Slashdot Mirror
Literature Teeters on the Edge of a 'Gr8 Fall'
aicrules writes "Yahoo news is reporting that the great works of literature often read and discussed by the brighter of our up-and-comers could be the latest victim of reaching the lowest common denominator at the potential expense of everyone. The article describes the efforts of Dot Mobile to make such literary masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet more accessible. From the article, 'We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,'"
People have been condensing things like this for humor for years. Ophelia's last line: "Glub!" And remember the story about consensing the Lord's Prayer into a text message? (I think it had lines like "God, UR GR8")
So we take something that's been used for humor, and use it for Cliffs Notes instead. Big whoop. No one is going to think that the summaries are the original works. I mean, anyone who has taken a logic class has come up with "2B v ~2B"
Although it does remind me of the time in high school when we were reading Romeo and Juliet aloud in class. I read Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech, got through the whole thing, then looked at the footnotes, and had the reaction, "I said what?!?!?" (From then on, I read the footnotes with the text, not afterward.)
Need I say more?
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
the net impact of this will be nil. What person who was going to read some classic piece of literature is going to forego that experience after checking out the text message summary?
And who will go read the real thing after getting one of these?
In fact I also will go out on a limb and predict that this marketing ploy by the cell phone company will fail. Kids will not want these phones and that will greatly overwhelm the couple idiot parents who might think this would be a good idea.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
From the article: "To be or not to be" soliloquy is rendered: "2B? NT2B?=???".
So are they following in that ridiculous "ubonics" tradition and further degrading the English language or what?
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
There's a type of home game where you can spell things out in "leet" speak, or you get cards with strange letter and number cominations and you have to decipher the meaning. Anyone remember what it's called? That's what I think of when I see someone writing "R U Their".
I can't understand the vast numbers of kids and people my age even that write with such sheer illiteracy that it makes me think twice about talking to them. Should I really expect someone who asks "How RU", to understand me when I talk about solar flares, or which car gets the best milage? Sure there are bright people that have given in to pretending they're typing on a cell phone, but why would someone try to initiate communication with other english reading person, with a line like "Hey Jou wat u doin?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This won't affect literature any more than did those yellow-bound examples of conciseness.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
From the summary: will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,'"
The plots cannot be taken out of context from the book they are presented in, for example here is the "plot" of animal farm:
Animals overthrow cruel/greedy humans to try to set up utopian society, true believers in the revolution pushed out, some use revolution for own goals, end up just like humans
Doesn't do the book much justice(not to mention doesn't contain one of the best sentences in all of English literature: "4 legs good, 2 legs bad"). You can't have anything but superficial discourse(make slashdot joke here) if all you are familiar with is a vague outline of the plot....
Monstar L
Don't we get warnings about this every decade for the last several centuries? Wasn't writing in the vernacular going to ruin writing back ever since writing was invented?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Okay. I'll bite.
We can't have progress without a solid foundation of knowledge upon which to build.
SiO2
In more modern spelling this becomes:
Was this considered a radical watering-down, back in the day?
I've also considered what Shakespeare's plays would look like as IRC logs; I suspect such an approach would work at least as well as the blog version of Pepys' Diaries
``Fake'' books of jazz and pop tunes with dumb chords substituted, simplified classical pieces that are easier to play, etc.
:)
If you can have a dumbed-down Bach or Beethoven as a ring tone on your phone, why not a dumbed down Jane Austen or Dostoyevsky on your bookshelf?
I don't see why it is so important to read Romeo and Juliet and other plays. They are meant to be watched. The actors are supposed to play a major role in how the characters are precieved. Take the students to see the play performed or bring in the movie. What really made me think Shakespear was awesome, was the Romeo and Juliet movie with Leonardo Dicaprio.
If you are going to just bring in scripts for you class to read, why not It's A Wonderful Life or Star Wars? That is only half the experience, and one not meant to be thrust upon the audience.
The point of Shakespeare and Dickens is not to memorize what happens. It's not history class. The Picture of Dorian Gray isn't a story about a portrait, it isn't a history lesson about what crazy stuff happened to some rich guy in the 19th century, it's a wonderful work of literature about a man and a time period.
Memorizing a few plot points and quotes from Faulkner does absolutely squat for learning anything whatsoever about these works of art. This isn't raising educational standards.
Turning Hamlet into a text message removes 100% of what makes it important. There's no point to it anymore at all.
We put far too much devotion into the "classics' and developing our "canon recognition", and not enough time into actual thinking up new and interesting ideas.
Because "the classics", if not actually defining our culture, give us a common foundation on which to build a shared cultural experience.
Did a dead semi-anonymous 16th century hack pop-poet/playwright really create the best-ever-and-always set of English writings? Of course not! He wrote the equivalent of "Seinfeld" for the televidiots of his day. But like it or not, that does give us a certain common ground on which to relate to one another socially. We like "lowbrow" humor. We prefer the good guy to win. We want blood and guts and gore and veins in our teeth. We enjoy Moe getting poked in the eyes by Larry. We want to see the queen kiss a Federline, everyone to tragically die at the end, and the servants to get away with a good practical joke on their bosses.
