Could someone help me understand "classic" literature

[JCamilo]

Just a note, Poe liked Twice-told Tales and was full of compliments to Hawthorne, who indeed, have much to do with Poe short stories rules.

[Vautrin]

After yet another year of clashing with my English teachers and their curriculum choices, I am fed up. I have been told year after year that these stories were top of the line and that they would inspire/move me. Year after year they have not lived up to this standard. Is it the books? The teachers? Or is it me? In any case I'd like to know what exactly sets these books and authors above the others. Any help or constructive critiscm is appreciated.

Oh and a few examples of the authors giving me trouble. Hawthorne, Alighieri, Shakespeare, Wharton, and C.S. Lewis.
I have enjoyed Orwell, Twain, and Steinbeck.

I had a similar problem one semester. Not only was I not inspired, but nothing I read made any sense whatsoever. I almost felt as if these books were written in a foreign language. I was on the verge of changing majors.

Until one day I went to see my professor about a certain assignment. As I was pointing out to him a passage in a novel that was giving me considerable trouble, he suddenly nodded his head and grinned. He then took my book into his hands and turned it right-side up. To my embarrassment, it turned out I had been reading all these books upside down the entire time!!!

Hope this helps.

[keilj]

I had a similar problem one semester. Not only was I not inspired, but nothing I read made any sense whatsoever. I almost felt as if these books were written in a foreign language. I was on the verge of changing majors.

Until one day I went to see my professor about a certain assignment. As I was pointing out to him a passage in a novel that was giving me considerable trouble, he suddenly nodded his head and grinned. He then took my book into his hands and turned it right-side up. To my embarrassment, it turned out I had been reading all these books upside down the entire time!!!

Hope this helps.

the sad thing is, some of the books we've been talking about might be more interesting if read upside down

[stlukesguild]

It's funny how medieval catholicism influences modern catholicism. Maybe this stems from the fact that I haven't studied the book in a scholarly manner but I'm having a hard time figuring out what your trying to say. What kind of love? Influence over what? I have read of far more convincing friendships. Idealist love, if I wanted to see any of that I'd just take a quick trip to the junior high school. Why should I have to put up with it in classic literature? Whatever trails he blazed outside of the book does not make up for shortcomings within the book. I see little reasoning employed within The Divine Comedy.Philosophy? Seemed like pretty standard issue stuff to me. And my experience of reading it was unpleasant, that is how I judged it, as an unpleasant reading experience.
Also, if you are not agnostic atheist what are you: explicit, ignostic, Theravedic Buddhist, what?

You began this thread asking for help with understanding classic literature. A half dozen members who have far more experience than you in reading classic literature have made any number of quite diplomatic suggestions... and you continue to blow them all off. Dante is laden with shortcomings? Funny... the Divine Comedy is seen by a great many literary scholars and readers as perhaps the single greatest literary achievement in the West... and one of the most polished. You admit that this is the first poem longer than two pages that you have read... and yet you somehow feel confident to dismiss the work as weak philosophy (and no doubt you've read Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and the other Greek and Roman philosophers that Dante was engaged in a dialog with), weak expressions of love and friendship, and lacking in logic. So everyone else must be wrong?: your teachers, all the professors over the ages who studied Dante, all the subsequent writers whose writings built upon him... from his own era to T.S. Eliot, J.L. Borges, James Joyce, Eugenio Montale, and any number of other Modern and even contemporary writers... to say nothing of the array of composers and painters and artists in every genre who have drawn inspiration from Dante.

Seriously, I suspect you really don't want help... and you never did. You simply want others to agree with you. You want to argue that the fault is all with Dante or Shakespeare... and with your teachers... and with all those ignorant academics and professors and lovers of literature who have made Shakespeare and Dante the cornerstones of Western literature. We here have all acknowledged that you need not like Dante or Shakespeare or any writer... but that's not enough. With your profound grasp of literature you want to argue with those who have read far more than yourself in the hope that they will come around to sharing your opinion: "yes, junior... you are right... Dante does suck... and your teachers and all those dry academics... they don't know what they are talking about..." Diplomacy only goes so far before one is tempted to suggest that perhaps you are simply in over your head.

