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Arcadia is wonderful. We read it in a high school English class at my STEM-focused high school. The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had inte
by senkora 6y ago
Arcadia is wonderful. We read it in a high school English class at my STEM-focused high school.
The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had interesting implications for science.
Arcadia is one such work because it talks about what knowledge is, why it matters, and how historians bring their own biases to interpreting the past. We see characters in the past do one thing and characters in the present misinterpret it several times. We see a child prodigy discover math concepts before anyone else, and then have a historian dismiss the evidence of that because she had the ideas “too early,” even though her discoveries were basic and from first principles. The historian is trying to prove his incorrect pet theory but is blind to something even more significant because he doesn’t expect it. (All of this is from memory years later)
Other books we read in this class include A Canticle for Liebewitz and a book about Galileo whose name escapes me.
- Farnak 6y agoWas it the play "Life of Galileo"? That's a fascinating concept for a high school English class. Is it reasonable for you to dig up the entire reading list?
- senkora 6y agoIt was! I looked it up and the summary matches what I remember. I found the list, it may be missing some poems but this is largely what we covered: A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr Arcadia - Tom Stoppard Dulce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen Frankenstein - Mary Shelley Kindred - Octavia E. Butler Life of Galileo - Bertolt Brecht Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw Suicide in the Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King The Lady's Not for Burning - Christopher Fry The Mortal Immortal - Mary Shelley
- Farnak 6y agoAwesome, I haven't heard of half of this list. This will be great shelter-in-place reading.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoWell, at leats they had Canticle, so well done for not being totally closed, but the problem with this and many reading lists is it's just. so. predictable. Authors in the above I have not heard of: Laurie R. King, Christopher Fry I'm not saying these are bad but the list focuses on what's well known, not what's obscure and perhaps better. In that sense it's gutless. It invites you down the well trodden paths where there's no risk of upset, all carefully vetted. And it makes me sad because it seems to want to usher people into conformity, of not being open to new ideas. Don't scare the horses. I don't have time to list books I'd find interesting, but this is depressing for me.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago...aaand the inevitable downvotes. Not "you're wrong, here's why", just a surly response that you don't like it. I made my point clearly enough, the lack of a constructive response kind of backs up that being stuck in a rut is a good thing in literature. (I suppose it could have been down to me not offering an alternative reading list, but I don't think that's all of it)
- dirkt 6y agoYou may like "The Physicists" by Dürrenmatt, then, if you have not read or seen it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists