird oedipal spaces where they can take out their frustration on having to read crusty white guys in high school and then be rewarded for their dilettantism.

I've never heard it phrased so concisely and accurately, but this is precisely what the humanities have degenerated into. Literally the school of resentment.

I can't help but think this is perpetuated by seminar style classes from Freshmen year where kids are encouraged to spout out their opinions before they have had time to develop any understanding of anything. Not to mention that from a teachers standpoint, opinionated and loud kids are good for a seminar style class because they keep the discussions going. Even if they are just expressing resentment towards the writers they are reading, at least they are talking. And the only thing worse than that for the teachers, is a silent classroom.

[Anonymous No.14082663]

Duh
Also, a lot of people lie about reading things in high school.
For example Anyone who says they had to read War and Peace in high school is a liar. That would never be assigned. It’s too long

[Anonymous No.14082734]

>>14082663
I never read Moby-Dick in high school, bug I did read Billy Budd. I honestly can't believe Moby-Dick would be assigned reading with its hundred of pages of CETOLOGY.

[Anonymous No.14082759]

>>14082734
They typically assign abridged versions.

[Anonymous No.14083153]

>>14082663
High schools don't all work the same way. Some do assign Tolstoy.
Admittedly, in my high school, we only had to watch the film (and the prof lamented how these days we have much less to read than her generation, yet still don't read all the material we're assigned). On the other hand, we read Pere Goriot, Madame Bovary and Crime and Punishment that year (and a bunch of somewhat shorter novels and stories), so it would add up to the same page count surely.

>>14082734
>hundred of pages of CETOLOGY.
Why is cetology so blown out of proportion? Come on, there's just several chapters on it.

[Anonymous No.14083187]

>>14083153
The middle third of the book is literally just about whales, dude. The sizes, shapes, colors, anatomy, taste of their flesh, etc. I posit that anyone who understates the amount of cetology has read an abridged version.

[Anonymous No.14083198]

>>14083187
The color chapter is about whiteness as an abstract object, not about whales

[Anonymous No.14083217]

Did anyone else really enjoy the cetology parts? It’s made me want to go to the whaling museum that’s near my town.

[Anonymous No.14083244]

>>14083187
Well, the version I've read isn't abridged (Norton; in fact it is even thicker than it needs to be thanks to a ton of additional essays at the end of the book). But there's simply very few chapters that are actually divorced from the narrative and talk about whales. Some are also about the ship and whaling techniques, and overall all these chapters are still very artistic, thought-provoking, not simply scientific or informational.

[Anonymous No.14083299]

>>14082734
They get assigned abridged version that's basically just the important plot parts.

[Anonymous No.14083344]

>>14083217

People will dismiss those passages as being out of date, but that is entirely to miss the point. Among other things, Moby Dick encapsulates an entire tradition of whale observation. The deliberate historical character greatly enhances its appeal.

[Anonymous No.14083366]

>>14082663
We had to read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, really most of what you guys consider classic Russian lit here. Maybe a couple of people actually read the books, the rest (me included) read the cheat notes to pretend we've read them to get marks.

t. Russian straight A's student, my first real book was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at the age of 19

[Anonymous No.14083436]

>>14082574
No one seemed to raise any issues with the 'old white guys' at my uni - and there were a few Marxists (and some more moderate socialists) in there so idk. This must be a US thing. Probably helped that my classes were 98% white people.

[Anonymous No.14083460]

>>14082507
I feel like teachers assign books like Moby Dick and Don Quixote to high schoolers just to weed out the weak, they don't actually expect to promote reading. If they assigned Catcher in the Rye, Vonnegut, 1984, they'd reach more kids.

[Anonymous No.14083462]

>>14082507
This the value of the middlebrow range of literature, for all the shit authors in that range get. The Millers, Goldings, and Priestleys of this world fulfil their purpose admirably in my opinion. They were a great bridge for me to get off of reading essentially YA kid's stuff and into more adult things. Gives kids a chance to get involved but also dip their toes into critical thought. Put that next to abridged versions/extracts of national classics or whatever and I suspect that's about as good as you can do with adolescent kids who mostly just want to play videogames. Which is essentially what schools, at least in my country, do The rest just comes down to how good or bad the teacher is at making it engaging.

[Anonymous No.14083468]

>>14083460
That's all they did where I lived. That and "muh slaveryyy" books.

[Anonymous No.14083489]

>>14083436
It definitely is a US thing. I went to college in the US and had a similar experience. Also yeah having more white people at your school definitely is a bonus. I distinctly remember one day waiting outside class for the professor to show up, and some loud monkey was going on about how "des books aint even relavent to me mane! shit nigga how am I suppose to relate to niggas who been dead fo a thousand years?" This was a collage aged person who hated having to read "old" literature because apparently he couldn't relate to anyone who was born after 1990. I wanted to say to him, "Hey nigger, I know you want every protagonist of every book to be a watermelon slurping ape who wears Jordans and plays basketball so that you can 'relate' to them, but that would get kind of boring, wouldn't it?" But I said nothing because I didn't want to get shot.

