How often do you come back to reading old literature? Do you have your favourite works? Do you think that contemporary reader can reach a full understanding of the main ideas?
How often do you come back to reading old literature? Do you have your favourite works? Do you think that contemporary reader can reach a full understanding of the main ideas?
What do you call Old Literature? Do you have an example?
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Old literature is gold literature since what we do understand about literature or the way we think about literature comes from old literary sources and it is Shakespeare, Milton, Marlow, and Sophocles, even Plato and Kalidas, Vyas without them we would have been orphaned and it is on their back we stood and remain glorified. If we keep aside the whole history of literature that has to do with old literature we will be shrinking, diminishing ourselves into diminutive world. Let us glorify our old heritage, old literature and pride over them
Interesting questions, Hannah, especially the last part. I used to think that works of literature should be assessed (I don't like the word 'criticised', it has too many negative connotations) purely on its own merits. While I still shy away from trying to use a text to surmise something about the author's life or state of mind, I now think no work should be taken in isolation. Everything, to my way of thinking, is part of a whole, part of the Zeitgeist, if you like, and the more a reader understands about the period in which the work was written, the more likely it is that he/she will come close to understanding the writer's intentions.
In fact, I think it is quite dangerous to read any 'old' work with modern sensibilities alone - and by 'old', I'd certainly include anything more than twenty, or even ten, years old. In case you are thinking I'm being too stringent in my timing, let me suggest to you that you think for example about the changes in attitudes to money as recently as 2008 following the financial crises that began in the autumn of that year. As for social attitudes, when I was a child, (granted a long time ago,) the word 'divorce' was whispered in hushed and shamed tones. It seems to me that unless you have some understanding of the mores of the time the book/play/treatise was written, you will not fully understand the work.
So what is "old literature"? I have never encountered the term before, and most literature s still timely, even after a few millenia.
I used this term ("old literature") during my studies in Poland. For example, we studied at the very beginning "old polish literature". In polish it is called "literatura staropolska" and contains: Middle Ages, Renaissance and baroque. Baroque seemed to me then very contemporary, especially poetry by Mikolaj Sęp Szarzyński.
Recently I have been writting an essay about "Beowulf". I have read it for the second time feeling some kind of loss. I think that we`ve lost this gift of telling stories. Reading works as "Beowulf" or "Seafarer" we mostly do it in a contemporary way but probably we cannot do it differently. We cannot describe the world we do not know. Many my collegues do not even try to read those wonderuful works. It is always an exciting journeyDespite the fact that we read mostly translations, we should try discovering this maybe forgotten world. We are only hobbits standing on the arms of giants I think
Reading old literature is a great fascination since it wings our imagination far and wide in terms of space and time. I read today a little of life on the Mississippi by Marktwain, the old American classic novelist and I got moved and absorbed in the beauty and grandiloquent style he had written with and of course it is to old literature that I must turn to if I have to broaden my literary horizon and of course there is a great storehouse of ideas in old literature.
New literature has yet to summit the heights they have scaled and I really take pride in the fact that I have immensely read old literature, more than new ones
Mark Twain doesn`t seem to me so far away
The Bible is written beautifully and they used good vocabulary and yet I do not find anything deeply absorbing
by your nickname you may already know, but you seem to be working with the same ideas of Walter Benjamin, specially in the Narrator essay.
I would say, there is a lot of appeal for narratives, even if visual arts are taking space of everything. Cormac McCarty, for example is a great narrator, and we analyse well Neil Gaiman, we see he is a narrator.
I never read any contempory stuff, simply because I don't know who to read - who's any good. I do read a lot of Greek Classics, and read around them and about them and find echos of them in other books. I find you eventually get into the groove, and start understanding the context more and more.
ay up
Conversely, reading books of te same era and country gives you a geenral understanding how people saw their society and the world in genera. Allowing for some bigotted opinions, of course...
Reading with a modern conception of wht is right per se takes away from what you can really get from a work.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
I read of course contemporary books but I always come back to the classics
The trill of the classics is set in my memory and I find them ineffable and find no match. Read Wordsworth or Shelley, I do not mean written on the classic mold or model but they are nonetheless old literature and I find nothing to match them, the grandeur of their style and depth of their theme and the cadence, the spontaneity and the like
I suppose the real problems start where you get a modern author setting a story in the past, and taking their modern attitudes with them. So you may get a white woman brought up in the pre-war deep south with impeccable modern attitudes towards racial equality, or a secular medieval philosopher. A character out of context. It is a kind of arrogance, a "we know best"ism, and is more prevelent than it used to be. Many books say more about the times of the writer, than the times it is supposed to be set in.
ay up
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