The truth about literature

[RCBH928]

Hello,

I just want some input on literature, because I might be getting the wrong idea. I passed over a business article and it mentioned a book called Atlas Shrugged. It kind of has mixed reviews. Which brought back ideas I had earlier on about literature.

I honestly think that the media makes whatever literature they want famous or not. Thats it. This media includes schools and universities.

I say this because I have read only few books but I can tell what is going on. I had some crazy English teacher back at school that would strip every word from the book to analyze , I won't be surprised if she would ask how does the color of the walls in the main character's room affect the plot (even if it was never mentioned). What is going on is, that any piece of literature you pay so much attention to can sound very important.

Personally I like stories, and I like the creative ones that are non-repetitive . Stuff like Romeo and Juliet is pretty creative if you think about the events. But in a lot of other books its just SOOO hyped over nothing.

For example, there is this book that I didn't know about. It is titled "Catcher in the Rye". I had no idea what a rye is. This person comes a long and tells me to read this book because the main character is like me. So I did. I didn't get it. This world famous book is just about some person running away from home and upset about over some stuff in his life. There is nothing important happening, why is this book so famous?

Another book that was a total upset was Lord of the Flies. This is like one of the most important books ever at school. I am not sure what is so exciting. All it is saying that people will always fight for power and segregate. I am very sure this is not the first book to mention this idea. Why is it so famous and important?

On the opposite , I read Animal Farm which I appreciate a lot. I will be honest I would have not known by my own what was going on really, but the whole thing is an amazing novel and great reflection of what was happening to the world during the author's lifetime. It is amazing how each character in the story represents something important. I know why this novel is great.

1984 a book I read, I am also not sure why it is so important . Maybe when it came out it had new ideas, but whatever he is talking about is same old same old. But I will give this one a pass because I might not have understood it.

Do you think I can't spot the important stuff in literature, or is my opinion right, the media hypes whatever they want. If you pay so much attention to most stories and novels you probably would have them all on par , but they choose to pay attention to who.

Something to think about is Shakespeare, I know he is a great writer, but they make him sound as if he is the ONLY great writer out there. If they would pay so much attention to someone else, I think they might find others very close to him(maybe surpass him).

Can you give your point of view on literature?

[Octopod]

1984 and Animal Farm are both great books, Catcher in the Rye was boring as hell, Ayn Rand I have nothing nice to say about at all.

Edit: As for literature I do not really care. When I was a teenager I read a lot of "classics" because I thought it would make me witty and clever and I could seem more intelligent by talking about them. Now I read shit like Robert E Howard, H P Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the like. I believe reading should be fun.

[zxqdms]

You should write a book about a global literature conspiracy.

[dlmvii]

When I was in high school, we read Lord of the Flies in english class. Our teacher did much the same thing in terms of symbolism, drawing parallels between things that were clearly not meant to be meaningful. On a side note, I also took a class called Rise of Western Civilization, and the teacher there did this kind of thing as well, and there was an essay question on an exam asking us to link Revolution by the Beatles with Oliver Cromwell...

[lordofduct]

first starters the books you bring up are high school level books. It's why you read them in high school. They're well known books that start introducing you to broad themes in novels.

These books begin down a road towards what advanced literature is like. It's to practice reading between the lines because a character, colour, mood, or anything could be an allegory for something completely different.

But why are these books so important? Well there's a few reasons. First off saying it's media hype is a bit redundant and non-sensical. Literature is media...

media: noun - the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely.

Furthermore lumping schools and universities into the definition, when they are not, opens the gate to subjigate any institute as media. Then losing all meaning to the word, because to say "media hype" would just mean "hype"... so why not just "why is it so hyped" in general then abstracting a word like media to a limit where it loses its meaning. Oh and a reason why literature is good in and of its own (not that I'm questioning if you think literature is good or bad).



So on to those books. Why are they important.

Well for starters it is hype. A set of books have to be selected for students to read. A large collection of which are either on state or national lists of books to read. These are books that teachers have decided are very good examples of advanced reading for high schoolers, that touch on topics relevent in contemporary times, and are succesful American classics (yes most of the books read in high school are American classics, we're America... I guess that's a pride thing). The fact that every student is going to end up reading most of the books on this list, and most people don't read a whole lot themselves unless required, they tend to be the books most people know. Thus the hype. We've all read them, so of course their 'popular' in the sense that everyone knows them.

