Could someone help me understand "classic" literature

[LitNetIsGreat]

What is it with youth and their need for instant gratification? This thread reminds me of one of my favourite fables:

There were two wolves upon a hill. An old wise wolf and a young rash snappy wolf. They looked down upon a big green field and spotted two nice fluffy sheep. The young wolf said "let's run down and get one" to which the old wolf replied "let's walk down and get them both".

Really though you are expecting too much too soon, literature of this type just does not operate on that sort of level as I said before. It might be best to read a little more before taking on one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Just a suggestion like...

[Leland Gaunt]

Given that response, I will follow in Quark's wake, and cede the field. If you despise it all then what are you looking for here?

As Quark knows, I find the work of Dickens hard to love, and yet as Petrarch does with Faulkner, I make the effort to still read the novelist and appreciate what he was in the Victorian era without damning him--it resides in my love of scholarship for its own sake, which, as I've indicated, isn't for everyone. Since you love backpacking, maybe you should check out Stegner; his work deals with demythologizing the western frontier.

My response was not that I despised Dante. My response was that I do not respect the reasons given so far as to why I should like Dante. Why would I read something over again that I despise? What do you want out of exaggerating my statements? Thank you for the reading suggestion.

Actually, in a dispute such as this... when one person with limited experience in the field is challenging the accepted judgment of the larger portion of experts in the field (academics, writers, and common readers in Virginia Woolf's sense of the term) the basis of proof is upon the person who is challenging the accepted values. Beside which, quite frankly Dante has no need forme or anyone else to defend him. His position in the canon of classic literature is quite secure regardless of the complaints of any number of high-school and college literature students.

Nope, it is always, always, always on those that would take the position you have. Is that the only way you can win, by creating boundaries that force those with an opposite opinion into a logical fallacy? The bolded part is exactly the problem, you are putting his work upon a god-like, untouchable pedestal, and no literature is that good.

The utter bollocks is the sophomoric notion that any work of art exists in a vacuum or that its merits are solely measured on an individual basis. How is that even possible? To offer up a judgment of any individual work there must be some concept of what the standards for "good" and "bad" are. How are these standards developed if not in comparison. T.S. Eliot in his seminal essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent offered a view of the relationship of the writer to tradition and the influence of earlier writers:

No I feel that philosophy (which you have claimed The Divine Comedy to be), exists by itself and the only judge of it is yourself. Now after you have read enough philosophy and found what clicks with you then I suppose you will start comparing work, but until that glorious day each philosophy is on it's own uncompared. Fiction on the other hand does need comparison with other works, but really any fictional book that philosophizes too much will be dry and the characters will suffer for it. Since you have replaced the idea that the Western hemisphere is a monolithic entity with the same motivations, ideals, values, behavior, beliefs etc... and that all of these can be traced back to Dante with, that works can't be judged alone, as utter bollocks. Do you agree with the former? Could you please argue with your own words, I didn't realize that I was discussing the matter with T.S. Eliot.

A work of art attains the status of a literary classic because of its impact upon (and the opinions of) subsequent writers, readers, critics, and other literary experts or academics. Your analogy with Das Kapital is completely misleading because Das Kapital has never been accepted as a major literary creation. Its influence was political, not literary. One might just as well suggest that Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica are major works of literature because of their influence on the sciences.

The Comedia has attained a preeminent level of esteem as a work of literature among critics, literary academics, writers, and readers and yet you would argue that the work is grossly flawed or fails to meet certain standards based upon what? Your own personal opinion? We have all granted you that. No one can be made to like something. It is doubtful that they can even be convinced by logic into liking something. But you are not simply stating that you personally dislike the work... rather you are suggesting a range of flaws that suggest the fault is in Dante... and again this criticism is based upon what? Your own deep reading of literature?