Now, based on the above, does it commit some grievous sin to "translate" the works of this ancient hack into a more modern form? To that, I would say no, with a qualification - One can modernize without butchering. Converting Hamlet to the style of texting fails to make the work more accessible, instead tailoring it to a very niche subculture of rebellion-without-a-clue (and likely a short-lived subculture at that, as it only even exists as the fleeting intersection of a technological limitation with an economic convenience).
Here comes some of the illiterate ilk! I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.
Did you really name your son "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--"?
Still, I don't blame you for getting this wrong, it seems to be a fact of modern life that you can produce crap art as long as it has a "deeper meaning", forgetting that the best art is a feast for the mind and the senses.
What use is it to teach kids about masterpieces of English literature without teaching them how to properly read them? As far as I'm concerned, this is doubleplusungood. You want kids to get more into Shakespeare? Take them to see a play, which is how Shakespeare intended us to experience his works! Hell, even watching BBC's Pride and Prejudice is better than "Evry1GtsMaryd."
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
It reminds me a heck of a lot of the speech Captain Beatty gavein Fahrenheit 451, where he talks about how this line offended a group, so it got trimmed, that line bothered someone else who didn't understand it, so it got nixed, and so on, until it got to the point where nobody had the patience to read the whole work, and eventually, books were eliminated (in the film, newspapers were in comic form without any words). Contrary to what some have said in other threads, Shakespeare is not that hard to understand -- if you're willing to make an effort at first, it gets easy once you get over that "hump".
I don't think we'll lose the classics, but I think we're heading toward a tiered society (if we're not there already) composed of the literate and well educated and the underclass who stay in non-thinking jobs, a lot like Metropolis.
Whenever I read news like this, I want to write Ray Bradbury and say I knew he was right from when I first read F451, and it's a damn shame he wasn't wrong.
'We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,
Since when is thoughtless memorization of plots and quotes educational? Isn't the point of studying literature to learn how to think analytically, read between the lines, address social issues, and use language effectively?
I think teaching the "classics" is a bad approach to begin with. The classics are so out-of-touch with modern society and culture that the qualities that made them great at the time are almost completely lost on modern students unless they also invest huge amounts of time understanding the language and culture of the era. There's plenty of modern, current-day writing of outstanding quality, which could serve all the same instructional purposes while also actually being interesting and easily related to by students.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
The poetic flow and imagry of the text is what makes these worth reading. The childish scribbles being produced here ruin everything that makes the story have value.
It's like making renaissance paintings more accissible by rendering them in ascii art.
This is exactly why I can't put much educational weight into liberal arts.
Sure, Dante Aligheri spent a lot of time writing "The Divine Comedy". What it amounts to, is a rather self-absorbed view into political views and a comparison of him to someone regarded as a "master" in his time.
What makes this any more important than the average slashdot comment outside of a historical context?
I think teaching the "classics" is a bad approach to begin with. The classics are so out-of-touch with modern society and culture that the qualities that made them great at the time are almost completely lost on modern students unless they also invest huge amounts of time understanding the language and culture of the era.
They are not out of touch with modern society, because so much of human society never changes. People are no more nor less pious, brutal, kind, evil, wise, or merciful than they ever were. Many things stay the same, even such contemporary things as the War on Terror have uncanny analogues to past conflicts. The classics, by keeping the universe of discourse in the past, reveal what is timeless and universal about the human experience. You learn that some things never change.
Whenever I read news like this, I want to write Ray Bradbury and say I knew he was right from when I first read F451, and it's a damn shame he wasn't wrong.
Oh, I'm sure he's gotten a few thousand versions of that letter by now.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I don't think we'll lose the classics, but I think we're heading toward a tiered society (if we're not there already) composed of the literate and well educated and the underclass who stay in non-thinking jobs, a lot like Metropolis.
There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.
If an artform, or a particular piece of art, has genuine, lasting mass appeal, it is normally exorcized from the "canon" and not longer a part of that which you "should" aspire to know. The whole point of Great Literature (as opposed to great literature) is to separate Those Who Have Read It from the unwashed masses who cheerfully haven't.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
So what if people don't learn the old classics. Quite frankly they aren't of great relevance to modern life and for most kids being forced to read them encourages a dislike of literature and reading.
High Literature is a type of art that appeals to a certain small class of people. This is great and fine for them but there is little reason to inflict it on those who don't enjoy it.
Ultimately the reasons given for reading literature simply don't apply to forcing great literature on unappreciative audiences. The reason we read literature rather than just essays is that it should entertain as it teaches. If the audience doesn't appreciate it then it fails at this task.
Reading literature under duress just generates resentment and dislike it doesn't encourage a lifelong love of literature. We would be better off choosing books that had action and other aspects the students liked but combined this with sophisticated issues and interesting questions. There is no objective reason Ender's game isn't just as appropriate to teach in class as Shakespeare and the students will like it way more.
Making students remember quotes is just dumb and if literature is taught well the students will *want* to read the books and notes or little helpers won't be relevant. If the book needs outside help or encourages the use of cliff notes then something is wrong with the course or the book isn't appropriate for the audience.
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