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A work should have to meet three criteria to be included in a modern English curriculum. 1. It should be an esteemed part of our common literary heritage. 2. It
by johan_larson 9y ago
A work should have to meet three criteria to be included in a modern English curriculum. 1. It should be an esteemed part of our common literary heritage. 2. It should be somehow complicated, to allow for sophisticated analysis. 3. It should be a good model for the students' own writing.
Shakespeare's plays do just fine on the first two criteria. But the third is a rather different matter. He wrote plays in spoken verse, a long-dead form. And his English, after more than four hundred years, now sounds comically forsoothly and old-fashioned to the point of needing annotations and explanations. He sounds old in a way that Twain and Dickens -- no spring chickens, themselves -- do not. To write sort of like Billy Avon, today, is to court mockery.
Given this deficiency, my inclination is to reduce the amount of Shakespeare in the curriculum. In high school, we had to study one of his plays every year. Cut that in half, replacing two of his plays with modern novels. There's certainly no shortage of candidates. Mailer? Roth? Atwood? Plenty of fine choices that are held in high esteem, admit of deep analysis, and serve as good models for the students' own writing.
- davidgerard 9y agoIt's a tricky one. The trouble is that Shakespeare is one of the two great anchors of modern English, the other being the King James Version bible. You can't be highly literate in English without knowing both, because so much common phrasing and allusion is straight out of them. (The trouble with the KJV is that it's hardly ever taught as a literary source, only as a religious one, but that's a separate rant. And if I wanted to fix it I should become an English professor and teach it for a year to prove my point.)
- mrkstu 9y agoThe only time in High School that the Bible was mentioned was my AP English class, when we studied the Book of Job. It was a bit of a shock, after all that time learning English, to suddenly be confronted with Scripture at school... but refreshing. The KJV was definitely THE source of common culture in America, up until the last ~30 years or so. It has been sad to see the rapid decline in Biblical scholarship by the average American. Having a common touchstone of such breadth/depth/complexity being replaced by Disney/Marvel as the common lexicon has been disheartening (despite my love of all things Marvel.)
- davidgerard 9y agoIt's still the source for many of the sources. So many phrases are straight from there, much as they are from Shakespeare. Martin Luther King leaned heavily on Exodus, and the theme of "let my people go".
- dagw 9y agoShakespeare needs to be studied not mainly because it is great literature (which it just happens to be), but because it is the cornerstone for so much culture that followed. So much English literature that follows makes so much direct and indirect reference to Shakespeare and his works that you'll miss out on much of its meaning if you don't have that background. People will use shorthand like "Othello" or "Hamlet" or "Puck" and expect you to understand what they are talking about. That being said I agree that we can change the way Shakespeare is studied. Focus the study on the effects he's had on the literature that followed rather than on works themselves in isolation. It's far more important to know the plots, characters and main points and themes of his most important works rather than having read all of them. I guess the point is that there are two (equally important) approaches to studying literature. One is studying literature as the art of writing and one is studying literature as social and cultural influence.