[stlukesguild]

I had a similar problem one semester. Not only was I not inspired, but nothing I read made any sense whatsoever. I almost felt as if these books were written in a foreign language. I was on the verge of changing majors.

Until one day I went to see my professor about a certain assignment. As I was pointing out to him a passage in a novel that was giving me considerable trouble, he suddenly nodded his head and grinned. He then took my book into his hands and turned it right-side up. To my embarrassment, it turned out I had been reading all these books upside down the entire time!!!

[stlukesguild]

Just a note, Poe liked Twice-told Tales and was full of compliments to Hawthorne, who indeed, have much to do with Poe short stories rules.

Just imagine... JCamilo defending the canon. Will miracles never cease?

[JCamilo]

Just a note, Poe liked Twice-told Tales and was full of compliments to Hawthorne, who indeed, have much to do with Poe short stories rules.

Just imagine... JCamilo defending the canon. Will miracles never cease?

What? When? I just stabilished a fact with the obvious aim to ridicularize north-americans. Yes, defending Poe, the ever under-rated most influential american writer ever and bringing Hawthorne short stories, not his romances, is a jab in the jaw to american silly obssession for the great american novel and the incapacity to understand the best stuff ever wrote there is small like a whale.
Yes, I am much more subtle than JBI.

[Petrarch's Love]

As I have thought about it more I have come to realize that it has more to do with the way it is being taught, now I don't want to demonize my teachers for they are quite passionate but that is part of the problem. They build up my expectations and they inevitably fail to meet the high hopes I had for the books. It also has to do with how assignments are given. We are given x number of pages to read. We are also told to pay special attention to certain parts of the assignment. So I read and reread that section. Next day in class I have to sit through first a student and then the teacher (who is melodramatic and likes to perform her own little one woman plays) go through the same passage and it quickly becomes both tedious and redundant. Sometimes we are given problems almost in equation form, person x has come to conclusion z, tell me y, so x+y=z. Or this(x) symbolizes that (z), tell me why (y). I'm so busy looking for the "right" answers that I don't take the time to enjoy the characters, setting or anything else that would emotionally involve me within the story. Consequently I have been so turned off of a few works that the likelihood of me ever picking it up again at a later date to see if my opinion of it has changed, is very unlikely.

Not knowing your literature teacher, I can't judge exactly to what extent you are right. It is possible that her teaching is not the most inspiring. That said, I think the key word in your response is "expectations." I think you are right that you have inflated expectations, though not possibly in the way you are thinking. Your problem may partly lie in what you are expecting from your learning experience. I would think about this in two ways. First, remember that your teacher is only human. From your teacher's point of view she is facing a large and varied group of people, all who are at different points of understanding and ability and she is trying to find ways that she can ensure that all these students come away with a basic understanding of these texts and some sort of interpretative or analytic skills. This may mean that she needs to cover things in a way that may seem redundant or boring or reductive to some in order to make sure that she gets through on some level or another to all. You say that your teacher is enthusiastic and really trying to get you excited about her subject, which sounds like a teacher who, at the very least, is making a good faith effort. As such, as a human being trying her best at what is not an easy job she does deserve basic respect. This doesn't mean that you have to agree with or even like her teaching, but you're not being productive for either yourself or her if you end up using her as the scapegoat for your own lack of appreciation for literature (I don't know to what extent this is true, but you've made allusions to clashing with your teachers and other comments that make it sound like you're frustrated with and actively criticizing your teacher a fair amount).

