Comments on: Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

By: mariegauthier

mariegauthier — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:00:22 +0000

For the record, Gulliver’s Travels was flogged when I was in college, and it thoroughly deserved it.

Also for the record, I still read it, all the way through, every one of those three times it was assigned.

Did you read Ahab’s Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund, as an aside? Do you read novels outside of class, just ’cause?

By: emmabolden

emmabolden — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:30:10 +0000

Ross, Moby Dick is TEH AWESOME. I am very sad to say that I didn’t read it until I was in graduate school, at which point I was so, SO ready to plow through chapter after chapter of cetology. In fact, I think that might’ve been my favorite part.

I think that, at this point, a lot of my students have adopted the “just don’t read it” policy. After years of flogging great literature, I can’t say that I don’t see their point.

By: emmabolden

emmabolden — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:28:40 +0000

Ah, Marie, how I understand your feelings on Gulliver’s Travels!!! I’ve taught it three years in a row — and am so tired of trying to spell the word “Houhyhnhmn” on the board that I’m thinking of trying the dreaded “The Rape of the Lock” instead.

By: Ross

Ross — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:57:00 +0000

Why, why, why must high schools continue to flog great literature until it’s dead?

On the flipside, I remember being the only person in my AP English classes to finish several of the novels. When I read Moby Dick by the assigned date, I was openly ridiculed for having no life. Only two or three other classmates would admit to having opened it, and they all stopped when they hit the chapters on cetology.

So, in order to avoid the trauma of literature taught poorly, my classmates simply didn’t read.

By: mariegauthier

mariegauthier — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:53:48 +0000

I sympathize! — I had to read Gulliver’s Travels 3 semesters in a row — I truly madly deeply loathe that book.

By: emmabolden

emmabolden — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:40:00 +0000

I must admit that I am terribly behind on my James. During our fiction semester in high school, we had to read the first paragraph of Portrait of a Lady and discuss/worship it every. Bloody. Semester. By the end of the third year of doing so, I kind of hated all things James-related.

I need to get over my adolescent hissy fit and go back and read what I’ve missed!

By: mariegauthier

mariegauthier — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:40:59 +0000

I think of Whitman & H. James as 2 sides of the same lonely coin—one, a poetry of capaciousness, the other, spare prose. Not that James couldn’t go on, but think of Washington Square — anyway, they both make me very sad.