<p>Anna Karenina is such a great book. Right up there with anything by Austen, imho, and maybe better.</p>
<p>Part of my thinking about literary topics is based on the difference in experiences that students have now vs. my generation’s experiences. I don’t want to downplay the anxiety that my age cohort experienced with the Cuban missile crisis (while realizing that it happened before a number of the parents here were even born). I also don’t want to downplay the tragic impact of the war in Vietnam on the young adulthood of my age cohort. And certainly there was much to criticize about the 1950’s and 1960’s, in terms of inequality among different demographic groups, and the level of prejudice.</p>
<p>And yet . . . </p>
<p>I think that events in the US have made it impossible for today’s students to be complacent, and they have made it unnecessary to “shock” anyone into awareness. A heavy emphasis on grim literature that might have been defensible when it was presented to a sheltered, complacent student audience. That seems much less the case now. I think that quite a few students probably need some cheering up as much as anything.</p>
<p>I agree with QM. DD, now in college, had real difficulty with the distressing literature in MS and HS, from the Holocaust immersion in 8th grade through Invisible Man and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in 12th. It seemed like the most upbeat thing she read was King Lear!</p>
<p>DD is bright and sensitive. To this day she’s never seen the Lion King movie, because she found it intolerably scary as a pre-schooler. Doubtless some toughening exposure to sad and scary parts of life, via literature, wasn’t all bad for her. But for a sensitive, imaginative kid like her, there really did seem to be an overload of dark stuff in the English literature curriculum. She was reduced to tears by Night and other Holocaust content in 8th grade. Her teacher was an award winning Holocaust educator and apparently on a mission to get the grim reality across to complacent, insensitive modern youth. Unfortunately, DD didn’t need any prodding to imagine the horrors, and she found this curriculum well nigh intolerable. I wish educators bent on shaking up the thick-skinned and complacent would spare a thought for their students at the other end of the spectrum.</p>
<p>Hi all. It’s clear that I think in very different terms than most of you.</p>
<p>I find the distinctions posters are making between grim and just tragic very arbitrary and very much in the eyes of the beholder.</p>
<p>For example, Little Women was mentioned, but for me Beth will always be the main character. I read the scene in which she died (In the Valley of the Shadow) at least 25 times when I was 8. D has said, “But you are Jo, ,Mom.” But not to myself. I was raised in an abusive home, and I actually found comfort in crying for Beth. So I read a different novel than some of you do.</p>
<p>Anna Karenina was touted by a poster, but it’s sadness does me in, not that it shouldn’t be read. I am just pointing out how highly personal this is.</p>
<p>Since humans must grapple with death, our deepest thoughts will always have dark shadings. The proper subject of the novel is the life of the individual within society, and I actually think the tragic perspective is easier for young people to grasp than the comic.</p>
<p>i don’t think that they need “cheering up” so much as they need to not be lied to (nor have their curriculum dumbed/watered-down). they need to be taught the truth in a fearless way, while still being given tools to solve the problems we face with creativity and collaboration (which loops back to finalchild’s thread). they don’t need to be fed doom-and-gloom, but they also don’t need mindless, baseless, disconnected jingoism (and i think that this has always been true, regardless of generation).</p>
<p>the whole hierarchical, linear path isn’t conducive to creativity, flexibility and the ability to think independently.</p>
<p>and you’re right–complacency is no longer an option.</p>
<p>Truly great comic novels, like Vanity Fair for example, are cynical and world weary and more foreign to youth than tragic stories.</p>
<p>I see many reasons for you g people to read great literature. The first is civic, to learn empathy. A great novel, story, poem or play will give a window into a life very different from our own.</p>
<p>The second reason is to teach us to master difficult feelings and situations. Recent studies have shown that the brain stores experiences we have lived and those we have merely read about in the identical way. I have been a comfort to those around me on many occasions because of experiences gleamed from books and have faced the world with more fortitude.</p>