This brings us to the second point about expectations, which is that you may even be absolutely right that your teacher is not the greatest or most inspiring lit. instructor. You may be right that she is teaching in a reductive fashion. You may have perfectly legitimate reasons for being frustrated with the way classes are conducted (and I don't know if any of these things is actually true or not). Even if this is the case, however, it does not give you a legitimate reason to dismiss the literature that is being taught in that class. As several people on this thread have been saying, part of the reward of sophisticated works of literature, part of the way they teach us to be better thinkers and help us to expand ourselves, is that they require the reader to put effort in, to struggle with, spend extended time with, really get to know the work on all its levels. If you expect that your class is supposed to give you everything to get you to a full and sophisticated understanding of what you are reading, then you probably will be disappointed, because such reading requires you to step up and do a lot of work yourself.

I am sorry to hear that your classroom experience has made you reject some works of literature, and I recognize that this could be partly because you're fed up with a teaching style you find frustrating. I have certainly been in classes with teachers I find frustrating, reductive, boring etc. However, it also sounds as though you are rejecting some of this literature partly because you are allowing that way of teaching to shape your whole understanding of the text, when it sounds like what your teacher is doing is only addressing one level or layer of the text that she hopes will be helpful. Saying that analyzing a book at any level makes it impossible to enjoy the reading experience is a little like saying that learning music theory and technique to play the violin or the guitar ruins a person's ability to appreciate music just for fun. Analysis and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive. If the analysis you are doing in class is not helpful, then that could be for two reasons. One is that you are bored because you already get all the symbolism etc. and you want to move on from basic or even reductive analytical points to more interesting things. If this is the case, then you really don't have a problem. You can just go ahead and perform the easy in class assignments and answer the facile questions and then move on to thinking about more complex issues in the book on your own. The other possibility is that you don't understand the type of analysis the teacher is trying to get you to do. If this is the case then you need to stop blaming the teacher, the book and all sorts of other things and address the things that you don't understand. This may mean telling the teacher (in a respectful way that is open to communicating) that you don't understand her approach and asking for more explanation. Or, if you can't seem to communicate with your teacher then you can ask particular questions of people here or other students who do well in the class etc.

Dante is the exception here, as I read it on my own time. As I have mentioned before Dante was one of my first poems, in fact the first that went beyond 2 pages. Also, it is hard for me to relate to any of the moral lessons which seemed either basic (don't kill), or petty (don't give bad advice). Then again I could be completely missing deeper points and underlying themes. And then there was the occasional silliness. Like how the 2 of the 3 mouths of the devil are spending eternity gnawing on Cassius and Brutus. That was almost as bad as Tolstoy's concept of history in War and Peace.
On the overall I find myself drifting away from taking novels and fiction seriously. In fiction, I now tend towards stories with lots of adventure, maybe with an overarching theme of power but that is not the real reason I read it. I prefer philosophy and political theory for my serious reading.

This is a highly simplistic reading of Dante. Reading the inferno as a straightforward succession of moral lessons would indeed be worthy of a circle in and of itself. If you're a fan of philosophy and political theory then there really should be a lot in Dante to sink your teeth into, but it may take more time and background knowledge to get to these other layers of meaning at work.

Again, the only way you're really going to get better at reading classic literature, as you say you would like to in your OP, is by discussing it, so post a passage from a writer that you don't like/don't understand for us all to really talk about. Otherwise I know I can't be of any more help.

[keilj]

You guys can't blame Lit teachers for everything - some books are just %@$# dull

War and Peace is often considered the best novel ever written - yet many agree that it has hundreds of pages of unnecessary exposition

[Petrarch's Love]

The same could be said of lesser-known works by Twain, Fitzgerald, so on. In fact, it could probably be said tenfold if these lesser-known works had been included on more syllabi - instead of the same old "cornerstone books" being included time and time and time again

I never said the same couldn't be said of Twain or Fitzgerald. Both these writers are commonly included on syllabi, so I don't quite get your point. I'm not arguing that people should read nothing but Shakespeare or Dante. I'm arguing that someone may get a lot out of being open to exploring and really spending some time with Shakespeare or Dante. I would have no trouble with saying the same thing about Twain or Fitzgerald or any number of other writers.

