Classics, yay or nay?

shakeysix said:

Except for "To the Lighthouse" --had to draw the line there. I liked most of them and several were life changers.

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And that's an example of each to their own. To the Lighthouse was a set text in my first term of my University English degree. When I read it several people had done so already and I heard back about how boring it was, so I picked it up with some trepidation...and within about twenty or thirty pages couldn't put the book down. Maybe it's a case of reading it at the right time for me. Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre and later Villette) made a big impression on me too. Maybe I should reread them sometime, as it's about thirty years later. The only other Woolf I've read was Mrs Dalloway, which I read when the film The Hours came out.

On the other hand I have always preferred the Brontës to Jane Austen (though should perhaps give her another try) and there are other classic authors I never got on with.

shakeysix said:

I have read a lot of classics in my time. Some were required, some I discovered on my own. Some I found interesting, some were boring, some were vexing--frustratingly wordy but fascinating at the same time. I read most because they were required for classes that cost a lot of money. Except for "To the Lighthouse" --had to draw the line there. I liked most of them and several were life changers.

As an English teacher I would like to make a point that is often missed when people discuss classic literature. The point of teaching classics is not the students liking or disliking the work itself. The point is teaching a student to analyze and express his opinions of the work in clear, correct, mature and well considered language, drawing on past worldviews and the works of previous reviewers.

You can't just say "This is stupid!" and still pass the essay question. Not because you are supposed to like the work or else, but because you must defend your likes and dislikes in lucid, conventional language. For example I can't just write that I don't give a rat's ass about ten years of peeling wallpaper and refuse to waste my time reading about a family wealthy enough to own a summer home in the Hebrides while my own father has worked like a burro all of his life and barely owns a two bedroom house. . I cannot reveal the sad fact that I detest Mr. and Mrs Ramsey and their 8 whiny offspring who have enough time and money to sit on their hands and sulk while I have to scrape dishes in the school cafeteria just to scrape up next semester's tuition.

Instead I must say something like : while loss-the theme of the novel-- is universal and the pain of losing love cuts across all social classes, reading about a family of Wodehousian featherheads and their almost comical angst about a freaking trip to a freaking useless lighthouse really brings out the Marxist in this little worker bee... oh, damn. There I go again.

But you get the point.

--s6

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Don't get me wrong, I get what you are saying. I'm with you. I'm a yay for the most part on classics. But I think they could throw a little variety in the required reading department. Just because I know many, many people who gave up on reading once they got out of school. Why? Because they absolutely hated what they had to read in school. There are tons of 14,15, 16 year old kids that view reading The Iliad or The Scarlet Letter the same way they view going to the dentist. And it turns them off of reading, sometimes for good. Not saying throw the classics out, just update. Give them something they can understand. Many kids just don't get the writing in some of the classics.

Lillith1991 said:

Knowledge is power and it seems strange to me that people wouldn't want that power.

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That is money right there. I view classics like I view modern books, some I love and some I hate. Just gotta find what you like. I do think, especially for a writer, you should read some classic stuff just for the sake of what you said, knowledge. For instance, I would tell anybody that is having trouble writing first person or wants to try it, read some of Huck Finn. That is a blueprint on how to write first person. Little things like that. Knowledge is power.

Diversity for the sake of diversity. Yeah, that's a terrible, stultifying thing. What can be more horrible that reading something written by or about people from different cultures, genders and backgrounds from most of the writers whose work young adults are exposed to in school?

Obviously, there's no purpose to this except for meaningless, political posturing and bean counting, because being educated has nothing to do with being able to understand and appreciate the experiences of people who are different from oneself.

Sorry, I know this comes off as cranky. But this attitude always hits a nerve with me, precisely because I grew up in a time when the prevailing opinion was that no one who wasn't a white, European or American male did anything or wrote anything of historical significance until very, very recently. It taught me that people like me are less interesting and important, which is an attitude I've been working hard to purge from myself all my life. I'd have been thrilled if we had to read some of Austin's twaddle back in my school days, but of course that would have meant knocking some white dude off the reading list, or possibly doing one fewer Shakespeare play that year (I love the Bard, but how many of his plays must one read each year in school before one makes up their mind about his importance)?

And I didn't learn that Alexandre Dumas was of mixed race (African and European) until well into my adult life. Why in the hell didn't they teach us this in school? And why were the only books that dealt with Chinese culture at all written by a white missionary and not someone from China, or at least of Chinese heritage?

Once! said:

The classics are simply the best selling books of previous generations. They aren't necessarily better or worse than current best sellers - they are just, well, old.

That means that we need to make some adjustments when we read them. Some of the issues they deal with will be different (although some will stay the same). The language may be unfamiliar to us. The stylistic conventions may seem alien.

