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?
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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?
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,:smile5:) 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 journey:) Despite 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:) I have always been fascinated by texts such as "Beowulf" for example. I wrote my M.A about Bible translations, so it is a very big challenge. Mostly we don`t read religious texts so often. However, Bible is a masterpiece.
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.
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.
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.
Of course there is a philosophical problem when it comes to drawing a conclusion or making a point of judgement. Slavery were the norms at some epochs in time and the literature of the time justified it as it graded humans into the master and the servant based on their birth of nobility or lowliness. They had the belief that people born of a prosperous family has to do with their Karma and it is indeed their Dharma to satisfy themselves where they are in and serve those who were considered their masters.
When we look at this old literary source we scorn at the very foundation of their thoughts or their philosophical roots.
Haha, those are exactly my thoughts! Authors of historic novels never quite get it right. I guess it's not their fault though, they don't know any better. Everyone is a child of their time. I'm sure I could find some inconcsistencies in PD James's Death comes to Pemberley, despite her reverence for Austen and the evident knowledge she has of the era.Quote:
Originally Posted by prendrelemick
Considering that arrogance. I agree. Who is to say that in 50 years, maybe 200 years, those people will not look back at the novels written now and say, 'Tssss, how [fill in biased social issue] those people were!' Yes, we have different ideas, but it's not worth thinking about whose are superior, it's merely about the differences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Values go with respect to time and time will fizzle out or devalue things we esteem now. Interests change and so do the philosophy of life and writing. Shakespeare's main objective was to entertain Tolstoy wrote to educate.
I don't scorn their thoughts. For example, slavery was not just allowed in the Bible, but it was approved by that god, so it is clear that they would accept and approve of slavery. That is just one of a great many older customs that have gone out of use. We probably should pay more attention to the older works.Quote:
Originally Posted by osho
Acouple of points...
It's odd but the nearer we are to the time the book was written in, the more out of date it seems. Probably because we don't expect it to be.Quote:
Originally Posted by kasie
Mark Twain is a good case in point. The word "Nigger" has been removed from the text in the latest edition for schools. I agree it is an offensive word and sharn't use it again here. But for his day, Twain's works were as progressive and as racially inclusive as you would find anywhere. He had no other word he could use at that time, it is what his characters would say. That is context and you need to know it when reading Huck Finn.Quote:
Originally Posted by osho
Recently I have bought "The castle of Otranto" and I am going to read it soon. However I have so many books to read that sometimes I don`t know which one choose.
I think that we shouldn`t remove any words from the texts.Quote:
Originally Posted by prendrelemick
The great narratives do not have the text fixed on the stone, hannah. (Albeit, the chage on Twain did no good, was rejected and in the end instead of calling a black man by a pejorative name used to call slaves, called a free black man by slave, which is as offensive or more).
I strongly agree. Part of the allure of reading older works is seeing how a language has changed. Less than 100 years ago the word "nigger" was not pejorative; it was just one of the several words for dark skinned people. Alas, some people found it offensive, and we get the foolishness of pulling it out of a good novel.Quote:
Originally Posted by hannah_arendt
The word nigger was pejorative, it was the reading public, white, that wasn't aware of this.
As the public wasn't aware of the word being pejorative, it wasn't pejoritive therefore, was it. That's the whole point of language. Languages are not absolute things and words change their connotations. Hence the word 'nigger' was not found pejorative. It only became that when people started to avoid the word and use another instead (euphemism), maybe because they were embarrassed, maybe because they didn't approve of those who did say 'nigger'. Thus, the small group of non-approvers grew and the word 'nigger' became synonymous with those who did approve of black people's reduced value, racial quality and the like and thus the word got that connotation.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
We shouldn't confuse our perception of issues, words and what-not with their historic meanings.
