ever look at a piece of art and think of how a simple picture, painting, music, or book transcend time. For it to live through generations of generations, era after era, and yet, here it stays, alive and beating. as it captured the hearts of many before, now it beguiles us with the same intensity, even bringing us to tears, knowing that behind each stroke, note, and word is another person’s soul laid bare. gazing in the depths of the Art, we reconcile with the ghost of its creator, drifting and immortal. in a simple glimpse, we became a part of the undying
If your dark academia friend goes missing here is how to find them!
1. Make a small shrine of books, perhaps Shakespeare or the Picture of Dorian Gray, leave some tea or coffee, maybe a few jumpers if it’s cold and of course leave a copy of Dead Poets Society
2. Leave it near your local library/forrest/curiosity shop/aesthetic cafe /old building or anywhere that seems fitting to yearn
3. Wait until nightfall as they are most likely an insomniac and will most likely becone productive anywhere between 11 pm and 3 am
Hopefully your friend will emerge from their hideaway and you can safely take them home
Okay so I know that this is a liiiiiiiittle off topic from what I normally post but I wanted to advertise a Dead Poets Society server!!! Pretty new, super duper friendly, we simp for all the characters, and have lots of fun roles lol.
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
Anyway unpopular opinion probably but the school system (and general book snobbery) fucks up by trying to force kids to read “classics” before they have the mental and emotional development to appreciate them.
This post is me telling you to consider revisiting that classic book you read in the 7th grade that you hated because the ability to understand a lot of literature gets unlocked later, for reasons a lot to do with emotional maturity
reading those books and being forced to analyze them is how you develop the ability to understand literature. there’s literally no way to learn how to properly read a text other than by doing a bunch of reading and being forced to actually parse the text for meaning. the best way to build this skill is with difficult yet good texts, ie classics, and the sooner you get started the better.
the point of handing you lord of the flies as a freshman isn’t to get you to have deep emotional realization about the evil of humanity, it’s to get you to learn how to read an allegorical novel.
Yeah sure but books are (at least in the US) typically assigned in schools based on ‘reading level’ which is often inconsistent with the age at which you can actually comprehend the meaning.
I do think it’s important for kids to be able to uh, actually get something out of a book they read for school. If something is meaningless to you, you’re not going to remember anything of the experience anyway. This is how you get kids that think they’re dumb and can never enjoy reading so they never pick up a book after high school.
My last literature class was mainly focused on teaching books for high school and the education majors in the class with me work with local high school students and some of them are functionally illiterate. This kind of viewpoint, that we should just force kids to read stuff they can’t enjoy or appreciate to 'teach’ them literary analysis, does damage. Teachers are struggling to get kids to care about reading and THAT’s what you have to cultivate for it to be a life-long habit.
the purpose of learning to read is not to foster a life-long love of reading. it is to learn to read. that is, to learn to parse a text for meaning. you don’t have to enjoy it, but you do have to interact deeply with it and analyze it, which you are forced to do because you are being graded. enjoyment is only needed if the class isn’t hard enough and students aren’t properly forced to engage with the text, which they should be.
…Okay and what is reading for
For reading comprehension and the ability to parse text for meaning. That is what being taught by reading classics is for. Do you think that reading classes are so that kids will develop a certain hobby?
If the “hobby” is reading, I guess the answer is, uh, yes?
If people don’t continue reading after high school, they won’t retain those skills.
Kids have to experience reading as intrinsically rewarding, or at least as having some relevance to their lives, to internalize those skills as useful in the first place.
@desiringmachines I didn’t say “never engage with art that challenges you” I said “being forced to read complex things that require a certain level of emotional maturity/experience to 'get’ at a too young age can turn you off from appreciating those things later”
yeah you should be exposed to stuff that challenges you but many books that are required reading in school get a bad rap because they’re chronically assigned based on how complex they are to read and not on the level you can understand their nuances
And to answer your question, on some levelyoudo just “wake up” one day with the ability to “understand” certain things because you…mature. That’s why it’s called maturity.
I guess i’m contrasting the technical skill of analyzing texts with the power to actually get something out of the process—knowing what parallelism or extended metaphor is,being able to write an essay about it, is something very different than being able to GET it—to experience it doing its job.
i was a fifth grader that supposedly read on a college reading level but I was still developmentally a ten year old. When your ability to think abstractly is still under construction, you can know and understand concepts of symbolism and metaphor, but just not understand why they are used or be able to “see” them opening a deeper meaning in the text. I remember not understanding why authors used things as “symbols” because wasn’t it better for them to just convey meaning literally? I and my fellow young students all felt this frustration and looking back I feel almost certain that it was literally just a developmental thing
Here’s the assumption that people keep making in responses to this post though: that people have to be taught, through a difficult and grueling process, to recognize deeper meaning in a text.
Here’s my question for y'all: how do you think the deeper meaning in these stories got there? How do you think people are able to read or watch Shakespeare or even enjoy tv shows and movies? What would even be the PURPOSE of weaving deeper meaning into stories if you have to be specifically educated to see it? How and why do you think that humans can tell or enjoy stories at all? Why do you think figurative language and narrative devices exist or were invented in the first place? Why do you think humans tell stories?
