How to study literature without a university?

[DWill]

Maybe we should have a corner for former teachers. My own experience as an English teacher is slight, three years in grades 6-10 and a couple of years in college freshman English. I can't say the students drove me out, as there are other aspects about classroom teaching that are challenging and require a pretty stout ego, which I don't have. I found the attitudes of administration and parents exasperating, too. I trained for teaching in an era in which it was believed that teacher and students would pursue literature and writing organically. The bible of this approach was called Teaching the Universe of Discourse, by James Moffet. He made the English classroom sound great--no drills on vocabulary, grammar, or spelling, no canned essays, just students and teacher actively engaged in processes that would naturally make students truly literate. When I hit the ground after training, though, it was like losing a few decades. The administration and parents didn't want that approach, and sadly neither did most of the students. It's easier, after all, to hand in exercises and take quizzes than to expose your thoughts and stretch yourself. That takes real commitment.

I abhor the approach to literature that it's something that you "take" when you're in school, like a medicine or treatment, because it's good for you. And then you're all finished, you don't have to be bothered by it again. I like what I heard Joseph Campbell say once: "I don't believe in studying subjects because they're said to be important, do you?" There needs to be interest, simple as that, and if there isn't, it's game over. I have a suspicion that schools aren't very good at kindling interest in students. With their emphasis on fixed curricula, testing, grades, and competition, they send a different message. I have friends who have always home-schooled, and I admit that I wondered if their kids had the basic skills of public school kids in their age group. But these kids have something more valuable than being right in step with peers; they have independent interests about history, art, and literature, and it's good to see them pursuing them just because they have a liking.

[geo]

This was Bloom's somewhat curmudgeonly reaction in 2003 when Stephen King was given a National Book Award. I know Bloom considers Edgar Allan Poe a vastly overrated writer as well, so it's ironic when he says here that King is no Poe. I don't doubt what he says about the study of Lit being debased. I'd love to go back in time and take a Lit course in the 1920s or 1930s.

Dumbing down American readers

By Harold Bloom

9/24/2003

THE DECISION to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can't write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curriculums across the country.

Recently I spoke at the funeral of my old friend Thomas M. Green of Yale, perhaps the most distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature of his generation. I said, "I fear that something of great value has ended forever."

Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose "Underworld" is a great book.

Instead, this year's award goes to King. It's a terrible mistake.

Harold Bloom is a professor at Yale University and author of "The Western Canon." He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editor ... n_readers/

[SkywardGnost]

This was Bloom's somewhat curmudgeonly reaction in 2003 when Stephen King was given a National Book Award. I know Bloom considers Edgar Allan Poe a vastly overrated writer as well, so it's ironic when he says here that King is no Poe. I don't doubt what he says about the study of Lit being debased. I'd love to go back in time and take a Lit course in the 1920s or 1930s.

Dumbing down American readers

By Harold Bloom

9/24/2003

THE DECISION to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can't write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curriculums across the country.

Recently I spoke at the funeral of my old friend Thomas M. Green of Yale, perhaps the most distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature of his generation. I said, "I fear that something of great value has ended forever."

Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose "Underworld" is a great book.

Instead, this year's award goes to King. It's a terrible mistake.

Harold Bloom is a professor at Yale University and author of "The Western Canon." He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editor ... n_readers/

Harold Bloom is rather cynical at times. But he's still a mad genius

[SkywardGnost]

Maybe we should have a corner for former teachers. My own experience as an English teacher is slight, three years in grades 6-10 and a couple of years in college freshman English. I can't say the students drove me out, as there are other aspects about classroom teaching that are challenging and require a pretty stout ego, which I don't have. I found the attitudes of administration and parents exasperating, too. I trained for teaching in an era in which it was believed that teacher and students would pursue literature and writing organically. The bible of this approach was called Teaching the Universe of Discourse, by James Moffet. He made the English classroom sound great--no drills on vocabulary, grammar, or spelling, no canned essays, just students and teacher actively engaged in processes that would naturally make students truly literate. When I hit the ground after training, though, it was like losing a few decades. The administration and parents didn't want that approach, and sadly neither did most of the students. It's easier, after all, to hand in exercises and take quizzes than to expose your thoughts and stretch yourself. That takes real commitment.