If we can make those adjustments, then there is a lot to be gained from reading the classics. All of them tell a story about how we got to here, whether that is our development as a society or the way that language changes over time. Some of them are rollicking good stories. Some of them are very well written. They were best sellers for a reason.

Not all classics are the same. There is a tendency to lump anything more than say 50 years old into a category called classics and then to argue that you either must read it "because it's a classic" or "I know I'm gonna hate it, because it's a classic".

Do you have to read the classics? Heck no. It helps, but it's not mandatory.

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They're also often the bestselling books of this generation, and typically outsell our current top writers. They simply don't qualify to go on the bestseller lists. They are not just old, nor do most of them need any adjustment to read.

It sound sliek most have never tried reading many classics. No one says you have to read them all, but a great many of them read the same as books written today. Many others are simply wonderful storytelling, and ALL have something to say that a writer can't learn anywhere else. You can only learn about people of a generation by reading the writers of that generation. If you don't read them, you simply have no clue.

Do you have to read the classics to be a successful writer? Not necessarily, but you darned sure have to read a lot of them to be a good writer. And if you don't at least read the classics in your own genre, you'll spend all your time reinventing the wheel.

Not that it matters. People do what they want, and can always find an excuse for doing it. But a writer who doesn't read a lot of classics is making it infinitely tougher on himself, and is most certainly woefully ignorant of not only past generations, but of today's, as well.

Classics to me means boring books forced upon me by people who think their taste and opinions and world view are superior to mine. I read any post by such people and check out after the first few sentences. And so I leave this thread, and will not look back.

Laer Carroll said:

Classics to me means boring books forced upon me by people who think their taste and opinions and world view are superior to mine ...

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I find those who flee discussions to escape having a position "forced upon" them usually lack a defensible position of their own.

And I see little value in joining a community that didn't include others with taste, opinions and world views superior to mine own. Nor would I suggest they keep their superiority to themselves. Otherwise, what is there for me to gain? Nothing but a lot of glad handing and rump swabbing — no gain at all, methinks.

Laer Carroll said:

Classics to me means boring books forced upon me by people who think their taste and opinions and world view are superior to mine. I read any post by such people and check out after the first few sentences. And so I leave this thread, and will not look back.

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So who is feeling superior to whom?

I read a lot of pre-modern literature when I was younger. These days I'm just reading straight genre. May when I quench this thirst I'll go back & read some more old stuff. (Wish I enjoyed reading Shakespeare enough to sit down & read it...)

I like what James said - that reading the literature of a period gives you an irreplaceable insight into the way people of that time thought about the world.

I've read hundreds of classics from Beowulf onwards.

Some I loved, some I didn't enjoy, nine times out of ten I would have to try not to wet myself laughing in literature classes. I apply the same criteria to all books - great character, interesting or easy to read and stellar plot. Classics taught me how actually a plot like "Little Women" or "What Katy Did" where not much happens can still be gripping. Characters are important.

I love Shakespeare. My favourite exchange in Henry IV where Prince Hal and Falstaff are trading insults. You bulls pizzle, you bed presser. Fabulous source of some really creative insults.

I'm not a Jane Austen fan but I think Mr and Mrs Bennett are two of the best characters ever written.

I read more obscure ones as well.

The first grown up book I ever read was Jane Eyre - I was about eight and sobbed my way through it. Also because of the red room scene I've never sent my children to their rooms and I've always wanted to go to Madeira.

Yes I do think reading widely from a lot of eras makes me a better writer.

Usher said:

Yes I do think reading widely from a lot of eras makes me a better writer.

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Yes I do think reading widely from a lot of eras makes me a better person.

Nymtoc said:

Yes I do think reading widely from a lot of eras makes me a better person.

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Better person - no. It does influence my writing though.

One year I was teaching Brit Lit to a class of girls. We had covered the Black Death, Macbeth, the Great Plague, workhouses, wicked orphanage keepers and Jonathon Swift. I was trying to get the girls into some cheery Hardy. One of the girls moaned "Another life is shit and then you die book? I can't take it!" The other four said the same. Since I knew that poor Tess was a gone goose, we read some Wodehouse short stories and the Canterville Ghost instead. That was long time ago and the testing was different.

It made me laugh when she said it and then I remembered taking Spanish Lit on top of American and Brit Lit--one dreary tear jerker after another. This year our kids have been through some pretty depressing stuff in English classes. The English teachers say that the curriculum has changed and there isn't time to teach lighter works. No one reads Thurber or The Death of Red Peril, they read Night, The Giver, Of Mice and Men, the Old Man and the Sea, To Kill A Mockingbird. there are new books but a lot of the newer books deal with rape, divorce, drugs and of course gangs. There is a purpose to reading these works--we don't want another Holocaust. We want kids to learn to speak up when they see wrong accepted as everyday business. Kids should learn about serious things and about how to face a life crisis with grace and valor but they should also laugh a little with their teachers. Red Peril, Why I live at the PO, The Night the Ghost Got In and My Oedipus Complex are worth reading and the kids won't find them on their own. --s6

shakeysix said:

It made me laugh when she said it and then I remembered taking Spanish Lit on top of American and Brit Lit--one dreary tear jerker after another.

