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Pompous prose
**helen**
Deactivated Posts: 9,235 Supreme Poster
What do you think about literary snobbery? Or more to the point, do you agree with Rhian's rant?
I have mixed views on this so would be great to hear yours.
Linky - http://www.thesite.org/community/reallife/rants/pompousprose
I have mixed views on this so would be great to hear yours.
Linky - http://www.thesite.org/community/reallife/rants/pompousprose
Post edited by JustV on
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I can see her point about being more open to including other novels in the canon but how can you diss Shakespeare? I get that most of the plays were a collaberative effort but it shouldnt distract from the play's worth.
The same goes throughout all arts. You'd find it hard to argue that the latest Kaiser Chiefs single is techincally on a par with one of Beethoven's symphonies, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to listen to it, and love it, and dance round your room to it.
Personally I think that some books are an embarrassment to the craft and shouldn't be touched, but if people are going to read them, at least they are reading something. In the same breath, just because ten million people read a book doesn't mean it's a literary masterpiece. It might well just be a shit book that a lot of people have read.
Indeed
To be honest, after studying various Shakespeare works at school, I can't even watch anything by him (or adaptations of his) on TV, never mind reading a book. There's a lot to be said for a teacher making something that should be (or at least, could be) a 'masterpiece', dull and uninteresting, and hence putting me off for what I could suspect be life. I left school 14 years ago, and have no intention of picking up another of his works any time soon. I'll happily diss Shakespeare, thank-you very much
i agree in that i think teachers made his plays not exactly accessable, at my school we worked together in class reading and studying one play for a year which was a long and arduous process... if teachers dont want to freak their students out with shakespeare then they should relax the study around the plays a bit more and at least try and lessen how scary it seems by letting students know that you can actually work through an entire play in two hours or less.
Surely that's a diss to your teacher though rather than Shakespeare's work? I know exactly what you mean, I hated Shakespeare throughout most of my school life, until I was taught it by two really good teachers. It makes such a difference, honestly. They taught me to love Hamlet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello and King Lear - and I then went on to love The Tempest and the sonnets at uni. I must admit I've really only ever read and studied the more well-known of his works, but I do love them now. It was just a question of having the right approach to them.
Definitely a diss to my teacher(s) - but I have absolutely no intention of wasting my time in delving into them again. For me, they've had their time - and there are countless thousands of alternative books out there for me to read.
Keyes herself has written about fairly serious issues like depression, drug abuse, cancer etc. Might not be a 'masterpiece' as such, but I think people can be too quick to judge -, books touch us on different levels; if it means a person picks up a book and gets something from it, either a laugh or a few tears shed, then who cares what the BA students think?
So is my mum