I abhor the approach to literature that it's something that you "take" when you're in school, like a medicine or treatment, because it's good for you. And then you're all finished, you don't have to be bothered by it again. I like what I heard Joseph Campbell say once: "I don't believe in studying subjects because they're said to be important, do you?" There needs to be interest, simple as that, and if there isn't, it's game over. I have a suspicion that schools aren't very good at kindling interest in students. With their emphasis on fixed curricula, testing, grades, and competition, they send a different message. I have friends who have always home-schooled, and I admit that I wondered if their kids had the basic skills of public school kids in their age group. But these kids have something more valuable than being right in step with peers; they have independent interests about history, art, and literature, and it's good to see them pursuing them just because they have a liking.

This is so true.

I knew a guy who had a decent GPA and a modest ACT score. But man, if you got into a conversation with him about computers, you could feel the passion oozing off of him. He was way more passionate about his subject than most of his high-test scoring peers.

[Theomanic]

Are you talking about Ray Bradbury?

He went to a conference with college students and a group basically told him what his book was about and he got upset.

I don't think so, as he's one of my favourite writers so I hope I would've remembered if it was him. Maybe, though! If I find out, I will post it here.

When I hit the ground after training, though, it was like losing a few decades. The administration and parents didn't want that approach, and sadly neither did most of the students. It's easier, after all, to hand in exercises and take quizzes than to expose your thoughts and stretch yourself. That takes real commitment.

When I was in school, I was in the Gifted program, and in theory that was the way the classes were to be taught. More about a free-thinking dialogue than content quizzes. In practice, only about 20-30% of the teachers did that... the rest just made the classes difficult by introducing a lot of complicated concepts, but still along a content quiz state of mind.

I often wonder why there was this idea that only the clever kids could learn in such a way, by engaging and discussing material. I imagine most kids would find that a lot more interesting than someone droning at them from the front of the room. I know a lot of people, at varying degrees of intellect, who despise any book they studied in school because all the joy was drained out of it for them.

This was Bloom's somewhat curmudgeonly reaction in 2003 when Stephen King was given a National Book Award. I know Bloom considers Edgar Allan Poe a vastly overrated writer as well, so it's ironic when he says here that King is no Poe. I don't doubt what he says about the study of Lit being debased. I'd love to go back in time and take a Lit course in the 1920s or 1930s.

Is it wrong that I find that essay very entertaining and generally agree with it? I agree that King writes to appeal to the common masses, though to be fair he says as much himself in On Writing. I've read four of the Dark Tower books from him and it's frustrating to see such great ideas and potential crudely written out. It's like sometimes he has these amazing ideas but only knows how to discuss them in a series of grunts and hand gestures.

I enjoy an empty-headed read as much as the next person (unless the next person is reading Candace Bushnell, because then I would set them on fire) but King's (arguably deliberately) crappy writing just frustrates me. I still think there is a time and place for it, and I definitely don't begrudge him his success - that man worked HARD to get where he is! But giving him some sort of writing award that indicates anything other than his ability to churn out words seems like a spit in the eye to all those brilliant writers out there.

One thing I noted in Bloom's essay is that all the old writers he mentioned are white men, but all the upstarts are women. I hope that isn't a theme with him... misogynism is so tedious.

[geo]

I love reading King who's a very gifted writer. His work is not going to ever be considered great literature, and I think Bloom's main problem is that he was being honored, not through any literary merit, but through his popularity. So he probably makes a good point, but really it's probably not that different from what critics have been saying for hundreds of years about declining values and the vacuity of youth.

I've heard arguments that Cormac McCarthy's work is dearly beloved by academics, but some of his writing is overblown, pompous, and tedious. I didn't get this from THE ROAD which I thought was very good. I haven't had a chance yet to read BLOOD MERIDIAN.

Surely Bloom has biases of his own that are tied to his era. The man truly knows his Shakespeare though.

[Theomanic]

I love reading King who's a very gifted writer. His work is not going to ever be considered great literature, and I think Bloom's main problem is that he was being honored, not through any literary merit, but through his popularity. So he probably makes a good point, but really it's probably not that different from what critics have been saying for hundreds of years about declining values and the vacuity of youth.

I've heard arguments that Cormac McCarthy's work is dearly beloved by academics, but some of his writing is overblown, pompous, and tedious. I didn't get this from THE ROAD which I thought was very good. I haven't had a chance yet to read BLOOD MERIDIAN.

Surely Bloom has biases of his own that are tied to his era. The man truly knows his Shakespeare though.

