I'm not that familiar with the books. Is the actual "readability" level at 5th or 6th grade? Yaknow, syllables and sentences per 100 words? Or, is that an aesthetic valuation?
99% of modernist literature is essentially only good as toilet paper. In future generations they will look back on this period as a time of ignorance.
I disagree with you almost all of the time, but on this you are spot on. Damien Hirst and all the other Turner Prize parasites are a disgrace. "Toilart", these barbarians truely despise high culture.
What makes you think that high school students should be learning literary theory instead of literature itself? Why focus on the tools, instead of the texts? I knew a pretty cool professor at UNL who refused to teach "Intro to [fill-in-the-blank]" classes on ANY subject. When he occassionally got stuck with one, he simply ignored the premise and had the students focus on one particular writer or even a particular work. He said "Intro" classes were based on the premise that before building a house, a carpenter should spend a semester studying the hammer.
The Modernist period ended by the 1950s. "This time" doesn't equal modernist. And if you think that the real modernists produced toilet paper, then you don't know what you're talking about.
Yes!!! KILL T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein!! Wait. What do you mean they both died over 40 years ago??
So, wait . . . you're serious? You'd do away with Faulkner, Joyce, Stevens, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Frost, and Auden? You'd do away with Frank Lloyd Wright and Stravinsky and Woolf? I didn't think that "Soviet" thing was literal.
I realize you asked this about 3 months ago, but better late than never. Yes, I was referring to the "readability" level of the Harry Potter books. They're considered to be at about a 5th grade reading level.
my high school has a mix of both contemporary and classic literature Freshman: -Great Expectations -Romeo and Juliet -The Chosen by Chaim Potok (contemporary) Sophomore -Things Fall Apart (contemporary, written by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe) -Antigone -Macbeth -Odyssey -Slaughterhouse-Five (contemporary) Junior(that we read so far and those that I know we will, all American literature): -many contemporary comedy/satirical short stories such as "Just One More Time", "The Report on the Barnhouse Effect"(Vonnegut) -trancendentalism unit: many essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (Walden), poems by Walt Whitman -short stories such as "Bartleby the Scrivener"(Herman Melville), and "The Birthmark"(Hawthorne), "The Fall of the House of Usher"(Edgar Allan Poe) -The Scarlet Letter -Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -The Great Gatsby -etc.
Those are fine choices, really. I think more what we're getting at is the fact that a lot of English classes are putting in works of questionable literary merit - and Vonnegut and Achebe are largely above question in that regard - in order to try and either give the kids something that they can apply to their lives or to provide a more 'world' perspective, and how more often that not it just results in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Trying to de-DWMify your curriculum is fine to a point, but passing up something genuinely important in favor of assigning Amy Tan because she is neither dead nor white nor male is not. (Side note: I just picked Amy Tan as an example because she's a favorite punching bag of mine. One of the most played out conventions in modern American writing is the Asian-American with an identity crisis.)
Wankler, you're supposed to be a "Catholic" do the liberal left within the Church now believe that suciders/self-murderers get a free ticket to heaven? Foster Wallace is either in hell, if he was an atheist like most of these scum, or in purgatory until he is cleansed of the sin of suicide and sickness of postmodernism. Which is the greater sin? I'm not sure. I have no doubt that most modernists are in hell, or going there.
I am the man who brought the Crusade to bookclub. Regardless, I think it would be very rewarding for TwentySix to be pinned down and demodernised. Force something decent down him, have him read Aristotle's Metaphysics.
As somebody who dabbles in gender and is leaning towards specializing in constructs of masculinity, I have to say that the "identity crisis" in the Asian-American male provides a powerful case study in analyzing the contours of American masculinity. By definition, he is not the Alpha male, the standard-bearer for masculinity, which ends up encouraging an overcompensating "performance" of hyper-masculinity in order to "prove" his masculinity in a society that rejects that notion outright. And then the flip side... the queer side... is fertile ground for study. And don't get me started on the commodification/sexualization of Asian women. Anywho... If I were a high school English teacher in an area w/ a decent amount of Asian students, I would bring in basic concepts of Orientalism and gender theory (in bite sized pieces, of course) in order to enrich texts. I'd also bring in non-literary texts as well in order to set up the themes discussed. (And yes... I'm fully aware that there's not enough time to do all this, but hey... if on BS we can talk about what the USMNT would be like if we had Ibisevic, Rossi, and Subotic on the team, then what the heck.)
Go ahead, but you know I'm an Asia scholar. It's pretty easy to show that whitey's just working with what he's given - I can dig up Ming dynasty poetry about foot-bound women that would make modern foot fetishists blush. To expand, most of the fetishization or commodification was already in place by the time the first Westerners came to Asia in the 1500's. We aren't responsible for the geisha or the kisaeng, we didn't invent foot-binding, and we didn't mandate that a woman must be obedient to her father in youth, her husband in marriage, and her son in old age. We also didn't fetishize pre-pubescent girls as they did in the Heavenly Kingdom of the Taiping. Yeah, white men commodify Asian women, but Asian men were doing it long before we were - we're just working with what they gave us. Western perceptions of Asian women are one of the few cases in which Orientalism fails.
I have devoted a lot of thought to the subject, as you can tell. Unfortunately, it's largely because I get accused of the phenomenon that you're mentioning due to my dating pattern - the vast majority of the girls I've dated have been Asian, and I haven't slept with a white woman in four years.
Which is, ironically, why almost every single Asian female friend I have would rather not date Asian men.
I don't think there are any. I was the mod when it was first started, and when I stepped down, they just left it open. Incidentally, I've been fighting the good fight on this "no DWM, especially Shakespeare" nonsense. I wrote a Shakespearean Speeches unit for the 10th grade that won a curriculum award last spring, and it's now being taught in three other schools (since it requires no books and it self-contained, the low-budget schools loved it). Also, I built a performance-based Shakespeare unit for 12th grade (the class is split into six groups, with each group working with a different play). The toughest part was getting the books to run it. I asked the county for $$. They said no, so I raised the money myself. I got the books last week and started the unit a few days ago. Shakespeare is staying in this county if I have to dig him up and move him here myself.