It's not like we are calling these books the best novels of all time... far from... actually a lot of scholars will laugh and smirk at you like the elitists they are if you thought these were the greats. They're good... they're respected... and they can be easily applied to the classroom.

So since most of the hype is coming from the mere fact it's just because everyone has been required to read those books at some time. The only question left is WHY were these books chosen. Which I sort of touched on... lets expand on that.


The novelists who wrote these books tend to be fathers of a genre, idea, method, time period, etc. Mark Twain is a world wide celebrated American novelist loved by all... hated by few... and created some of the original American boyhood stories with political overtones and dark witty humour. Orwell created some of the most well known and poiniant political commentaries against communism (and of course we have to have anti-communism propoganda in America... it was only 20 years ago we got out of the cold war). That or they were just bizarre extravagant individuals... like Fitzgerald and Salinger (the guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye), both being wealthy messed up individuals, Salinger especially with his very VERY reclusive life. They not just as novelists, but as famous people, are archetypes of our nation.

The themes covered are relevent to teenagers and American socio-politics. Animal Farm and 1984 easily being explained with their strong anti-communistic themes. Catcher in the Rye being the archetypical post-modern boy coming of age story. Really in high school english you read a LOT of post-modern literature... or excerpts from (Hemmingway... the father of post-modern literature).

The books aren't long, they really should be able to be read in less then a weeks time. Most novels from prior to the early 20th century were freakin' huge... back then people got paid by the word and would stretch books out. Think Moby Dick with chapters dedicated to describing the process of cleaning and processing whale blubber... these older books would just go on and on, they had reasons, they were trying to shed light on certain atrocities (Oliver Twist and 18th century work conditions in London, Moby Dick and the whaling industry). But they were also trying to make a buck. In the 20th century we cut a lot of this crap out... so our catalog consists mostly of these books or shoot novels from the past and post-modern literature which formed in the early 20th century.

The books aren't hard. The verbage is relatively easy to grasp. The themes are things adolescents would understand. But the underlying themes are usually hidden and need to be pulled out from between the lines. But due to the rather simple text, it's in a form that makes it easy for younger people to learn how to read between the lines... as long as they try.

And lastly a lot of them are staples in literature. 1984 was a book never seen before, the way it went about portraying fascism and all that was an eye opener to people. Consider the book was written just after WWII and at the wake of the McCarthy era. It was a time of collapsing nations, and the iron curtain being raised in Russia. We had just discovered the bomb and everything. This book was relevent and prominent to the times. Romeo and Juliet is a given, it's THE romance story... Shakespeare invented the tragic love story that would be reused for the ages... anything shakespeare is to literature as the Atari and Colecovision are to the home console industry. It revolutionized story telling in English (not internationally I have to say, but for English... explanation of that is a whole different topic).




Are the books you listed down right amazing? Meh, that's up to you. If you don't like em', whatever... you aren't required to like them. You were told to read them because if you didn't, advanced literature would just blow you out of the water. Try reading James Joyce... oh my fucking God... some amazing stuff in there, but holy shit the way he puts it down on paper, it'll baffle you. I picked up "Finnegans Wake", one of his most famous novels, and the first fucking paragraph sent me digging through dictionaries and periodicals of the time. Just look at this:


warning, James Joyce is notorious for bad grammar and the use of a lot of slang, a lot of which he himself invented

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war; nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time....

We can't even start explaining what the hell that means if you haven't gotten through 1984 or the ilk.

Does this mean it's necessary though? Oh dear God know. Nor is Calculus for most people. But shit, I loved the quote my writing teacher had on his wall:

It may be true you will only use 10% of what you learn in High School... the question is what 10% will it be!

Now if you dig further more, ignoring Finnegans Wake for its notorious nonsense. Other novels of great reverence and importance still more are difficult to understand. Take "The Canterbury Tales" in any of its translations, yeah its probably the earliest know English fiction, but the original text is so bizarre of a language that you just wouldn't fucking get it. It's scary different. But even the translations and modernizations are difficult to digest. Or we can get into contemporary literature full of all kinds of crap, that you'll have to read in College... and understand... and are required to graduate with a Bachelor, I don't care the majour.

