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My AP English teacher started out the year telling us that the only way you can "be enlightened" from reading a book is if the book is a tragedy in some degree. She said that books that end up with the protagonist on top give readers a false sense of hope in reality, are good for nothing more than enjoyment reading, and do not leave you wanting more/asking questions, etc. Do you agree with this point of view?
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No, maybe all AP English teachers have to start out by saying how all non-tragic books are worthless.
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Possibly. We read Anna Karenina over the summer, which would seem to be an attempt to reinforce this point.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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You should read french literature! In my experience, the french have very little optimistic literature. (Or at least what you study in school is pretty depressing). It doesn't leave you asking questions, it leaves you in despair!
I believe your teacher is wrong. If we only ever got anything out of depressing things, would there ever be point living?
What about Dickins? He isn't always depressing! Sure, some of his protagonist characters die, but generally at least some people achieve great happiness or peace!
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Tell your teacher that the head of the English Department at IDEA College Prepatory in Donna, TX, thinks that her little spiel is the largest dose of unmitigatedly pretentious tripe he's had to swallow in a long time.
[ August 27, 2003, 08:52 PM: Message edited by: David Bowles ]
Posts: 5663 | Registered: Jun 2000
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My AP English teachers the past two years have both been very upbeat. I don't know about the books though. What do you consider the Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Slaughter House Five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the Great Gatsby?
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
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That is decidedly untrue. You can "be enlightened" in humor by reading a humorous book (try the Stainless Steel Rat series). You can be inspired, and realistically so, with other sorts of novels that aren't tradgedies.
You teacher is the worst kind of cynic. I'm sarcastic, but jebus!
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Could she be in dire need of a lay? Might she have suffered a lot and be bitter about life, shrinking from any happy stories and deeming them fantastic?
Just read the books she assigns you and ignore her weird rantings, dude.
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I have little patience for people who declare books "great literature" without really looking at what the book is. To be honest, I find a lot of "great literature" to be poorly-written and fairly flat.
Ending that rant, and beginning another... There are basically three kinds of stories, and tragedy isn't one of them. The first is a "someone comes to town" story, the second is a "someone goes on an adventure" story, and the third is a "someone gets married" story. While tragedy is an important element in telling a story, it is no better or worse than other elements. Enlightenment is certainly not garnered from consuming doom, death, and destruction, but it is gained through proper storytelling to elucidate a particular facet of how humanity works.
One of the greatest books I've read in the last year has been Empire Falls, criminally, I've forgotten the author. I had heard nothing about it previously, but enjoyed it immensely both because it was written well and examined the lived of true characters. One of the worst books I've read this year has been The Bluest Eye a highly-acclaimed book by Tony Morrison. I thought it was flat, boring, and pointless. Although both were tragedies, I felt that one had depth, while the other lacked.
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Actually I think there are two classifications for stories being comedy and drama. A book could have both but every story has at least one. Within those categories there are more types but I think those are the basic two.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:There are basically three kinds of stories, and tragedy isn't one of them. The first is a "someone comes to town" story, the second is a "someone goes on an adventure" story, and the third is a "someone gets married" story.
Let's not forget the "someone goes on an adventure to town and gets married" genre.
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Anyway, I do think there's some truth to the comedy/tragedy classifications. It's either gonna end good or it's gonna end bad (otherwise, it wouldn't really be a story).
I don't buy the "false sense of hope" line. A comedy will succeed exactly because that hope isn't false. Obviously life isn't always a comedy, but it isn't always a tragedy either. (Well, it always ends in death, but then again there's always new life to takes its place. I dunno.)
Posts: 3056 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Is your teacher having a problem with depression? Or just insufferably pretentious?
On the other hand, My Name is Asher Lev is a really good book.
I think the idea that only "downer" books can provide enlightenment is about the stupidest thing I ever heard. Yeah, it's a cold, cruel world out there. But without hope, what is the use of going on? And this teacher is trying to tell you that having hope is, essentially, stupid? What is he/she (I can't remember if you specified gender) doing teaching high school students, who tend to be a bit depressive sometimes without any outside help?
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Wow. I'm glad my AP English teacher didn't do something like that. She wanted us to get something out of the story without her having to tell us what. It was a lot of discussion and her sitting on the sidelines just listening. She was a great teacher. HI Mrs. Johnson!!!
(teehee, it's a common name)
Anyhow, it's a shame your teacher has to tell you something stupid like that. That's like saying for ice cream to have any flavor, it has to be chocolate chunk.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote: My AP English teacher started out the year telling us that the only way you can "be enlightened" from reading a book is if the book is a tragedy in some degree.
That's laughable. Huckleberry Finn immediately springs to mind as a counter example. Also, like Teshi said, almost anything by Dickens breaks this rule. But I'm biased, because I typically can't stand English teachers and disregard what they say. Hence one of my favorite quotes:
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: They were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.
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Good teachers tend to be those who teach through personal love and appreciation of the subject. They encourage discussion and delight in challenges that show the students are thinking about the material.
Bad teachers will teach through imposition of personal opinion, rote facts that do not permit discussion, and not a little bitterness about never having personally succeeded in the field they teach.