You are mistaken. First, for something to be pejorative, there must be intent. If the speaker or writer of a word does not intend it in a negative sense, then it is not pejorative. Second, nigger was not even a nasty term for dark skinned people until the 1950's. It could have been used as a nasty term as any word can be, but it simply was not.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
That raises an interesting question of intent vs. reception. Is the word not offensive if the speaker doesn't consider it so but knows the target does and will be offended regardless? Seems to me that if the speaker knows the target will be offended, and uses the word anyway, telling himself, "It doesn't bother me, therefore nothing's wrong with it whatever he thinks", that's more self-absorbed arrogance than anything else.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
Also, I'd argue that it was considered pejorative much earlier than the 1950s. The original title of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None was changed for its 1940 U.S. publication for that reason.
Sorry, you are mistaken. It was considered pejorative much earlier than the 1950s. In fact, from a Washington Post publication on the term:Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...ap1/nigger.htmQuote:
In A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States: and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837), Hosea Easton wrote that nigger "is an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race. . . . The term in itself would be perfectly harmless were it used only to distinguish one class of society from another; but it is not used with that intent. . . . [I]t flows from the fountain of purpose to injure." Easton averred that often the earliest instruction white adults gave to white children prominently featured the word nigger. Adults reprimanded them for being "worse than niggers," for being "ignorant as niggers," for having "no more credit than niggers"; they disciplined them by telling them that unless they behaved they would be carried off by "the old nigger" or made to sit with "niggers" or consigned to the "nigger seat," which was, of course, a place of shame.
And in 1904, Clifton Johnson (journalist) wrote about the opprobrious nature of the word, emphasizing it was used in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "coloured." Even the 1909 founding of the "National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People" shows that their preference for racial identity was "coloured" and not "nigger."
It was the 1950s and 60s when "Black" became the preferred racial identifier. "Nigger" had been considered offensive for at least 50 years, if not 100, by that point. It was certainly used pejoratively, with an intent to offend from around the turn of the century.
It is somewhat offensive to read misinformation being put forth about this term and how "harmless" or "innocent" it was just 60 years ago. This notion is categorically false. I suggest a little research before making such a claim.
Mark Twain used it as pejorative already. It was a term to describe black slaves and he uses it to describe the behaviour of those who cannot see Jim more than an object. The obvious implication that is a being of inferior condition is all there.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
And no, it was received as pejorative. The offense is in the ear of the receptor as well, after all, no theory of that describes the communicative process lay all production of significance on the person uttering the message.
Kiki:
Read well what I said: it was the reading public, white, that wasn't aware of this. The africans were well aware of this, but they are not part of the reading public, as slaves, they had no education. Do not mix the limitations of perception of a public plus the lack of power and expression of another with historical revisionism. The white population discovered that the africans felt bad with the word, it is not just a simplistic guilty feeling. It was a result of african-americans incorporation to america society, do not try to make it also a process of the white population.
Twain did not use the word nigger as a pejorative. He used it a general term for dark skinned people. Huck and Tom treated Jim as a person, and they were aware of his color. The reading public knew the word and they commonly used it a a general word. Any word can be used pejoratively, if the speaker or writer wishes to use it that way.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
They chose this particular word, amongst several other general terms. As is common knowledge "coloured" was much preferred at the time by the receptor of the term. The word was certainly chosen prior to others because it signified more contempt, derision and scorn, alongside the enslavement of the race. Semiotic analysis of the term and what it signifies to both producer and receptor shows this very early in its usage. Certainly by the time of Twain.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
Gower in 1965 states that nigger is "the term that carries with it all the obloquy and contempt and rejection which whites have inflicted on blacks."
The Harlem renaissance writer Langston Hughes made his 1940 plea for omitting the "incendiary word" from all literature. "Ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy, it doesn't matter . . . [African Americans] do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic."
In his memoir, The Big Sea, Hughes also wrote: "The word nigger, you see, sums up for us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America."
However, I do believe the removal of the word from this text is absurd. He was using it to accurately portray the era of the early 1800s in the South. Just reading the introduction illustrates this as he states that he uses, "the extremist form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect" and "the ordinary Pike County dialect." Both these dialects would certainly have used the word, so why censor it? We must understand the past. The word was prevalent, as was the notion of white superiority at the time. It is, however, a mistake to suggest that the word was not considered offensive until the 1950s. That's revisionist history at its worst.
The word nigger is frequently used throughout the text, as one would expect, given the time at which it was written and that the protagonist is black.