To some extent, the ability to understand multiple layers of non-literal meaning and to comprehend themes and ideas being conveyed through stories IS INNATE. this sounds like a bold statement but it’s actually…completely obvious.
Things like symbolism are used because they convey meaning.
Literature exists because it conveys meaning.
Stories have been a fundamental technology of the human species for millennia, used to pass down information necessary for survival and to explore the big questions of our existence. They tell us how to live both literally and figuratively.
Shakespeare was not written for people with formal education in literary analysis. The people that watched and enjoyed his plays did not have to be “forced” from a young age to “engage with literary texts.”
To put it simply: if you have to be forcibly taught how to read Shakespeare, why does Shakespeare matter?
This is not to say that education in literature isn’t worthwhile. It is to say that for most of human history public education did not exist, and most humans that have ever existed couldn’t even read. If that deeper meaning in classics was not, on some level, innately understandable by humans, they would not be remembered, they would not be worth reading, and they would not even exist in the first place. There would be no such thing as literature with deeper meaning in it. There would be no way for literary works to originate, and there would be no reason for them to exist, because they would not mean anything to anyone.
The PURPOSE of writing is to convey meaning. Literary devices are used BECAUSE they convey meaning. If humans had to be “forced” to learn to understand meaning in literature, we would not have created literature, because the ability to “force” other humans to learn to understand meaning has only ever existed recently and on a small scale if at all.
For those of you who can’t be bothered to read all that:
The purpose of literary devices is to convey meaning. If humans have to be forced to learn how to understand meaning in a story, why do these stories exist and why do they matter?
A great many of the “classics” should be set at a much higher reading level now - because they are no longer dealing with contemporary settings, character archetypes, and story tropes.
Two hundred years ago, Shakespeare may have been reasonable high school or even junior high material. (Err. If high school had existed then. It didn’t, or not as we know it now.) It may still be… in parts of the UK.
In the US, however, it starts nearly incomprehensible. The vocabulary is so different from what kids are used to, that they can’t follow the jokes or even the drama, because they first need about a third of the words explained, and then they have to get used to the cadence, and THEN they can start to sort out a meaning. And then they’re supposed to get the emotional impact, but by the time you’ve had to run through “what does this word mean” and “wait what do you mean those two words rhyme” and “why is it unusual that he’s not wearing a hat?” … you’re no longer in the right headspace to get the joke.
“Get thee to a nunnery” changes a lot when you learn that “nunnery” was slang for a whorehouse.
Classics only work for literary analysis if the reader has the context to understand them. Adults who are widely read, can understand books well out of their direct experiences. Children can’t; they don’t yet know enough facts about the world to put a joke or a dramatic moment into a different context.
Young modern kids may not understand why being a child of a single unwed mother is supposed to be shameful.
They may not understand why it’s blasphemous to insult a bishop.
They can’t tell when a character is being disrespectful to a shopkeeper, or overly-respectful to a beggar, because they don’t know how one shows respect in a different culture. So they don’t understand why the other characters are shocked.
You can’t do literary analysis if the teacher has to explain every aspect of what’s going on. You need, first, a story you understand - and then you can dig into the why-and-how aspects. Later, you can put those analysis skills to stories in contexts you don’t understand: “Aha, this fellow’s friends are shocked and dismayed at him, so he must have said something appalling to the shopkeeper. So that must’ve been an insult.” That’s what the skill is for.
But you can only start with “classics” if they’re still reasonable depictions of the kids’ everyday lives. Otherwise, they don’t know when something unusual is happening; they don’t know who’s acting weird; they don’t know who’s happy or angry or scared.
And they’ll interpret them according to their experiences, rather than the historical one.
“He is being very polite so he must like that lady.”
No, he’s not being notably polite. Everyone talked like that. But the reader may not know that. You can’t develop literary analysis skills if you don’t understand the context of the story, and young kids can’t understand contexts that are entirely new to them.
How well will these kids understand a story in which a payphone is a major part of the plot?
…And most of them have at least scene payphones before.
Homestuck fans repopularized the public-domain song, “The Midnight Crew.” It’s got a line that goes, “[I’m] Home with the milk in the morning”… and most of the fans had no idea that related to “I got home when milk was being delivered in the early morning” because they’ve never even heard of milk delivery.
You can’t analyze meaning if you don’t understand what’s going on in the story.
Oh, absolutely! This is a great addition. I’m first and foremost a history nerd, and it’s appalling that people seem to think nothing of assigning books that are 300+ years old the same way they would assign a book that’s 30 years old.
Honestly, it’s probably best to teach literary analysis using more contemporary texts, because with books that are linguistically and culturally disconnected, it’ll take twice as long to analyze if done properly. Even simple questions like “What genre is this?” require loads of homework to answer, because literature itself has changed.
And as you say, there will be unfamiliar technologies, cultural references, and other stuff that trips you up.
