OldLady
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2015
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Well, they've been attacking the white male canon for at least fifty years, women first--slim pickings--i had to read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice three times in college, the Brontes. Lol. I still chuckle at my philosophy prof Humanities teacher ranting about the psychopath Heathcliff and the sick twisted dysfunctional relationship between he and Catherine. Honestly. Philosophers. Or should I say "men"? But I loved Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath.It's been a long time since I read it, but probably the very first line is the reason: kids shouldn't have to read anything written more than 70 years ago, because everything should be in modern vernacular.God, I hate when they do that.
Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those "in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm
Meghan Cox Gurdon: Even Homer gets mobbed -- a Mass. school has banned 'The Odyssey'
The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of "intersectional" power struggles.www.foxnews.com
Yeah, that's it, that's the article I read, too. Any ideas on why they would ban the Odyssey? I always thought Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs was quite a refreshing feminist statement ---- I'm just not seeing the problem. And besides, Brad Pitt played Achilles in the movie, wow. Gotta love that. There is some bad violence right at the end, but lots of books have terrible violence in them and that isn't a leftist reason to ban them all, apparently, so far. I wish that article had gone into more depth: they asked a question they didn't answer.
I completely and categorically disagree with these people. I'm an English teacher, so I know a little about it. Yes, it can be tough for students with poor reading skills to wade through Hawthorne, or an epic poem like the Odyssey. The first few goes at Shakespeare are like a foreign language. To get reluctant or poor readers to read ( which is the only way to improve their skills) YES you start with high interest fiction written in easy to understand language. As their facility and interest increases, then you feed them a bit of something that twists the language around a bit. I liked to use James Herriott, who wrote the All Creatures Great and Small stories sometimes. Then you can try a little Mark Twain. A little Hawthorne (although I personally wouldn't chose him either), some Walt Whitman...my freshmen loved Romeo and Juliet, wanted me to read it to them. It was meant to be heard, performed, not read. It stretches their proficiency in understanding complex sentence structure, builds vocabulary and gives them a window into another time and place. All very good things.
Sorry. Couldn't help myself. These people are full of shit and I hope they get booted out of that school fast, for the kids' sake.
Yes, of course we agree on that. As for Shakespeare, I remember a woman saying it was a foreign language to her; she couldn't understand it at all. I felt like that about Chaucer early on. But I'm three plays from the end of the Shakespeare canon, and it comes with a dividend, Chaucer of course. It's an issue of practice.
As for the vernacular thing, I read that but it didn't compute ---- I can see it re Hawthorne, which would be read in the (difficult) original, but no one would read the Odyssey in the original, and almost no one can even translate 8th century BC Greek. (I once met the great translator of both the Homer stories, Richmond Lattimore, and he had wonderful things to say. I've read his translations over and over, since.) So ----- why don't they teach an up-to-date translation? There must be lots. There's a new translation of Don Quixote out, which is quite modern, and I'm reading the new Tom Holland translation of Herodotus, which is positively chatty. I like new translations: I agree that stilted 19th century verbiage isn't maybe the best way to teach a classic, but people are doing new translations all the time now.
However, on talking this over with my husband, he says the point is not that the Odyssey is racist-sexist-whatever but that banning it makes time-room for black writing or whatever lesser lights. "The steeples must be cut down so the chimneys can aspire." That the Odyssey was written by a white male, so it should be discarded on that basis alone. I expect he's right, that this is why they want to ban older classics.
i liked the African American additions to the canon...Toni Morrison, whose Son of Solomon is one of the best American novels of the 20th century, seriously. Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin... lots of good writers. Of course, being an English major AND a bookworm, I didn't have to worry about missing out on anyone. I read as many classics and recommended books as I could.
Many of these I didn't read 'tIl after high school; I don't remember a whole lot of classics in high school. Shakespeare each year, Huck Finn, Steinbeck, Thoreau, Salinger, Harper Lee. But we read a lot of "relevant adolescent fiction," too. It was already a thing in 1970.
I suppose for folks who aren't going to spend much time in lit class it's hard to decide with such a wonderful smorgasbord to choose from. I certainly don't think kids are missing out by reading The Bluest Eye instead of Wuthering Heights.
There are a lot of voices competing for space in the canon. Women, Native Americans, Asian Americans, blacks, Hispanics, even white trash like Chute and Dorothy Allison. Love 'em all.