I used Das Kapital as something revolutionary in general, as opposed to something revolutionary in literature. The point still stands. Not grossly flawed, I have never said that(really now, I have never seen so many strawmen outside of political discussion or the state of Iowa) but it did fail to meet my standards. Standards like fiction should be enjoyed for it's character, plot, and setting as opposed to it's philosophy. Philosophy texts should be judged on their philosophy and enjoyed for the ideas they present. Same for political theory. Haha, you say that as if you have presented logic into this thread. Nope I have said nothing beyond that I personally disliked the work, I have only criticised others interperation and the significance placed on it. I've yet to claim that Dante is to blame, but I reserve the possibility that he could be. I was curious as to why others like it. Moved them/meant something personal to them-excellent, it's a classic-poor, others liked it-poor, it was influential-poor. By whose standards should I judge things by, then? Yours? Great now if you could just get me a list of all the books that you have read, what you thought of them, and why you thought those things. Then we could get started.

Really though you are expecting too much too soon, literature of this type just does not operate on that sort of level as I said before. It might be best to read a little more before taking on one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Just a suggestion like...

That's fair, I'm just beginning to doubt that literature of this type is worth the time.

[spookymulder93]

That's fair, I'm just beginning to doubt that literature of this type is worth the time.

Everyone is different dude. Literature might not be your thing and even if it is you don't have to like everything that everyone else likes. If you don't like Dante it's alright, because unless your killed or die life will continue to go on and I'm sure there is a lot of other stuff out there that you DO like.

But since you HAVE to do this for a class I advice you to try to take some advice from these guys and put some of it in your paper and get that passing grade and be done with it.

[Leland Gaunt]

I already get passing grades. Besides that it's not literature I don't like, it's this sort of literature.

[billl]

...I'm just beginning to doubt that literature of this type is worth the time.

I already get passing grades. Besides that it's not literature I don't like, it's this sort of literature.

Perhaps this sort of literature isn't worth your time (at the very least, not yet), is what you were trying to say. Then the problem is how to deal with assignments. If checking out some of the discussions in the areas of this forum devoted to Dante, Shakespeare, etc. isn't enough to earn your respect for these guys, then you might be able to track down some professional critic discussing them. Really, even checking out Cliff's Notes would probably open your eyes to why some people find these writers worthwhile. (I don't want to promote Cliff's Notes, really: but I will point out that your local used book store probably has some cheap used copies of the Cliff's Notes for most of this stuff that is boring you. And they can really be surprisingly insightful, when one is disposed, for whatever reason, to not like some particular work of literature.)

[Leland Gaunt]

Perhaps this sort of literature isn't worth your time (at the very least, not yet), is what you were trying to say. Then the problem is how to deal with assignments. If checking out some of the discussions in the areas of this forum devoted to Dante, Shakespeare, etc. isn't enough to earn your respect for these guys, then you might be able to track down some professional critic discussing them. Really, even checking out Cliff's Notes would probably open your eyes to why some people find these writers worthwhile. (I don't want to promote Cliff's Notes, really: but I will point out that your local used book store probably has some cheap used copies of the Cliff's Notes for most of this stuff that is boring you. And they can really be surprisingly insightful, when one is disposed, for whatever reason, to not like some particular work of literature.)

Heh, probably should have clarified, I don't think this is worth my time. No thanks though, me reading critiques and entire forum boards would defeat the purpose of not focusing on this type of literature. Reading things over and over again, and reading about them over and over again, and spending years just trying to thoroughly figure out what a book means simply does not appeal to me. Besides that I can already perform what the teachers ask of me and complete all the assignments, so far anyway.

[billl]

OK, I was just saying, in case you were having trouble finishing the books or figuring out how to handle assignments.
(You know about Cliff's Notes, right? They are hardly a step towards over-analysis...)

[Leland Gaunt]

(You know about Cliff's Notes, right? They are hardly a step towards over-analysis...)

You certainly are persistent, and I mean that in a good way.