You’re setting kids up to parrot what their teachers say about really old books, because you can’t come up with a novel argument about a book if you just don’t have the full historical context. And no, you can’t fully explain the historical context of a book in a single lesson.
Not to say that these books shouldn’t be taught, but they should be taught as part of an in-depth dive into the historical context. History is hard!
It really stretches your mind to enter the perspective of someone long ago! It’s incredibly worthwhile! BUT it can’t be done as a mere side note to analysis of a text!
Also, historical context can be explained in a very biased way in english classes, or leave out critical information.
When I was in high school my English teacher told me something that stuck with me: When she read Dickens in high school she thought it was depressing. When she read it just after college she thought it was hysterically funny.
I was probably the only kid in my class who actually enjoyed David Copperfield, because I was 18, depressed, and traumatized.
I want to chime in on this thread to disagree with something said WAAAY above, this:
the purpose of learning to read is not to foster a life-long love of reading. it is to learn to read. that is, to learn to parse a text for meaning. you don’t have to enjoy it, but you do have to interact deeply with it and analyze it, which you are forced to do because you are being graded. enjoyment is only needed if the class isn’t hard enough and students aren’t properly forced to engage with the text, which they should be.
There’s so much I disagree with in here.
For one, this thread is about reading classics, which as later comments point out, are often written in marginally-archaic to highly-archaic language which is not an effective tool for teaching the basics of reading, or even more advanced reading of the type that is going to be necessary for most people in their lives.
But for two, enjoying reading is actually important. If you force kids to do something that they find unintuitive or inaccessible, many of them will resist it and put little effort into it, and those who enthusiastically dive in and put effort into it will often get little out of it.
For three, grading is a terrible motivator, and it often kills or at least diminishes kids intrinsic motivation. Most kids want to learn to read in order to access information. I’ve seen kids delve into stories they love, technical manuals way over their head because they want to build or fix something, or historical or scientific texts just because they find the material interesting. Kids also often want to get on social media and websites (including ones they might not be legally allowed) where they start reading and writing to engage with topics important to them.
Even people who don’t necessarily love reading for its own sake, already have a lot of motivators besides grades, like wanting to get a job, wanting to be able to function in society, wanting to have their skills and intellectual abilities respected by others, and perhaps the most important, wanting to be able to communicate effectively, be understood by others, perhaps even wanting to be persuasive in writing.
Also, “forcing” kids to do work doesn’t work. I have teaching experience in college, which is similar to high school in some ways. Kids can and do cheat and plagiarize. And it is simply not possible for teachers to catch all examples of this. Also, kids can and do fail. Furthermore, what is even much more likely is for kids to “slide by”…their heart isn’t really in the work so they do the bare minimum, or they do a half-assed job good enough to get maybe a B or C, and the school moves them on because it’s just not realistic to set high enough standards that would fail half the class, even if few of them are actually getting what is intended out of the class. This sort of thing is even more common in primary and secondary schools than in college.
I personally think there is no need for the average person to ever read “classics”. If someone wants to, then great. They can choose to take a class that focuses on it. Or a mandatory class that gives students choice of what to read, can give them classics as an options. The school can make them available in the library. And teachers can provide tools to help people to understand archaic terminology and constructions, as a way of making this stuff more accessible to them. There are a lot of ways a school can encourage people to go down this route, of their own initiative.
The essentials of education though, are being able to read and write things of the here-and-now, being able to communicate in writing in the ways that are expected of most people. There are so many things that are more important than reading classics, that are omitted from most education, things like reading and understanding the basics of legal contracts (how many people sign leases? loan contracts? employment contracts? agree to terms and conditions of websites? pretty much everyone in our society) or navigating the terminology of government websites to file taxes or apply for various government benefit programs? How about interacting with people on social media, in various formats where conciseness of language is important? What about corporatespeak and work emails, and the languages of HR and cover letters and job applications and the responses to them?
We hammer kids with stuff not relevant to their daily lives while omitting huge portions of the language that is critically important to function, and then we wonder why people struggle so much and get depressed in their 20′s.
Yeah no. I wholly disagree with the attitude expressed in the above comment. We need educational reform. We need education that is more relevant, and we need education that works with, rather than against, people’s intrinsic motivation.
Ban grades. And ban the mandatory teaching of anything that is not essential so that we can free up the resources to teach people what they actually need to have in order to function in our society.
Not to be all “I have a master’s degree in English so I’m literally qualified to make this assessment,” but I am so I’ll point out that you can do an in-depth analysis on almost any text. You don’t need to stick to supposedly deep texts to do it, because every story is read through the triple contexts of the world behind the text (the context in which it was written), the world within the text, and the world in front of the text (the context in which it is read). If you think I can’t analyze the fuck out of Where’s Spot? it’s because you’re needlessly limiting your idea of what it means to analyze a text.
Not the usual super specific playlists but I spent a shit ton of time on these so y’all should check them out :) <3 there’s also a bunch of different kinds of music on each playlist so if you’re looking for a variety I got u.
