Speaking from (admittedly limited) experience, high school English teachers generally have pretty good taste in books. Unfortunately, all but the best see no other way to share this with teenage students beyond endless literary nitpicking. Set up too many syntax-analysis tripwires, and even the biggest blood enthusiasts in the room will be yawning through Macbeth. In the wrong hands, The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies can be tantamount to holding back your friend’s hair as he throws up in your bed. When Holden Caulfield seems about as relevant as an Archie comic – and this is adolescents we’re talking about – something has got to be wrong.
The Redundancy Report is the love child of what required reading could be and the enjoyable pretentiousness that comes with stating an opinion on classic literature (“1984 was pretty okay”). To everyone who thinks self-improvement begins at the public library: this is for you.
Disclaimer: You are probably more sophisticated than I.
This is totally amazing. I had no idea of this blog’s existence! You blog? Madeline Coleman? Blogging? This is insane. Wonderfully insane.
Most intriguing. I’ve often felt that required reading is dreadfully obtuse, actually, beyond that I feel that it is an egregious misnomer to call most of the “classics” that are so hailed as such.
I read Dostoevsky when I was 12. I realized everything else was preposterous, and couldn’t stomach any of it.
Steinbeck?…Dickens?…Orwell?…
Merely inexpressive, thoughtless footnotes in comparison to the likes of Dostoevsky, Joyce, Bulgakov, Stendhal, Kafka, Burroughs, Witkiewicz, Pynchon, James, Gombrowicz, Musil, Mann, Nabokov, Gogol, Goncarov, Carpentier, Kundera, and Barth [to name a few who have written true classics].
As a child I always assumed literature was simply a terrifyingly dull mechanism of the arts. I’ve since realized that it was simply the fact that they ladle horeshit into the minds of the youth that literature appeared as such.
Hopefully you have taken these, and other truly greater authors into account. I was pleasantly surprised to see someone blogging about Marquez, the darling.
I was sorry to hear that literature doesn’t seem to have opened up your mind past the cage of western materialism though. It’s amazing you could read such romantic books, such beautiful pieces of art and be left so untouched so that you are still constrained by conceptions of “normalcy” that you judge unique individuals on their hopes and for expressing their innately passionate selves.
Perhaps you need to delve into some Kant, Nietzche, Hiedegger, and Arendt to reflect more on just who you are and what your conception of reality is like.
It seems a shame for a champion of literature to remain so constrained after all.
Only the thoughts of the being I pretend to perceive my self to be constructed of.
Sincerely,
- Micah