However, it's not just the title that has been changed but 'the N-word' is used throughout.
Someone's gotta be joking.
http://imageshack.us/a/img822/125/41...sl500aa300.jpg
Yes, it was as pejorative. He knew the meaning enough to avoiding using it but in the comical , steryitipical way he did in Huck Finn. I have no idea why you are insisting on trying to prove something everyone showed: nigger was always pejorative in the USA scenary.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
The idea that Huck Finn is racist because of the use of nigger is a bit of a strawman argument against those who are concerned about racial representation in the work.
Educators have pointed out that the use of the word, no matter its context, makes for a difficult learning environment for African American students, and so there is good reason either to exclude the work or censor it in a classroom environment with children. There is a lot of anecdotal accounts of black people feeling singled out when they are in a minority position in the classroom. Given the goals of high school education, teaching Huck Finn uncensored can be counterproductive.
Then there is a more academic line of criticism which has viewed the book as part of the affectionate, liberal orientated racism of the late 19th century that was part of the infamous minstrelsy tradition. The vaudeville black minstrel tradition would have white actors use black-face to parody the stereotypes of African Americans, and this same tradition of racial comedy plays out in Huck Finn. The work is implicated in 19th century racism even if it is speaking out against the more insidious manifestations of racism (i.e. slavery). Moreover, a work published a few decades after emancipation can hardly be viewed as radically progressive for criticizing slavery. There is good reason to acknowledge that Huck Finn is in many ways a racist text, and this is part of the work that should not be brushed aside. The racism of Huck Finn is but one element of an excellent work and it should be understood as part of the critical discussion surrounding it, which influences how we think of the culture that produced it and how we receive the novel. This is not an argument to censor the text, but a call to be conscientious about all the nuances of a majorly canonical text.
Do you know what opprobrious means? It does not mean offensive (by extension only), it means expressing scorn, disgrace or contempt. You might call that offensve, but there is a difference. In its first sense it merely expresses the idea that blacks designated with the word nigger are a lower kind of human being, which is natural, seeing the timeframe. It was a fact that all non-Caucasian creatures were of lower value, however sad that may be. At this point the Germans were doing experiments in Namibia, I think it was. And the Laps were being measured by the Swedes. At any rate the term employed in the two quotes comes from people who are living past 1900, i.e. 20 years after Mark Twain and crucially about 40 years after the emencipation of the slaves.Quote:
Originally Posted by islandclimber
The article you have so kindly provided a link to only tells me that, indeed, the word started to be used widely as a word of denigrating quality (worse than a nigger as a metaphor for something bad). Only much later do people start to associate that widely expressed inferiority with shameful behaviour, from a merely ethical point of view (the ablitionists). Whether those same people thought that black people were equal in everything to whites is doubtful. Why otherwise was there still segregation in the 1950s? The point is that people like Abraham Lincoln found slavery wrong because all humans were equal in God's eyes, they maybe freed them, but you didn't have to ask them to sit next to them on a bus. Blacks were still inferior and that wasn't even an offensive thought (not to the whites at least).
It is when people started to assocate the shameful idea of slavery with nigger (it is a slavery term) that it became offensive to everyone. I put this in itaics as this word has two different recipients: the white reader and the black + other different race ones. Naturally the latter group will find it offensive, and probably found it offensive, way before tthat seaped through the hard skulls of the white population. The whites did not consider that. The mabslavery wrong and that was where it stopped in all likelihood.
And yes, of course the black population would have found that offensive, but they we in the vast minority, so who cared? (to be blunt)
Of course the Africans were aware, but as I said above, they were not really a concern. Fristly there was wide-spread illiteracy (20 years after the Civil War) and secondly, the total US population was around 49 million. Do you think a mere 4 million blacks (in 1860, the population did not fluctuate too much from 1790 to 1860, always hovering around about 10-20% of the population who could have found that word offensive [and there are always exceptions] would have mattered? Most of the reading public is typically middle or high class with time to read. I don't know about the USA, but it would surprise me that that would have been very different. Middle and high class Americans were typically whites.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
Words and languages are the products of people and if 80% of a population finds a word commonplace, indeed even uses it to tell their children off, I doubt whether 20% can change that.