[keilj]

I never said the same couldn't be said of Twain or Fitzgerald. Both these writers are commonly included on syllabi, so I don't quite get your point. I'm not arguing that people should read nothing but Shakespeare or Dante. I'm arguing that someone may get a lot out of being open to exploring and really spending some time with Shakespeare or Dante. I would have no trouble with saying the same thing about Twain or Fitzgerald or any number of other writers.

I don't always have a point

Naw, my point was - it seemed like the suggestion that books are on many syllabi because they are very significant to literature could be turned around. In other words, perhaps these books are considered "important" by so many, because the books just appear again and again on syllabi year after year. So, perhaps if Roughing It by Twain appeared over and over instead of Tom Sawyer (Roughing It being a far better book in my opinion), then Roughing It would be considered a "must read" for anyone with any literary taste

So perhaps a book isn't essential because it is taught over and over, perhaps because it is taught over and over, the public begin to believe it MUST be terribly essential

[stlukesguild]

Oh Gawd! Another conspiracy theorist.

Shakespeare and Dante aren't on the syllabi because of any merits of their writing, but rather because all those ignorant teachers just followed whatever their predecessors told them was good without ever thinking for themselves. And the vast worlds of critical writings on Dante and Shakespeare? The subsequent works of literature, art, and music inspired by them? All mere anomalies... signs of the brain-washed or brain-dead of academia.

[stlukesguild]

What? When? I just stabilished a fact with the obvious aim to ridicularize north-americans. Yes, defending Poe, the ever under-rated most influential american writer ever and bringing Hawthorne short stories, not his romances, is a jab in the jaw to american silly obssession for the great american novel and the incapacity to understand the best stuff ever wrote there is small like a whale.

While I would counter that there are any number of great American novels... if not "The Great American Novel"... including one about a whale... I will concur. The short-story as a genre of real achievement in American literature (Hawthorne, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Melville, Stephen Crane, Faulkner, Hemingway, O'Connor, Barthleme, etc... is far too often ignored in the focus upon the novel. Of course the novel is what many students are taught IS literature and the analysis of the elements of the novel: plot, character development, setting, etc... is something that doesn't always translate to short stories... to say nothing of essays or poetry. But even here... one needs only look at how central the novel is. How many discussions are there about Melville's or Crane's poetry? About Emerson's poetry or essays (as central as the latter are) to American literature? And how many discussions about American poets in general? Of course there is that American penchant for BIG...

and novels are BIG... poems and short stories aren't.

Yes, I am much more subtle than JBI

Indeed.

[Leland Gaunt]

You began this thread asking for help with understanding classic literature. A half dozen members who have far more experience than you in reading classic literature have made any number of quite diplomatic suggestions... and you continue to blow them all off. Dante is laden with shortcomings? Funny... the Divine Comedy is seen by a great many literary scholars and readers as perhaps the single greatest literary achievement in the West... and one of the most polished. You admit that this is the first poem longer than two pages that you have read... and yet you somehow feel confident to dismiss the work as weak philosophy (and no doubt you've read Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and the other Greek and Roman philosophers that Dante was engaged in a dialog with), weak expressions of love and friendship, and lacking in logic. So everyone else must be wrong?: your teachers, all the professors over the ages who studied Dante, all the subsequent writers whose writings built upon him... from his own era to T.S. Eliot, J.L. Borges, James Joyce, Eugenio Montale, and any number of other Modern and even contemporary writers... to say nothing of the array of composers and painters and artists in every genre who have drawn inspiration from Dante.