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I remember (after reading "The Red Pony" in an eighth grade English class) asking my mom why there aren't any "great classic" stories with kids and animals where the animal doesn't die horribly. I think her answer was that the loss of a pet is often a child's first experience with death. Maybe so, but grandparents have to be running a close second, and I don't remember there being nearly as much grandmother and grandfather carnage in the books they made us read in school.

Though dead siblings are certainly up there in older literature. Even Little Women, a generally upbeat book (and therefore not included in any of my English classes), had that. And it was nearly always the one who was oh-so-good-and-sweet who bit it.

I must be weird. (No comments, please. ) When I was a kid, and still today, reading works from the past was/is like traveling to another land, another world, where I can see and hear things I don't see and hear in my regular life. It stimulates me and broadens me and makes me feel like I'm living in another era--temporarily. I do come back to my senses after I put the book down.

Recently, I reread Gulliver's Travels. I hadn't read it since childhood. Like many people, I tended to think of it as a children's book, centering on Lemuel's adventures in Lilliput. But I knew it was supposed to contain deeper themes, so I downloaded it onto my tablet and started reading. What a blast! It contains some of the most mordant social and political satire ever written, and it is funny as hell. Swift was a genius.

But oh, it dates from 1726, so it must be one of those boring classics. Right?

Pick it up again, if you have time, and see for yourself.

Not everyone is going to like everything whether it's a classic or not. First adult book I ever read, at 13 or 14, was Thomas Hardy is the Mayor of Casterbridge. I loved it and then read Jude the Obscure which I liked even more. I then tried to read Return of the Native and it bored me stiff.

But I would never suggest to someone that age that they should start reading Hardy – I simply picked up a book by accident happened to like it.

As an interesting sidenote, I belong to a novelist group of fairly well-known published authors who write fantasy and science-fiction. One of the things I have noticed is that almost without exception, everyone in the group is incredibly well read, from classics to modern literature, in every genre from action adventure to sci-fi to deep literary. And although they may differ on their liking some individual books, they all seem to have an abiding love for literature, including the great works throughout history.

Does this mean if you don't read or don't like the classics you can't be a writer? Well no, I would seriously doubt that. But it's an interesting data point that all of these extremely talented writers are also avid readers – and that most definitely includes the classics.

"Moby Dick" is a landmark work but boy is it a dull, dry book. Ugh. Ditto for "Red Badge Of Couragew". You don't have to read the classics to be good writer, you just have to read.

Axl Prose said:

But I think they could throw a little variety in the required reading department. Just because I know many, many people who gave up on reading once they got out of school. Why? Because they absolutely hated what they had to read in school. There are tons of 14,15, 16 year old kids that view reading The Iliad or The Scarlet Letter the same way they view going to the dentist. And it turns them off of reading, sometimes for good. Not saying throw the classics out, just update. Give them something they can understand. Many kids just don't get the writing in some of the classics.

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+1 on this.

Maybe if I'd had teachers who injected life and enthusiasm into things it would've been different, but for the most part it was just thick archaic prose we were supposed to find Great and Moving and Profound because Someone On High told us they were Great and Moving and Profound... though so long as we passed the test, that was good enough, then we could forget about it and move on to something else. Nowadays, when it seems no teacher can possibly have time to do anything but "teach to the test" and with classes larger than ever, I imagine it's even worse. And if a student's only exposure to reading is school, where it's a chore and where reading anything published within the past 50 years is viewed as a waste of time... well, just when are they supposed to develop an actual interest in reading once the test-taking years are behind them? When will they ever discover the author or genre that speaks to them, personally, and not to Someone On High who dictates what is Good and what is Bad literature? (I was lucky to come from a reading family, though it's only recently - thanks largely to freebie e-book downloads - that I'm slowly approaching classics again. Even after all these years, my Pavlovian response to the word "classic" is a full-body cringe...)

The Noble Bard never gets old. He was a student of human interaction, and his works are never irrelevant.

I wonder how standardized testing has changed the way teachers teach the classics.

I honestly don't have any problem with the way my English teachers taught the stuff. We read it, discussed it, and wrote papers analyzing it (tests were pretty much gone from English after the first year of high school--grades were based almost entirely on papers and class participation). The teacher were actually quite enthusiastic and clearly loved these books, and they did teach me to appreciate and see things in these works I wouldn't have otherwise.