[OrphanPip]

Now after you have read enough philosophy and found what clicks with you then I suppose you will start comparing work, but until that glorious day each philosophy is on it's own uncompared. Fiction on the other hand does need comparison with other works, but really any fictional book that philosophizes too much will be dry and the characters will suffer for it. Since you have replaced the idea that the Western hemisphere is a monolithic entity with the same motivations, ideals, values, behavior, beliefs etc... and that all of these can be traced back to Dante with, that works can't be judged alone, as utter bollocks. Do you agree with the former? Could you please argue with your own words, I didn't realize that I was discussing the matter with T.S. Eliot.

I don't think this is entirely accurate. Philosophy, much like literature, doesn't exist within a vacuum. Most prominent philosophers are in dialogue with their predecessors and peers at some level. Plato perhaps exists within a vacuum because we have little access to what came before him, but a complete understanding of Aristotle is impossible without understanding that he is, in large part, responding to Plato. As to literature philosophizing too much, I'm not sure such a thing can really exist. Plato's writing is often studied both as philosophy and literature because of how it was written, as a dialogue. Moreover, many Existentialist chose to advocate their philosophy directly through fiction. Works like Sartre's No Exit and Camus' Outsider are interesting because of their philosophy, and I don't think this weakens their value as literature, it just makes them a different sort of literature.

Standards like fiction should be enjoyed for it's character, plot, and setting as opposed to it's philosophy. Philosophy texts should be judged on their philosophy and enjoyed for the ideas they present. Same for political theory. Haha, you say that as if you have presented logic into this thread. Nope I have said nothing beyond that I personally disliked the work, I have only criticised others interperation and the significance placed on it.

I think what you call your "standards" of literature are what is putting you at odds with others in this thread. For many, character, plot, and setting are but the surface elements of literature. Sticking to fiction, you can appreciate a novel for so much more than the quality of its basic elements. For example, I love Dickens a great deal and one of Dickens' greatest influences was Henry Fielding. Fielding's novel Tom Jones is a major piece of English literature because of its influence on the English novel, but I personally find it to be a sleeping pill at times. Nonetheless, I read Tom Jones because I wanted to gain a greater understanding of Dickens, an author I do enjoy, and I think I did achieve that at some level. Reading highly influential works increases your ability to understand the stuff that came after it, it gives you new insight into what comes after it. For many there is a lot of value in appreciating the evolution of art and looking at how aesthetics change over time.

That's fair, I'm just beginning to doubt that literature of this type is worth the time.

I'm not the kind of person who reads the Divine Comedy on a regular basis, but it honestly is hard to find an author with as huge an impact on Western literature as Dante. If you don't care about that kind of stuff you don't have to read it though.

[billl]

You certainly are persistent, and I mean that in a good way.

Glad to hear that bright yellow guardian angel is still playing a useful role.

[Leland Gaunt]

and I don't think this weakens their value as literature, it just makes them a different sort of literature.

Yes, and it is a literature that I just can't seem to get into.

Most prominent philosophers are in dialogue with their predecessors and peers at some level.

Yes, but it is not their peer's ideas that I am reading.

I think what you call your "standards" of literature are what is putting you at odds with others in this thread. For many, character, plot, and setting are but the surface elements of literature. Sticking to fiction, you can appreciate a novel for so much more than the quality of its basic elements. For example, I love Dickens a great deal and one of Dickens' greatest influences was Henry Fielding. Fielding's novel Tom Jones is a major piece of English literature because of its influence on the English novel, but I personally find it to be a sleeping pill at times. Nonetheless, I read Tom Jones because I wanted to gain a greater understanding of Dickens, an author I do enjoy, and I think I did achieve that at some level. Reading highly influential works increases your ability to understand the stuff that came after it, it gives you new insight into what comes after it. For many there is a lot of value in appreciating the evolution of art and looking at how aesthetics change over time.

I'm beginning to think that your (everyone who has responded) interest in literature is far greater than mine. I have never once felt an urge to find out by what an author was influenced by, and I only occasionaly dig deeper to understand a piece of fiction. As I have stated before the aesthetics just do not interest me.