Seriously, I suspect you really don't want help... and you never did. You simply want others to agree with you. You want to argue that the fault is all with Dante or Shakespeare... and with your teachers... and with all those ignorant academics and professors and lovers of literature who have made Shakespeare and Dante the cornerstones of Western literature. We here have all acknowledged that you need not like Dante or Shakespeare or any writer... but that's not enough. With your profound grasp of literature you want to argue with those who have read far more than yourself in the hope that they will come around to sharing your opinion: "yes, junior... you are right... Dante does suck... and your teachers and all those dry academics... they don't know what they are talking about..." Diplomacy only goes so far before one is tempted to suggest that perhaps you are simply in over your head

I have never once said that Dante sucks, that my teachers were dry, or that I think I am better than the various esteemed people you mentioned. You are too intelligent to fall into the strawman fallacy. I am sorry but the fact that many respectable people view the material in a positive light, is not enough for me. But it was enough for me to question my initial judgement, and I came here to understand it better. I was received with plenty of good advice like persist and grow as a person, I vowed to do both and to also study poetry more in an attempt to increase my chances of reaching understand. But I have also received vague praises of the poem. Please do show me examples of logic, deeper meaning, passages of particular beauty etc... The thought that I missed something on my first read excites me, almost as much of learning more philosophy. It is to these insufficient anwers that I post my criticisms, that were answered with bunk. I truly do want to improve my understanding of literature.

Not knowing your literature teacher, I can't judge exactly to what extent you are right. It is possible that her teaching is not the most inspiring. That said, I think the key word in your response is "expectations." I think you are right that you have inflated expectations, though not possibly in the way you are thinking. Your problem may partly lie in what you are expecting from your learning experience. I would think about this in two ways. First, remember that your teacher is only human. From your teacher's point of view she is facing a large and varied group of people, all who are at different points of understanding and ability and she is trying to find ways that she can ensure that all these students come away with a basic understanding of these texts and some sort of interpretative or analytic skills. This may mean that she needs to cover things in a way that may seem redundant or boring or reductive to some in order to make sure that she gets through on some level or another to all. You say that your teacher is enthusiastic and really trying to get you excited about her subject, which sounds like a teacher who, at the very least, is making a good faith effort. As such, as a human being trying her best at what is not an easy job she does deserve basic respect. This doesn't mean that you have to agree with or even like her teaching, but you're not being productive for either yourself or her if you end up using her as the scapegoat for your own lack of appreciation for literature (I don't know to what extent this is true, but you've made allusions to clashing with your teachers and other comments that make it sound like you're frustrated with and actively criticizing your teacher a fair amount).

This brings us to the second point about expectations, which is that you may even be absolutely right that your teacher is not the greatest or most inspiring lit. instructor. You may be right that she is teaching in a reductive fashion. You may have perfectly legitimate reasons for being frustrated with the way classes are conducted (and I don't know if any of these things is actually true or not). Even if this is the case, however, it does not give you a legitimate reason to dismiss the literature that is being taught in that class. As several people on this thread have been saying, part of the reward of sophisticated works of literature, part of the way they teach us to be better thinkers and help us to expand ourselves, is that they require the reader to put effort in, to struggle with, spend extended time with, really get to know the work on all its levels. If you expect that your class is supposed to give you everything to get you to a full and sophisticated understanding of what you are reading, then you probably will be disappointed, because such reading requires you to step up and do a lot of work yourself.

I am sorry to hear that your classroom experience has made you reject some works of literature, and I recognize that this could be partly because you're fed up with a teaching style you find frustrating. I have certainly been in classes with teachers I find frustrating, reductive, boring etc. However, it also sounds as though you are rejecting some of this literature partly because you are allowing that way of teaching to shape your whole understanding of the text, when it sounds like what your teacher is doing is only addressing one level or layer of the text that she hopes will be helpful. Saying that analyzing a book at any level makes it impossible to enjoy the reading experience is a little like saying that learning music theory and technique to play the violin or the guitar ruins a person's ability to appreciate music just for fun. Analysis and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive. If the analysis you are doing in class is not helpful, then that could be for two reasons. One is that you are bored because you already get all the symbolism etc. and you want to move on from basic or even reductive analytical points to more interesting things. If this is the case, then you really don't have a problem. You can just go ahead and perform the easy in class assignments and answer the facile questions and then move on to thinking about more complex issues in the book on your own. The other possibility is that you don't understand the type of analysis the teacher is trying to get you to do. If this is the case then you need to stop blaming the teacher, the book and all sorts of other things and address the things that you don't understand. This may mean telling the teacher (in a respectful way that is open to communicating) that you don't understand her approach and asking for more explanation. Or, if you can't seem to communicate with your teacher then you can ask particular questions of people here or other students who do well in the class etc.

