[ SECRET POST #2238 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 097 secrets from Secret Submission Post #320.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[dreemyweird]

:D True enough.

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.

[chardmonster]

Oh for fuck's sake

Are you defining classic literature by what's on school curriculums now?

[dreemyweird]

Well, no? It was just an example. It only reflects the general attitude towards these poems.

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.

[chardmonster]

Not really. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn't put De Sade or Lady Chatterly's Lover on the list of classics. However you won't be taught those in high school because

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).

[lunabee34]

*nods*

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

[(Anonymous)]

We read Chaucer in my freshman year English class in high school.

My English teachers were awesome (except for junior year, but the others were fucking great)

[lunabee34]

We read Chaucer in high school too but it was very carefully culled Chaucer. No sexy stories for us! LOL

[(Anonymous)]

We got the culled version of Chaucer too -- mostly just pieces of the Canterbury Tales because we simply didn't have the time to translate 400 pages of Middle English into normal teenager speak. And I was granted permission to do my project on DH Lawrence, thus read Lady Chatterly's Lover. De Sade was talked about but never explicitly studied.

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).

[(Anonymous)]

Considering that schools are one of the most common means for people to be introduced to (and put off of) books they'd call 'classical literature', that's not as ridiculous a criteron as you're making it out to be.