As I was doing my homework today, I asked myself "Laura, how many times have you read at least part of Frederick Douglass' book? Common Sense? Various poems?" The answer is "many times." Between my history classes and lit classes throughout the years, I think I have read Common Sense at least once a year since 8th grade. Then there are those poems that every lit teacher feels the need to study like "The Lady of Shalott" or "The Flea" or "Sonnet 116." All of these have some kind of literary merit so I understand the importance of reading and understanding them, but I find it very ironic. See ALL of my English professors have complained or mentioned at some point how they just can't share every piece of literature with us in one semester, so we have to just make do with the important ones, or what the world has deemed a part of the literary cannon. The thing is that if each professor would stray away from the normal syllabus and pick something new, we could actually learn something new and important. It's also funny because much of what we deem worthy of so much study today were the books/poems that nobody actually bought/read when they were published.
Again, I'm not saying that the literary cannon isn't important, but more that there are SO MANY OTHER WORKS out there that we should have the chance to study in an academic setting. That's the lit class I want to take, English 325 Studies in the Forgotten Books.
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you're so right!
ReplyDeleteTeacher Ashley says: we have to make sure everything gets covered and in the way we think it should be covered, and there are always a few students who have never read those works. I try to poll and see ahead of time, but I don't want to be the lit teacher who never taught Lady of Shallot, letting a whole class of kids fall through the cracks without reading about the magic web of colors gay.
ReplyDeleteStudent Ashley says: How many bloody times do I have to read A Modest Proposal!?
Perhaps your professors are right to select only poems with literary merit. I mean, why study poems that are not good and beneficial? You may be asking yourself, "how do I know if a poem is beneficial or not?" Here's how you can find out in two simple questions:
ReplyDeleteOne, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and two, How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great.
You see, perhaps those "forgotten books" were forgotten for a reason. As implied in the measurement of a poem, they can't be that good if they were forgotten.
Jake...10 points
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