English Literature

English Literature

As usual the DT won’t let me comment in the right place.

English Literature back in 74/75  was horrible, because it destroyed the book we were reading, too much over analysis, a line by line interpretation just bores kids. In my year at Grammar school 30 of use did Eng Lit while 60 were spared. No blood was painted over any lintels or anything like that, but Eng Lit then was hard.

I think kids/students should be given a couple of weeks to read the book/plays/whatever first, then once they have read the books then they can begin to study them. Back then nobody read the book first it was a line by line “decoding”, which was/is wrong. We did Henry IV part I, Prince Hal and Falstaff, all good fun, I remember saying in an essay that Hal “was a bit of a lad”, not much different from the current one.

You have to enjoy something first, then you can study it afterwards, its seems the DT crowd forget their own experience of Eng Lit. When you are in love you have a passion, at a funeral you may say/explain why you liked somebody; the colour of your wife’s hair, the way she tilted her head to one side when she didn’t believe you, the scent of a woman. All of these things colour your view. I went to a Shakespeare play 20 years after I finished school and I struggled to understand the language because I’d forgotten it. Shakespeare in Love and modern films bring Shakespeare back to us. If people see a good film then they may take the plunge and go to the theatre, the bitter pill has to be sweetened.No doubt my last sentence will be over analysed and the wrong meaning glued to it, some DT readers do that and I lament it. If a poem is read and it touches the heart then people will want more of the same, there’s some poetry on my site, one of which really touched our local Vicar, but the same thing can be dumped on big time by a DT reader. Why such a divergence? People bring their own baggage to what they read instead of just reading it, then they destroy the meaning, its like pulling out wild flowers and then arranging them badly in a vase.

I went back and reread all of the Don Camillo and after 25years and more the joy in the tale was there for me, I hope we can all agree that there should be joy in what we are reading;  ditto with Eng Lit teaching, we should be bringing joy to the students, if that is lacking then we should find a better teacher.