Case (
case) wrote in
fandomsecrets2013-02-17 03:55 pm
[ SECRET POST #2238 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2238 ⌋
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no subject
Can we count ancient Greek and Roman literature in with the Classics? (As the picture includes Aesop's Fables, I'm going to anyway.) Because... ahaha, please tell me someone else here has read The Golden Ass. Please. (Among others, but that's certainly the most complete manuscript.)
Or even better, The Satyricon. I shall let Wiki describe it for me, though, because it's been ages since I read it. "The surviving portions of the text detail the misadventures of the narrator, Encolpius, and his lover, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy named Giton. Throughout the novel, Encolpius has a hard time keeping his lover faithful to him as he is constantly being enticed away by others."
Not trying to say you're wrong about them not being the same as the modern books, btw. Just... the things you find in Classical Roman and Greek literature. Craziness.
no subject
I don't feel that blatant pornography is ever considered classical, though.
Pushkin, for instance, has a lot of poems that include obscenities; and although Pushkin is undoubtedly classical, it doesn't occur to anybody to include these things in the school curriculum or whatnot. There's, in fact, a fair amount of people who condemn The Gabrieliad.
no subject
Are you defining classic literature by what's on school curriculums now?
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But I also think that modern school reading tries to include the creme de la creme of the "classical" literature, so it's not entirely unreasonable.
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1. Most kids won't really get it and just giggle
2. Parents will scream at you
Works with heavy sexual content just don't get taught until college/university.
There's also the fact that people putting together school curriculums have to worry about teaching literacy as well as teaching cultural touchstones. A lot of what kids at least in my school district read wouldn't be considered "classics" but instead were used to teach certain basic concepts and filled out some multicultural aspects (The House on Mango Street, for example).
no subject
We didn't get to read any of the awesome stuff from Chaucer or Boccaccio until college; the parents in the rural Bible belt I grew up in would have thrown fits. LOL
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(Anonymous) 2013-02-17 11:38 pm (UTC)(link)My English teachers were awesome (except for junior year, but the others were fucking great)
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(Anonymous) 2013-02-18 06:25 pm (UTC)(link)But then, I had a teacher who thought everything was a metaphor for vaginas/sex in senior year lit class -- except the river in Heart of Darkness. And it was through one of the books he assigned that the class learnt what "snowballing" was... It was a room full of giggling 17/18 year olds and he just looked at us and said, quite dismissive and seriously, "Oh, stop. You'll understand when you're older." That was pretty much the approach. He'd present literature as it is, no dumbing down for age. (In retrospect it sounds sort of pervy? But it really wasn't. I know what perv teachers are like and he was not one of them. He merely wanted to treat us like adults.)
He certainly didn't shy away from sexual content. (We also watched Pulp Fiction in class.) Granted it was gifted English and we expected to be more mature and intelligent than the rest of the school population, but still.
I will say I don't know any one else who's had quite the same "liberal" approach to sexual content in their senior English classes. It's certainly not the norm and there's likely a good reason for that.
We also read a lot of the "classics" throughout the years. I can't say I liked all of them, but the one thing I did learn is that holy shit they are diverse and apart from them being considered "classics" and well-written (supposedly) there is nothing else in common across the genres.
I'm not sure what my point was here. I guess some teachers say, "Fuck the system," and teach sexual content anyway. Especially when they know that this is likely the only time most of these kids will be exposed to the classics, etc. Most will not be doing English in uni. And he just wanted to show us classics beyond the typical To Kill A Mockingbird, The Outsiders, and Catcher in the Rye, etc (all of which we had read in younger years).
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-02-18 01:53 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-02-17 10:47 pm (UTC)(link)I mean, look at the Miller's Tale from Chaucer, or the Decameron, or even a lot of the old tales of knights and paladins. There's an extraordinary range to the depiction of life and reality in the classics, and the idea that you have this stuffy, restrained scope of things, and the novelistic attitude that is taken towards material, is in a lot of ways a relatively recent, modern development - more Victorian than anything else.
no subject
I never finished the Golden Ass, though.