[kelby_lake]

Leland, you really need to work on your apostrophes. 'its' for posession. 'it's' means 'it is'. Apostrophes to indicate posession with a plural noun are stuck right at the end: 'peers' ideas'

I like finding out the influences on writers I like- if only just to find other books that I might enjoy reading.

[wessexgirl]

Leland, you really need to work on your apostrophes. 'its' for posession. 'it's' means 'it is'. Apostrophes to indicate posession with a plural noun are stuck right at the end: 'peers' ideas'I like finding out the influences on writers I like- if only just to find other books that I might enjoy reading.

I would be very careful giving advice on grammar here Kelby, including spelling!

[Petrarch's Love]

Milton! Thou shouldst be posting on this thread!. Anyone with the chutzpah "to justify the ways of God to man" surely could justify the ways of literature to youth.

No I feel that philosophy (which you have claimed The Divine Comedy to be), exists by itself and the only judge of it is yourself. Now after you have read enough philosophy and found what clicks with you then I suppose you will start comparing work, but until that glorious day each philosophy is on it's own uncompared. Fiction on the other hand does need comparison with other works, but really any fictional book that philosophizes too much will be dry and the characters will suffer for it. Since you have replaced the idea that the Western hemisphere is a monolithic entity with the same motivations, ideals, values, behavior, beliefs etc... and that all of these can be traced back to Dante with, that works can't be judged alone, as utter bollocks. Do you agree with the former? Could you please argue with your own words, I didn't realize that I was discussing the matter with T.S. Eliot.

Ah, there is more on heaven and earth, Leland, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

Of course individual works stand well on their own, but they are also in dialogue with one another. Each book, each author or philosopher is a voice in conversation with other voices. What St. Luke's and others are suggesting is not a monolithic entity at all, but a diverse, rich and heterogeneous conversation among voices from age to age that weave together to help form the fabric of the culture, art, values, behavior, beliefs and so on of our own age.

But, of course it is alright if you personally aren't getting anything out of certain works at this point in your life. You have lots of interests to explore and things to work out, and it may be absolutely true that you're not in a place where you appreciate or get much out of certain kinds of literature. That's why many people on this thread started out by saying that you probably aren't at a point in your life when this is meaningful for you, and that this is not a bad thing, but that you just need to recognize that this doesn't mean that the books themselves are not potentially meaningful works or that there may not be another point in your life when they are meaningful to you.

As I write this I can't help but think of the first line of the Divina Commedia. I'll quote the opening stanze:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Tant e amara che poco e piu morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai,
diro de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte.

Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there. (Singleton's translation)

As ever, the translation of that first line, "nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" (midway in the journey of our life) doesn't entirely do justice to the power of the original. One clear meaning of that first line is that he is literally writing this as someone midway through his life. It's often remarked that he was about 35 at the time he wrote the Inferno and that, drawing from the biblical authority of psalm 89, which numbers the years of our life as seventy ("Dies annorum nostrorum in ipsis septuaginta anni"), he would thus be in the exact middle of his life according to Medieval and scriptural tradition. However, he does not say the middle of my life, but the middle of our life, thus starting out by placing his journey in a universal context as something that could well apply to all of us. We all will reach the middle of our life. We all may enter into a dark wood.