I like to read King sometimes, but I don't know if I would term him "gifted", though perhaps I'm being pedantic. I think it's a discredit to him to call him gifted in fact. He is a writer due to hours and hours and hours of writing. I would say he has a remarkable imagination, but his writing is definitely the result of blood, sweat, and tears. He may have the gift of ingenious thought, but writing was not a gift he was born with.

Just comparing The Gunslinger to The Drawing of the Three is incredible! About 20 years took place between writing those two books, and you could tell. I found The Gunslinger really difficult to get through; I didn't enjoy it at all. But I soldiered on because I'd heard the first book wasn't great but the next three were excellent, which I personally agree with.

I've also only read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which was minimal to the extreme. I'll have to put Blood Meridian on my to-read list, and see what I think.

[DWill]

I'm not proud of this, but I've never read a word of King--well, not true exactly. I did open a couple of his books but was put off by the style so didn't invest the time in them. But I could just be persnickety. Style isn't everything, and it isn't needed to create a page-turner. Yet I always try to find a fiction writer who writes better than I could, because it's more enjoyable to read nice sentences. I recently read The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith, and really enjoyed it. She was a crime writer, but also a good psychologist and agile in her use of words. Iris Murdoch is another who makes interesting plots without sacrificing the quality of composition. But I admit to being not that well read in fiction, so there is a lot of good stuff that I've missed. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never read Saul Bellow, aside from short stories. Speaking of short stories, that form seems to just about guarantee that the writing will be of high quality. The writer's aims are generally different there than in novels.

Harold Bloom must make a thing out of devaluing writers. I encountered him in a seminar on Yeats, where his book on Yeats was the critical text. One of his themes was that Yeats was overrated, because he inherited the Romantic tradition and totally dropped the ball. I don't know if Bloom has a prejudice against women writers. It appears to be a sad fact that due to social restrictions on women's roles, there weren't many women who even were published before the modern era. The pool was so small that the chances of women putting out great literature were slight. I strongly sympathize with Bloom, though, on the dreary political fads that have infected literature since the 60s.

[SkywardGnost]

One thing I noted in Bloom's essay is that all the old writers he mentioned are white men, but all the upstarts are women. I hope that isn't a theme with him... misogynism is so tedious.

Hm...sexism from an old white man...

Never heard of such a thing.


On another note, I think Harold is completely wrong about Harry Potter

The book is rich with themes and it shows life in it's very basic, down to earth nature.

Rowling did a fantastic job with it, more than people are inclined to believe.

[Suzanne]

I abhor the approach to literature that it's something that you "take" when you're in school, like a medicine or treatment, because it's good for you. And then you're all finished, you don't have to be bothered by it again. I like what I heard Joseph Campbell say once: "I don't believe in studying subjects because they're said to be important, do you?" There needs to be interest, simple as that, and if there isn't, it's game over. I have a suspicion that schools aren't very good at kindling interest in students. With their emphasis on fixed curricula, testing, grades, and competition, they send a different message. I have friends who have always home-schooled, and I admit that I wondered if their kids had the basic skills of public school kids in their age group. But these kids have something more valuable than being right in step with peers; they have independent interests about history, art, and literature, and it's good to see them pursuing them just because they have a liking.

I couldn't agree with this more. I am always heart sick when I receive my children's summer reading lists. (Only have one left in HS) There was a year my daughter was required to read a novel from the New York Times best sellers list. She wanted to read "Pride and Prejudice". We contacted the teacher and the head of the English Dept. and we were told she could not read it and get credit. She did read it that summer but had to slog along with the best seller first. The classics are gone from HS. Why is this? Sometimes I think that many English teachers are so young, they themselves have not read many classics.

I know a kid who was home schooled. There were guidelines, but he had a lot of latitude about his reading choices. In his junior year he started taking classes at the local community college. His SAT scores were extremely high, he got a full ride to Rutgers U. and started as a sophomore. He played competitive tennis with my son and was part of a large social circle connected with tournament tennis players. So, this young man never suffered socially, and has excelled in school. He is a very well rounded young man. Home schooling can work.

Kids need to be exposed to great writing, not just writing that make for great sales. If they do not read books that are well written and books they enjoy, they may never develop a love of reading. My daughter's HS not only discouraged her from reading, it could have squelched her love of reading all together.

Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose "Underworld" is a great book.Instead, this year's award goes to King. It's a terrible mistake.

Wow. Just wow. Quantity, (books and money) over quality.