Though everything about my teachers has been true, I appreciate you reserving judgement. I am sorry if it seems as if I have been berating my teachers, what usually happens is after an essay I will add an extra paragraph where I express my opinion of the book. To which they give an enthusiastic but unsatisfactory response. So I thought it over, and decided that it was a combination of factors. Which is why I used an OP that allowed for all three, and I have received answers that only validate my initial opinion. I have found that this is the best way for me to form a reasonable opinion, that is to discuss topics with knowledgable individuals who have differing opinions. I am able to decide what arguments are valid through how they are refuted, and up to this point most of the answers I have been given supporting the book have not been convincing. I have on multiple occasions stated my intention to utilize the ones that were. With symbols my main problem is I find most of them to be unnecessary. For example while reading Ethan Frome, we were told that the cat represents Zeena's presence between Mattie and Ethan when they are alone. Unneeded, the fact that Zeena would continue to separate the two, even when not actually present, is obvious. So the cat is just a cat, and the ten minutes spent discussing the cat have been a waste. I have only completely rejected one work, and that is The Scarlet Letter. The rest I have just been deterred from.

This is a highly simplistic reading of Dante. Reading the inferno as a straightforward succession of moral lessons would indeed be worthy of a circle in and of itself. If you're a fan of philosophy and political theory then there really should be a lot in Dante to sink your teeth into, but it may take more time and background knowledge to get to these other layers of meaning at work.

Again, the only way you're really going to get better at reading classic literature, as you say you would like to in your OP, is by discussing it, so post a passage from a writer that you don't like/don't understand for us all to really talk about. Otherwise I know I can't be of any more help.

Actually, the burden of proof is on you. It is impossible to prove that something does not exist, it is up to you fellows to prove that the something does indeed exist.

Love for literature, its a major theme on Dante and nothing a modern catholic family represents.
The notion of past authors influence is also a major example of what you find in Dante.
The point is that you haven't "read" this friendship.
Sure, and there Lady Gaga and Dan Brown may be found
You mean you could not see it. Sometimes it happens, I do not see something in a book, then i Notice the undeniable historical influence of the book and I do not need to ask, It was my problem.
So, why were you upset with Stlukes?
Just atheist.

His love for literature, and his expression of it in the poem, in no way enhances the poem.
I could care less who influenced him, what matters is what he has written down.
I haven't read of numerous friendships. Why this one over the others?
I tend to avoid all three, why should I venture to somewhere that contains them? Also, is that an agreement that idealistic love is juvenile. because I don't see any other way to spin it.
I reiterate, this does not affect the actual content of the poem.
I was only upset with him in the beginning, and I made a complete *** out of myself. For which I apologized.
How wonderfully broad, you being just an atheist.

[Quark]

Actually, the burden of proof is on you. It is impossible to prove that something does not exist, it is up to you fellows to prove that the something does indeed exist.

Okay, that's true, but you're not being terribly forthcoming about what you think would be proof. What is it that you're looking to get out of literature that you're not getting? Why does Orwell work for you, but not any of the others? You need to spell this out a little more. Otherwise, posters are just shooting in the dark. Give some examples of good literature and bad literature from these writers. You can't expect direct and concrete answers to vague, hopelessly large questions. Say a little more about what you think you're missing (obviously it must be something since you started a thread with "help me understand" in the title) and give some examples.