<p>Oh, I agree Mythmom. Anna Karenina did me in. Just differently than Notes, by Dostoevsky. Maybe just more “human”? I loved Little Women, growing up, and Anne of Green Gables. I see them as junior high books. I traded them with my youngest for the Twilights. She could read the Twighlights if she read those. A Wrinkle in Time. </p>
<p>In High School, there were books they read over the summer which I traded them for Great America and other treats. It was a good trade off for both of us. Great America was more fun than I would have expected. ;)</p>
<p>I gave them a lot of biographies of women they could admire. I liked going to see the plays, experimental and otherwise, with them. Took them to see Proof in the first month. What a great play! </p>
<p>There’s a lot of really great stuff out there, I think, which gets missed. But I suppose that is the nature of the business.</p>
<p>ETA: Don Quixote is hysterical, as well as deconstructive well before meta fiction, and I can’t imagine a group of high school boys who would not love it.</p>
<p>The third reason to read great literature is the one dearest to my heart: it teaches us our language just as the daily reading of The King Jamws Bible once did. (I am an atheist.)</p>
<p>Crystal glassware rings in a way that a 50 cent glass tumbler does not. </p>
<p>Just as the periodic table and a binomial equation have intrinsic beauty, so does beautiful language. Great literature teaches us to hear those ringing tones in words and then to struggle to reproduce those sounds with our own words.</p>
<p>I don’t always agree with “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but when it comes to writing, I do. The truest writing is the most beautiful.</p>
<p>And I have devoted my life to sharing that beauty with young people and struggle to rescue straggling bits of beauty in my own writing.</p>
<p>Sure, teachers can celebrate joy, but I guarantee that it is more incomprehensible to young people than sadness. Twelfth Night is more complex than Romeo and Juliet.</p>
<p>To my ear, neither Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Steinbeck or The Color Purple are in the ranks of our greatest literature. And kids might stumble on them themselves. We can do more in class.</p>
<p>I remember Lird of the Flies because it taught me the word nacreous. I loved Heart of Darkness because “the horror, the horror” gave me shivers, even if I just now know what it truly means.</p>
<p>And so on.</p>
<p>The Great Gatsby may not be the best book for high schoolers, but the subject of materialism sure is. And the last paragraph contains some of the most breathtaking writing in the English language.</p>
<p>Just yesterday I taught a class of ordinary college freshman to adore Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV. At first they could not make heads nor tails of it, nor could they conceive of a man, a minister, asking God to batter and tape (ravish) him. I mentioned that Donne was using powerful, paradoxical imagery as a rapper would. I rapped the poem and then read it again in Donne’s diction, and my class asked to read, and then analyzed, two more Donne poems.</p>
<p>And that’s what teaching literature is about for me.</p>
<p>Daisy Miller, anything by Henry James, though Henry James, like youth, is wasted on the very young.</p>
<p>Thanks, weatherga–I share your viewpoint.</p>
<p>You raise interesting points, mythmom, and I am glad that you have arrived on this thread. As the parent of an extremely empathetic child, I observed that QMP was pretty much “done in” by a lot of the compulsory literature. </p>
<p>From QMP’s commentary, I also found that the students who started out fairly armor-plated tended to remain that way, and in fact just to make jokes about the situations faced by the characters who were being crushed in the novels. A really good teacher could prevent this, and I think that students also eventually outgrow it, so mythmom may not have observed this in her classes.</p>
<p>Grappling with mortality is very, very hard, to be sure–but I am not sure that “Life is horrible, and lots of people walk over innocent children with jackboots” is a good message to help people deal with mortality. I do not mean to caricature mythmom’s view in these terms–rather, it’s the approach that I have seen (in part) in the local school.</p>
<p>QMP read Tennyson’s Ulysses out loud to me in the car on the way to school once, to discuss a segment of it. (It came from Latin class, not from English class.) I responded by bursting into tears. But I don’t find it grim.</p>
<p>Maybe I am not drawing the distinction between grim and tragic well. However, in my opinion, there is a suggestion in King Lear that even though events may go tragically wrong, and some people may act wickedly, there is still a moral order in the universe. The literature I consider “grim” tends to deny the existence of any valid moral order. Of course, many people think there is none.</p>