[ August 28, 2003, 01:20 PM: Message edited by: Chris Bridges ]
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Ivanhoe isn't a tragedy as far as I remember. People die but the hero saves one girl and gets another which the one he really wanted, (though I really wanted Ivanhoe to fall for Rebecca rather than Rowena). It also really wasn't much harder than reading the KJV Bible. But I was only like 10 when I read it so maybe I didn't fully understand the tragedy of it either.
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BannaOj, No Ivanhoe isn't really a tragedy (technically speaking). Though, that's beside the point as the intent of the quote is just to illustrate how ridiculous English teachers are in general.
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You know, there are at least two current English teachers and two former English teachers who read this site regularly, and they're not COMPLETELY ridiculous. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:One of the greatest books I've read in the last year has been Empire Falls, criminally, I've forgotten the author.
Hey! This guy was just on NPR the other day discussing a new movie based on one of his books, starring Paul Newman. Apparently Nobody's Fool (another Newman flick) was based on another of his books. He won the Pulitzer for Empire falls. I too, though, have forgotten his name. He seemed like a very interesting and practical fellow.
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No real surprise that the guy would finish faster, I guess. Though it's unusual that he's the one with the period....
Posts: 6213 | Registered: May 2001
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One of my high-school English teachers, who happened to be a big fan of Thomas Hardy, said something similar about tragedy. To illustrate his point, he took out a five dollar bill and handed it to a kid in the front row. When the kid took the money, the teacher turned to the class and explained that, like that kid, we all tend to accept the good things that happen to us, but when bad things happen, we’re more likely to stop and wonder why. That, he argued, is why we need tragedy.
There may be some truth to that, but I’m not sure how much. For one thing, I can’t imagine the kid didn’t wonder why the teacher was giving him five dollars. I know I did. Also, the kid’s instinct to take the money probably had more to do with impulse to play along than any hope of leaving the class $5 richer, which, of course, he did not. But then again, if he’d been handed a detention slip, I’m sure he would have been much less likely to play along.
Another problem I have with that argument is that Brecht’s big criticisms of tragedy as a genre--whether we’re talking about Hardy, Shakespeare, or the Classics--is that it promotes a fatalistic view of life, not a questioning one. We may wonder why things turn out badly for Tess or Hamlet or Electra, but typically tragedy leads us to believe it has something to do the main character’s fatal flaw, unavoidable circumstance, or a combination of both. It leaves us feeling that misfortune is inevitable instead of motivating us to take action.
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quote: You know, there are at least two current English teachers and two former English teachers who read this site regularly, and they're not COMPLETELY ridiculous.
lol. That's fine. If they're cool, then they're cool and they have no reason to be offended. To them: You are one of the few, the proud and the brave English teachers who actually know how to teach. Kudos.
If they engender the same poor attitude as Mr. Vonnegut describes, well... To them: Wise up I've met enough of your type for one lifetime thanks.
Though, I'm sure the four Hatrack folks are of the first variety.
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But Mr. Vonnegut is responsible for one of those tragedy books I mentioned, why should we trust him? But really, that book was awful, I can't stand people who base their antiwar views on WWII.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
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My English teacher this year recently said that all literature is sad because it deals with themes that relate to real life, and real life is inherently sad. So any "happy" book is therefore not literature.
Posts: 2149 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Who are these English teachers? My AP English teacher never said anything like that and out of 12 students, there were four fives and eight fours.
I guess Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, Aristophanes' The Frogs, Boccaccio's The Decameron aren't on your reading lists.
Tell your teachers that there are plenty of comedies in the LitHum curriculum at Columbia University.
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When someone in my class mentioned comedies, my teacher said the comedies are funny to us, but not to the characters in them. That we laugh at their suffering and predicaments. So the story is still sad, even if it makes us laugh. That's what she said, at least.
Actually, we just read Frederigo's Falcon from the Decameron last week.
Posts: 2149 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I would like Hatrack's opinion. Every six weeks in my AP Literature class we have to read one outside "classic" and then write and inclass essay at the end of the six weeks analysing it. Last six weeks I read The Glass Bead Game. This six weeks I asked my teacher if I could read Ender's Game, since OSC has said that it can be analysed, and write my essay on it. I promised that I would also read a "classic" in preparation for the AP test. I was told that since I had already read one "unorthodox" novel (she took this back when I pointed out that Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Glass Bead Gaem, so I was fairly certain it did qualify as literature) she wasn't sure, but probably not. Because my reading a *gasp* sci- fi novel would start us on the slippery slope, and pretty soon she would be forced to let people read just anything. Nevermind that five minutes before she had been encouraging people to read Slaughterhouse Five. To be honest, I didn't really expect her to allow me to read Ender's Game, but I think that since I am also going to be reading a classic, it shouldn't really be that much of a problem if I choose to write my essay on Ender's Game.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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I don't see why you can't read Ender's Game, although I think that The Worthing Saga would be better prep for the exam. I read Moby Dick and The Stranger for my optional books.
We were really prepared for the exam. Here's what we read (as far as I can remember and not in order):
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