But swing all back to the original point. No these books aren't hyped as being the greats... they are really good book that serve a really good purpose on more then one level. Not only entertainment, but also in education. The mere fact they are so well known, is just in the fact that so many people have read them... it is a product of standardization.

[lordofduct]

Oh and no one has every called Shakespeare the only great writer. And if you know anyone who has, they're closed minded twits. He's extremely respected, as I said he was the father of the tragic love story. He brought theatre to the masses in a day when well, England didn't have a lot of "entertainment" for the working class. The working class did just that, they worked. Shakespeare didn't just write for lords and the rich... he wrote and put on plays for EVERYONE... this was a brand new idea in his day.

Furthermore, yeah, there are better writers then him. Because his stories weren't that complex really. They were meant to be simple. They made examples of complex themes (several philosophical ones invented long before Shakespeare in places like Greece)... but he brought it to a new age, and to the working class. He brought literature to the ignorant at the dawn of the renaissance when people were still washing themselves of the dark ages intellectually.

He's not the greatest... he's one of the most influential. He is one of the most revolutionary modern artists.

Selections of "great novelists" don't just weigh on the quality of the word, but also the quality of the person's influence. George Orwell writes a pretty dry story really, anything he wrote that wasn't political probably sucks ball sacks. But the topic he wrote about, the influence it conveyed, that was huge.

Same goes for Catcher in the Rye... though not so politically driven as Orwell or Shakespeare... it still was a revolutionary work of the 20th century in that it brought the male self-battle theme of post-modern literature (read Hemingway and you'll know what I mean by male self-battle) to the level of a child. It was a public view of adolescence and how it had evolved. It's something we might not quite get today because well, we're young... we weren't around before the 50's. But the "turning into a man" stage of our lives is MUCH different then what it used to be. And this text is commentary on just that. The battle a boy has with himself against the world... and how he lashes out poorly... crippling himself in the act.

[Xonticus]

You should write a book about a global literature conspiracy.

Wouldn't it be ironic if it were a bestseller on the NY Times?

[General Chaos]

I think it's important to first ask whether you HAVE gotten anything out of other books, perhaps more contemporary.

Secondly, if you have not, it seems you just aren't getting the "messages" from books that really may or may not be intended by the authors.

If you find yourself in this situation, then ask yourself whether or not you at least enjoy some of these books, regardless of whether or not a larger moral is derived from them. If this is the case, I would suggest you should read literature that entertains you, knowing that eventually some larger meaning may crystallize for you, or it may not.

I'll comment on a couple of works/authors you've mentioned.

As for Rand, contrary to what others may think, I actually believe she is a better philosopher than a writer of fiction. If you like her ideas at all but can't stomach her plodding narratives and melodramatic characters, try picking up something like The Virtue of Selfishness, or even the Ayn Rand Lexicon (parts of which can be found here: http://aynrandlexicon.com/)

As for Golding's Lord of the Flies, what can I say--I think it's a fabulous book. It's eerie and entertaining, and its themes stick with you long after finishing. Of course, this is just me. If you feel differently, just move on and find something that entertains you. Don't give up on literature though. There is something out there for everyone.

Oh, and may I suggest the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, including Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans, Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie. While some have argued Cooper is sexist, racist, or both, there is little doubt that these novels are amazing adventures. Hawkeye is pretty much the ultimate action hero. He could take down any of these fancy new super heroes.

Edit: Ah, okay; it seems they've actually made a comic book out of it. Read the real books.

[General Chaos]

Take "The Canterbury Tales" in any of its translations, yeah its probably the earliest know English fiction, but the original text is so bizarre of a language that you just wouldn't fucking get it. It's scary different. But even the translations and modernizations are difficult to digest.

The Canterbury Tales is actually a lot of fun, and when you get into it pretty damn crude. My wife asked me to stop telling her about the stories in it because of how offensive they can be.

Chaucer is a badass.

[jfrost]

Take "The Canterbury Tales" in any of its translations, yeah its probably the earliest know English fiction, but the original text is so bizarre of a language that you just wouldn't fucking get it. It's scary different. But even the translations and modernizations are difficult to digest.

The Canterbury Tales is actually a lot of fun, and when you get into it pretty damn crude. My wife asked me to stop telling her about the stories in it because of how offensive they can be.

Chaucer is a badass.

And he has a blog.