The line need not only refer to being literally in the middle years of our life, however. An additional interpretation would be that it refers to any point when we are nell mezzo del cammin di nostra, in the middle of our path. That is, he is referring to any time in our lives when we are in the midst of things, traveling along our life's path of work and relationships and every day activities and concerns, and look around to find ourselves lost and confused in the middle of it all. In the next line the translation then says "I found myself in a dark wood", which is accurate but misses some of the nuance of the original. For example, the word for "dark" is "oscura" which evokes, not just the darkness of the wood, but the way it obscures, hides, and the word for "found" is not simply "trovai" but "ritrovai", which connotes not only finding himelf, but re-finding himself, which highlights the suggestion in the line of a reflection inward. In these two opening lines, Dante is describing a space that intrudes upon all of our paths at some time or another. Sometimes it is a short and passing moment when the awareness of your own mortality washes over you and you feel that brief and restless disconnect between your daily activity and something surrounding and permeating that activity that you don't understand. Sometimes it is that space when you lie in bed at some unreal hour of the morning and can feel some strange mixture of a calm detachment from all that makes up our customary sense of reality and an almost palpable and oppressive fear (perhaps like one form of such a moment that Phillip Larkin describes in his quite different poem "Aubade": "I work all day, and get half-drunk at night./ Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare./ In time the curtain-edges will grow light./Till then I see what's really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now..."). Sometimes it is a whole period of a person's life, when they find themselves, in the middle of going through the business of living, thrown completely off track and wandering in the obscurity of the realization that the world does not, in fact, provide many answers combined with an awareness of "what's really always there." This is a space of reflection, of not only facing death, but facing that which "tant e amara che poco e piu morte" (is so bitter that death is hardly more so).

It is from this moment of reflection, of fear, of confronting death and what is scarcely better than death, that the Divine Comedy opens up onto all the many things that crowd a person's mind at such times. Part of what we find with him in the pages that follow are reflections on the events that shape our real-life experience: politics, friendships, those we are tied to by love and those we are tied to by hatred. Another part is a looking back to the past outside our own lives. It is no accident that Virgil is his guide through the inferno. A pagan poet who wrote the great ancient Roman epic, The Aeneid hardly is the most logical choice as a moral guide through the Christian conception of hell, but Dante turns to Virgil as the author of book six of the Aeneid--who has already masterfully described the hero Aeneas' confrontation of death and journey through the pagan underworld-- because he sees in him a voice from the past who has already faced this space of reflection and fear. Dante is trying to grapple with the same things through the lens of his own world, his own religious beliefs, his own personal loves and resentments. He places himself, as an ordinary person like the rest of us facing "nostra vita," "our life" in the position of the mythical epic hero, Aeneas, and it we who now confront the space that in Virgil is braved only by the uncommon and the heroic figure. We turn to Dante as he turned to Virgil, to help us open up the complex boundaries between our own world and that "undiscovered country" we sense pressing in around the ragged edges of our world.

Well, I could go on and on talking about the DC, but my point for the moment is that it will be when you more fully know and identify with this space that intrudes upon the middle of our lives that you may get more out of a work like the Divine Comedy. It will be when you have fallen off your path a bit, when you are oppressed by questions you are fully aware there are no easy answers to, perhaps when you are exploring a more existential mode, or when you have been knocked down by some real-life event, that you may find yourself appreciating what Dante is doing in this work. For some this may not come until somewhere around the literal middle of life's path when they are older. For others it may come earlier for any number of reasons. This is not a judgment, and being in a place in your life to appreciate past literature is just that, a personal and individual state. It doesn't mean you aren't intelligent, or open to many interests, or exploring the world in many wonderful ways. It just means you aren't at the place where connecting with this sort of literature is meaningful yet. For now, the idea of learning it in high school is to make you aware of this work and give you a few practical tips for how you might think about approaching it should you ever find yourself at a point later when it does mean something to you. It's planting a seed now for a potential future harvest.

Well, I think that wraps me up for this thread, but it has got me to thinking that a discussion of Dante might be a really fantastic thing to get going. Looks like there are a lot of Divina Commedia defenders on this thread. I'm going to go start up a discussion thread and anyone who likes (including Leland!) is welcome to join in as they please. Will post a link in a minute.

Edit: Here's the link for Dante discussion purposes: http://www.online-literature.com/for...873#post897873

[LitNetIsGreat]

Milton! Thou shouldst be posting on this thread!. Anyone with the chutzpah "to justify the ways of God to man" surely could justify the ways of literature to youth.

Great idea on the Dante, I've been wanting such a thing for a while, I'll follow it with interest.