My only beef is that I wish we'd had more stuff by women. When I asked one teacher why we didn't, he said there just weren't many women writing great and influential stuff in the olden days, because they weren't allowed to, and when they did, it didn't speak to the overarching human condition, but more specifically to female concerns like motherhood or finding a husband (he didn't explain why specifically female concerns weren't just as much a facet of the overarching human condition as specifically male ones, like fatherhood or war).

But anyway, the only standardized test I had to take was the AP exam, and it was entirely essay based. We had to read poems or short stories or essays and analyze them, and at the end was the infamous "free essay," where we were given a fairly open-ended question (the one on my particular exam was about the use and relevance of violence in great literature and how it differs from portrayals of violence in more popular media) and had to answer it, citing examples from our own reading.

The whole thing was hours long, as I recall. I got a 5 and was very pleased with myself. But the AP test didn't ask questions about specific works of literature. They merely asked us to cite examples from classic literature we'd read, so this left teachers a lot of latitude in the construction of reading lists for their own classes.

There were, of course, the SAT (required for admission to most colleges and universities back then), which was multiple choice and quizzed us on basic reading comprehension, grammar and vocabulary. There definitely weren't any questions about the classics on that, though.

Maybe the modern standardized "no child left behind" tests in the US are different. And do those UK tests have more specific questions about specific books? This would indeed be tough, as it would give a teacher no flexibility at all. It seems that one would be more likely to get less than enthusiastic teaching then, because if a teacher can't stand (say) Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury personally, but they "have" to cover it, because it will be on the standardized test, then they can't sub another equally illustrious and important author they feel more qualified to teach.

Once! said:

The classics are simply the best selling books of previous generations. They aren't necessarily better or worse than current best sellers - they are just, well, old.

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That's actually not the case. Moby Dick didn't sell well during Melville's lifetime; it was pretty much trashed by the reviewers, and it wasn't until thirty or so years later that it was re-discovered. Austen's works sold well enough in her lifetime, but they were not at all in the class of best selling novels like, for instance, those by Sir Walter Scott.

What most people call classics in terms of novels are the novels that have become the canon, that is the works that are customarily taught by academics in colleges and written about in terms of scholarly criticism as a standard body of texts that are largely agreed upon. Many of them had little attention paid to them when they were published.

They aren't necessarily better than non-canon works, but they are works that have endured and that function well as objects of academic study.

It depends on what sort of a writer you want to be. If you want to be a "literary" writer then classics are nearly indispensable, imo. If you want to write "genre" fiction by contrast classics aren't all that necessary or at least less so by contrast. Also, writing is an individual thing. If you find that something helps your writing then you do it. If you don't then you don't. If you feel reading classics is a waste of time then don't read them. But do at least give them a chance first. Same with all sorts of fiction when it comes to reading.

There is an essay called "The Art of Eating Spaghetti" by Russell Baker. It is an excerpt of a bigger book called "Growing Up". In "Spaghetti" he tells about an essay assignment in high school for an English teacher who must be the one English teacher that every aspiring English teacher swears he/she will never become.

Baker says of this teacher, poor prim Mr. Fleagle, that he lacked the gift of infecting others with his passion. Conveying that personal passion for a piece, to my mind, is the key to teaching the classics. Teaching grammar, Spanish verb conjugations, even Spanish geography and Mexican history is much easier than trying to teach a novel or poem that I absolutely love to a room full of kids who just cannot see its value. When all else fails I want to holler "Don't you SEE?" like Mr. Fleagle. Of course hollering is NOT the way to teach anyone anything, not then, not now, not ever.

Sometimes the kids will bring in something they want me to enjoy--usually songs or cartoons or silly youtube stuff. I try to be receptive but I just don't see what they see. Sometimes though, they can make me see what they love about the thing. Sometimes an old moldy poet like Garcia Lorca will catch their interest and then, when it clicks, when the passion for the piece becomes infectious, well that is what teaching literature is all about. Literature is bottled experience waiting, sometimes for centuries, to be shared --different times, different world views, different social positions. It brings us together as a species. It creates a common bond. --s6

Lillith1991 said:

Are you saying then that someone writing Lit SF should read classics of there genre and others, but someone writing a time travel story or modern adventure story doesn't need to read Time Machine or Castaway?

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I ran into something like this the other day (maybe it was here somewhere on AW, or maybe it was on another writing board) where someone had an idea for a story that was a bit like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he'd never even heard of the story. It really surprised me, because even though I'll admit I didn't read it as a kid, I could basically paraphrase the story, because there have been so many movies, not to mention TV episodes of shows based on it, and even a Bugs Bunny cartoon based on the tale.

And of course, just because a trope has been done a lot before, doesn't mean one shouldn't write a story that incorporates it, but at least a nodding familiarity with similar stories that are out there is a good idea, so you can make sure there's something about your version that's fresh and special.

I don't think anyone can have read (or even tried to read) every classic work of literature ever written, but it's definitely good to be familiar enough with them to know when you're borrowing from one of them in some way.