By the way, I still don't understand what the problem with this word is if Twain clearly used it to say someing about his characters instead of calling black people that genuinely. But that's me.
That's an interesting thought. I had never thought about it that way, but that's indeed a good point.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
Of course. It undeniable "Nigger" was negative, that Twain used it because it is one of the themes of the book, but the work itself is not racist. The entire censorship is dumb. There would be no problem to have a preface dealing with the use of the word, so the teachers could actually teach literature without a problem.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
Kiki:
Yes, they were not a concern. Of course, because a bunch of racists did it to them. And of course, we are talking about modern readers. Plus you are just repeating what I said and this shows the word was alreadynegative and it was already a matter of raising the white population awareness by the afrian social fight.Quote:
Of course the Africans were aware, but as I said above, they were not really a concern. Fristly there was wide-spread illiteracy (20 years after the Civil War) and secondly, the total US population was around 49 million. Do you think a mere 4 million blacks (in 1860, the population did not fluctuate too much from 1790 to 1860, always hovering around about 10-20% of the population who could have found that word offensive [and there are always exceptions] would have mattered? Most of the reading public is typically middle or high class with time to read. I don't know about the USA, but it would surprise me that that would have been very different. Middle and high class Americans were typically whites.
Words and languages are the products of people and if 80% of a population finds a word commonplace, indeed even uses it to tell their children off, I doubt whether 20% can change that.
By the way, I still don't understand what the problem with this word is if Twain clearly used it to say someing about his characters instead of calling black people that genuinely. But that's me.
I have no problem with the word in Huck, but trying to imply the word is not racist is just as wrong as political correctness. The teachers must be able to reckon it and give to the kid the context, because that is teaching literature.
I think it's pretty obvious I know what opprobrious means. My next post there, which you conveniently ignore, states the exact same thing you said, derision, contempt, scorn... Let's not be pedantic. Often opprobrious and offensive are linked and this is certainly a case where the link is justified. Shameful behaviour was associated with the term much earlier, as evidenced by the 1837 work quoted, long before Twain wrote. Also, in my next post I refer to Twain's introduction to Huck Finn where he nearly apologizes in advance for the dialectic used due to his desire to accurately portray the era and place. He certainly knew the term was pejorative at that time. The word has always been inextricably linked to slavery.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Besides this, I agree with you entirely. It was basically a question of "who cares" for certainly in the south the general populace did not, yet I think the term was certainly pejorative all the same, as it was a negative term associated with a race they thought to be created inferior, a race that was good for nothing besides enslavement. To argue that this word wasn't used pejoratively at the time is ludicrous. Though I don't think that is what you are doing.
I think my next post clearly states that I think the idea of revising these texts is absurd, as it portrays a part of history in a critical light. I agree with you. However, teaching it in school is problematic for the reasons OrphanPip pointed out. I suppose the question is how to determine where one must draw the line.
Sorry if this isn't perfectly coherent, it was typed on a phone. :p
I imagine if someone is suggesting a non-Caucasian is inferior or of lower value or deserving of scorn or disgrace because they're non-Caucasian that would be offensive.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
This thread is turning into an example of why people should read a lot more older literature. If people read things from just a couple hundred years ago, then they would realize that they are wasting time misunderstanding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Unfortunately, there many other authors who wrote largely in colloquial American English of the 19th century CE, so it is difficult for some people to red how well Twain captured it, or enopugh so tht we can still read it while getting a good taste of how people actually spoke in informal settings.
The wikipedia article on Huckleberry Finn cites Please reference this as crit "#22235" in the
Lisa Cohen Minnick, Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004 in reference to Jim's dialogue. I will read that, if I get a chance.
Few 19th century authors used more than a smattering of slang, and it appears that much of the colloquial language has been lost, and some is now misinterpreted. As an example, pn another board someone opined that foul language was as common then as it is now, but we know perfectly well that that is not true. After we get the time machines running we'll have to send some people back and see what they think of American English in the 1840's.