As I have been reading the past two stories we have been assigned in English class, I have realized something. It is not that I do not like classical tradgedies such as Hamlet and Oedipus, I just have a hard time reading them. I truly enjoy these stories and think that they are very important pieces of literature to read and understand. Yet there within lies the problem, it is hard to understand a language that has not been spoken in centuries. I really think that you should be required to learn more about this almost foreign language while you are still in middle school and high school. If that was the case, by the time that you got to college you would be able to understand more about the story and it wouldn't take you two hours to read fifty pages. I'm sure it would not take the average person two hours to read, but I actually like understanding what I have read and getting the whole concept of what the author is trying to portray to the reader. I know there are classes that focus more on British Literature and stories of this nature, but unfortunately when it is not part of your major as a college student you do not get all the opportunities to learn about it. This is why I think that if they expressed the importance of this literature before we got to college it would greatly enhance our ability as students to understand this beautiful literature.
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I so agree that it's a totally different language, even when it's been "translated." The cadence is different, especially in Shakespeare, which is written in iambic pentameter, and even the embedded cultural presumptions and innuendos are different. That's really what I was asking about yesterday when I asked if it got easier as you went along with the reading.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that literature gets short shrift in high school curricula. I think students could learn so much about the world, from an anthropological, historical, sociological, even scientific perspective if more, deeper, attention were paid to literature. It's actually how most education has been conducted throughout time. Only when standardization occurred did the difficulty of testing "real" knowledge of literature cause it to, sort of, be swept by the wayside. It's unfortunate.