<p>As a further disclaimer, I might be misclassifying or misreading some of the works.</p>
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<p>Stories in the Bible can be pretty grim as well.</p>
<p>Thank you mythmom. I agree with both sets of comments.</p>
<p>The books that stayed with me were the ones that opened my eyes to a different perspective, whether cultural, political, historical or personal and these tended to be the books whose prose was beautiful and whose themes grappled with the misery and unfairness of the world. The reading I did and continue to do has helped me to gain empathy and to expand my (very) limited horizons. I believe that it has been the same for my children. Maybe we were all angsty teens who responded to the curriculum of misery and death…and worse yet, sought it out beyond the required readings. </p>
<p>Like you, I wept for Beth. And yet I was inspired by her goodness and the overwhelmingly loving and positive ways of this family. There were always layers of grim and hopeful.</p>
<p>When my children were young, an older and wiser friend always gave them edifying books. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but now does. I think it is possible for a book to be sad yet edifying. I don’t see anything edifying at all about Lord of the Flies and not much about Gatsby. One thing discussed a lot at my house is whether a canon should exist. It seems to me if a canon has any relevance, any longer, it should be for middle school/high school age students. If we think western literature, great books, still have merit - let’s have the kids read them then. Something like the St. John’s curriculum. Maybe if we all watch the same tv, we don’t need a literary canon. We have enough common experience to communicate without it. Not usually too edifying, though.</p>
<p>mythmom, in terms of great literature, I agree about Harry Potter. </p>
<p>I know that Steinbeck is not at all fashionable at present. I read The Grapes of Wrath in tenth grade, and it spoke to me then. It is conceivable that I would find it unreadable now. But if anyone can offer comments on East of Eden vs. The Grapes of Wrath, I would be very interested in that.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I would not claim that The Color Purple is Shakespearean. On the other hand, I think it is actually a good choice for some current suburban students (at least for the girls). For one thing, for a student who has been reared on the literature of “misery and death,” the earliest part of the book seems like just more misery, and it might be dropped by a sensitive student, if it were not assigned.</p>
<p>Finally, with regard to The Lord of the Rings–I think it has sections of true literary merit. I mentioned the Creation Story in the Silmarillion. The language in it seems beautiful to me. It reminds me a great deal of the chorus of the angels in Faust, but I actually find Tolkien’s version more poetic, even though I am a great fan of Goethe.</p>
<p>The “Canon” question was really in vogue and still being argued vehemently when I was doing my graduate work in Literature. It’s an interesting question.</p>
<p>I mean, who chooses the cannon? And why?</p>
<p>It turns out to be very political and divisive for some reason.</p>
<p>With regard to calimami’s post #25, I think it is really important to help the next generation develop the courage to face the problems that we have, using creativity and collaboration (to paraphrase that post). For me, the question is: What kind of childhood experience base, including literary experience, will promote this? </p>
<p>I think that the answer might be different for different types of young people. For some, the repeated drumbeat of “the world is awful” in the required literature is more likely to engender hopelessness than a commitment to right the wrongs and establish justice. But for others, it might inspire fearlessness.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to reduce literature to a tool for civic development by these comments–I recognize the important of literary artistry in itself.</p>
<p>I would never classify John Donne as grim. We read a little of Donne in high school–QMP read none in or for class.</p>
<p>There is actually a bit of beauty in The Lord of the Flies, in Simon’s harmony with nature on the island. For the first-time reader, this tends to be obscured by the horror of the plot.</p>
<p>Interesting comment, poetgrl #36. I avoided commenting about Huck Finn earlier on, because I know that it is controversial. How can one teach American literature without it? Yet how can one teach it? It requires a whole lot of side commentary as to time and place, and even that might not be enough to avoid hurting some students.</p>