[Anonymous No.14083529]

>>14083344
The interesting thing here is that Pliny, Tacitus and a few others are some of the earliest Roman sources in earlier Christianity. However, the earliest manuscripts of their writings on Christianity date to the 16th century. Some historians question whether some of their writings were embellished in the Middle Ages.

I also think Melville is poking a little fun about historiography and how we really know if something is true. Should we believe that a whale is 360 feet long because Pliny said so? Should we believe in the Gospels?

Interestingly enough, Pynchon touches on some of this too in Mason and Dixon.

[Anonymous No.14083538]

>>14083489
Figures. My country (UK) is, I'd guess, probably the worst in Europe by far for idpol stuff - maybe tied with Germany? - but there just seems to be something in the air in the US. I'm a socialist, but that stuff is cancer to anything it touches. The one, singular poo I ever saw in class leaving after a week because no one could understand her broken English made me laugh. Besides that, I saw maybe two or three black people in all my classes.

[Anonymous No.14083613]

>>14082574
>a bunch of loud undergraduates trying to burn Joseph Conrad at the stake
kek. Huffington Post authors in training.

[Anonymous No.14083640]

>>14083538
I’m in the UK as well and idpol stuff seems present, but comparatively tame. Then again, I don’t live in a big city, so it might be worse there.

The situation in America sounds like bizarro world though. I’m not even fully convinced it’s true.

[Anonymous No.14083646]

Yeah, it strikes me as kinda odd that Timmy Turner gets assigned this in like 4th Grade. It's not linguistically the hardest read, but it is dense, digressive and long - and after the 200 page mark, there's little narrative drive to pull the average reader through to the end of the book.

[Anonymous No.14083669]

>>14083299
Seems completely pointless. The beauty of Moby-Dick is in Melville's prose

[Anonymous No.14083691]

>>14083640
I mean we did postcolonial stuff and there were lecturers who knew all the gender theory crap for sure, it was there, and some people engaged with it. But I never saw any kind of angry confrontation or screeching like I hear of over there. The loudest guy I ever saw was a libertarian, and he wan't really confrontational, just commented frequently about his political beliefs. As far as I ever saw, the idpolish people, if they spoke at all to him, just said why they disagreed, and maybe after a bit of discussion the class just moved on.

[Anonymous No.14083707]

>>14083244
Yeah I agree, I think the degree to which the book is dedicated to a dry exposition of cetology is highly exaggerated. Melville tends to use certain aspects of whale-hunting and whale biology or the importance of whales in culture as a starting point for a deeper philosophical exploration usually. I suspect it's more due to the average liberal arts type reader's total revulsion to any sort of scientific text, which those chapters purport to be (I see them more as Melville playing with the novel form, much like how some chapters are written as a play). I can imagine their eyes glazing over when Melville starts talking about biology, scanning their eyes unseeingly across the surface of the pages until they get to a chapter that moves the plot along.

[Anonymous No.14083737]

>>14083640

It is bizzaro, anon. I live in the red part of a blue state, and everyone is an idiot. I'm in awe most of the time

[Anonymous No.14083752]

>>14083707
>I suspect it's more due to the average liberal arts type reader's total revulsion to any sort of scientific text, which those chapters purport to be
There's nothing scientific about those chapters, every time he describes a whale body part he uses some kind of analogy rather than talking about the animal's actual biology.

[Anonymous No.14083756]

>>14082569
this. there's a middle ground between young adult and something like moby dick. in my classes Gatsby was pretty popular for instance. I think literature just needs to be made interesting and pleasurable before anything else.

[Anonymous No.14083773]

>>14082507
Exactly what I feel. The first book I've ever read was The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, when I was 12. I've just reread it now that I'm 24 and realized a lot of nuances and ideas that flew over my head before. I'm hoping to feel the same when I rereread it 10 years from now.

[Anonymous No.14083784]

>>14083752
>which those chapters purport to be
That's my point. They're presented as ostensibly scientific descriptions from an authoritative source, which I imagine would immediately turn off some people. I think the actual content of those chapters is overshadowed by the framework to some readers, when the real goal is rarely to give an objective description of whales.

[Anonymous No.14083800]

You faggot really think children today can focus on something that doesn't blink or make noises for more than 10 seconds? Reading is like voluntarily alienating yourself from the world since it can't be done while you check your Twitter feed. What a bunch of nerds

[Anonymous No.14084112]

>>14083756
I agree. But to do that, you really have to start them younger than high school. As maligned as it is, reading shit like Harry Potter in elementary school is what sparked my love of literature. Of course, some people never move on from Harry Potter, and some just won't ever be interested in reading at all.

[Anonymous No.14084607]

>>14082507
This bad boy did me wonders in high school

[Anonymous No.14084614]

>>14084607
>pay your taxes and respect authority or you're no better than animals

profound

[Anonymous No.14084663]

>>14084614
I meant in terms of facilitating my interest/entry into more adult literature, you condescending nigger. Who said it had to be the best piece of writing ever created.

[Anonymous No.14085188]

>>14082599
Bloom was a literal prodigy though - and even he mentioned in his NYT interview on YouTube that when he fell in love with Hart Crane's poetry when younger than 10, he freely admitted there was no way he could have understood what he was reading at that age (it seems it was more akin to a sort of aesthetic intuition)
I remember him stating in a different interview that those who end up as serious readers tend to have started young, but not necessarily continuously from childhood
there was a time between the ages of 9 and 14 where solitary reading was the most important thing for me (even though most of what I read was garbage-tier children's/teen's lit, genre fiction, and almanacs), but then it stopped, only to come back in fits and starts ever since.
basically, I believe if reading ever fully possessed you as a young person - screening everything out and focusing on just the text - it opens something up in you that seems unlikely to ever close up
you don't need to have finished the Divine Comedy by high school in order to appreciate it - the opening lines even state it's a middle-aged man who's writing it - so why would you assume it would even reveal the totality of its meaning to you as a teenager before your life had even begun?

[Anonymous No.14085509]

>>14082507
I had to read a book about an old white dude who travels to brazil to have gay sex with child prostitutes in school and give a presentation about it in front of the class. Since it was diffetent times (read homophobic) I pretended to be disgusted by it but truth be told it was one of the first books I read that wasn't about swords and/or magic and I thought it was interesting. Maybe it was good for my literary interest? I also read the Iliad in my native language in a translation from the 50's written in deliberately archaic language and I almost died reading it, it was such a struggle but I don't think that scared me away from literature. I'm sceptical about hard books scaring kids away desu. Challanges can be motivatiing,

[Anonymous No.14085700]

>>14085509
>my native language
I'm curious what this is, as well as your nationality - and which book that was

[Anonymous No.14085991]

>>14085700
Swedish, Finland and I'm sorry I've been looking for it for a while now, unsuccessfully.

[Anonymous No.14086000]

>>14082663
Someone told me once that they had read Moby Dick in high school and didn't think much about it because it was 'pretty short'

[Anonymous No.14086070]

>>14082574
But he describes the opposite, loving that which was completely indifferent to them

[Anonymous No.14086101]

>>14083436
>>14082660
Seems much better for the student. The blind non-critical submission to the author only perpetuates the authoritarian structure of the institution/university.
Burgers have it right.

[Anonymous No.14086161]

>>14086101
> blind non-critical submission to the author only perpetuates the authoritarian structure of the institution/university
I don't understand. Neither of those two things really exist here as far as I can see.

[Anonymous No.14086267]

>>14085991
thanks. I was more curious what nation's library or curriculum would contain a book with that subject matter, which would be considered pretty extreme content by most countries' standards.

[Anonymous No.14086309]

>>14082507
All teenagers should be required to read Homer and literally nothing else.

[Anonymous No.14086394]

>>14086267
In Finland there is a very high degree of teacher autonomy meaning that the curriculum may in large be decided by the teacher to fit their vision (as long as it satisfies a general framework in the end). Choice of books for the students to read for example might be entirely up to the teacher and thus would vary from school to school, not to mention in the same school with different teachers teaching the same course.

[Anonymous No.14086593]

>>14086000
I did read Moby Dick in high school. But I found out years latter that it was a translated, abridged version.
Actually, I stole it from my school's library.

[Anonymous No.14086624]

>>14086394
How do you bros perform so well internationally compared to other school systems?
>inb4 low racial admixture

[Anonymous No.14086693]

>>14083784
>when the real goal is rarely to give an objective description of whales.
Exactly. He even writes that "in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish". It is "scientific" in that it's categorizing whales based on some framework, but ultimately, in my opinion, it's about establishing the idea that whales are a kind of fish, rather than distinct from a fish. Going through all the whales in a tedious and "scientific" way after calling "upon holy Jonah to back me" is just establishing the position that "whales are fish". I imagine this seems tedious to us, but in Melville's time it could have been actually a major point since we're talking about Biblical interpretation in a sense. I'm not sure though. I'm also two beers deep. lol

[Anonymous No.14086713]

>>14082663
>War and Peace
Speak for yourself, I was assigned Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, The Man Without Qualities, Being and Time, and Finnegans Wake in middle school/high school

[Anonymous No.14087527]

>>14083462
Think I finally understand how most read and get into serious higher literature, that middlebrow does serve a function. I could never understand it, since my experience went from nearly zero lit to proper serious lit.

[Anonymous No.14088098]

>>14082540
i think there is no simple way of "fixing the curriculum" that will make kids more interested in humanities
the number one way of making kids appreciate literature and history is by being a good teacher that shows them what is fascinating about it

on your question of what books to read id simply say pick "easier" books that are fun to read like Lord pf the Flies or something
Making high schoolers read Moby dick really isnt a good idea
I loved moby dick ever sinc ei first read it at around 16yo and i reread it almost evry year but it isnt for everyone

[Anonymous No.14088223]

>>14087527
Yeah I think this fits quite well. Although I'd began reading very slightly more grown up fiction myself before high school (I remember stealing Northern Lights from my school library lmao), it was definitely around then that I started branching out on my own initiative into more adult stuff, like Orwell and Huxley and such. But having an English class where we also read the middlebrow type national curriculum stuff stuff helped spur my interest.