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,'"
And this mindlessness is exactly the sort of thing that will push it over...
Here's a message for them: Lrn2RdFlBks. UGtMrFrmIt.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
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.)
The article describes the efforts of Dot Mobile to make such literary masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet more accessible.
Perhaps Professor Sutherland ought to check out the following links:
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
Kudos to Chris Coutts...they're still damned funny, although the idea of Professor Sutherland pitching this sort of thing for real is just ludicrous. As the epitath on the Bard's tombstone reads:Does this mean that Professor Sutherland is cursed, since he's caused Shakespeare's corpse to spin at such a rapid rate? ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
wtf wallhax0r cl4n?
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?
Make them into games.
Can you imagine a more violent game than Romeo and Juliet?
Two gang waring mafia type families and a plot where the two main characters die?
Have the full text and add a game requirement that you have to talk to people with the accent and all. actually walk up to people and ask them questions and make statements that forward the game, rather than the standard now where you just button mash to get through the plot and power up.
Mix the two areas, good games need good plot, and good books need to be read by later generations.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
"brevity is... wit." ;-)
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I, for one, am starting to root for the asteroids.
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?
While I am sure there will be plenty of purists out there that will be up in arms at this I think it might be quite a good thing. Anything that gets people interested in reading and expanding their mind has got to be good even if it means dumbing down some old masterpieces to get them interested. What concerns me about this, however, is their stated reason for doing it:
remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards
Surely remembering plots and quotes isn't why we get our students to read these works. Many modern works have plots that are just a involved, often more involved. Quotes are good if you're a bit dim and need to sound intelligent for 30 seconds but not a lot else.
As for their choice of material, well, I'm sure it will mostly be Shakespeare simce he's the only person most people seem to be able to name. That's a real shame because, personally, I don't enjoy reading Shakespeare. He wrote plays - plays are supposed to be watched. There are plenty of people who wrote books why not try promoting them instead?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
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
Okay, maybe I will say more.
I've only read a very small sampling of great literature. A bit of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and a few others. I can't claim to be well-read in this regard.
However, the little that I have read has had substantial benefit to me. I have been exposed to life circumstances, themes, thoughts, philosophies in a depth that has expanded my ability to see outside my own limited experiences, empathize and sympathize with other people, see the possibility that I might be wrong or prejudiced. As well, my use of language has improved in terms of vocabulary, style and metaphor.
There is no way that anyone can convince me that simplifying and making this literature "more accessible" is in any way beneficial except in the most limited fact-retention sense. Knowing the facts of a plot comes nowhere close to experiencing the expression of those facts in a sublime piece of literature.
That said, I appreciate the sentiment. I think there is a lot of legitimate concern that students do not get exposed to these sorts of literary works. However, this approach is at best a bandaid over a minor symptom of a much deeper problem. How much better would it be to address the real problems of the quality of our education and child-raising? I'm not saying that I know the real solution... that is beyond me... but I can see when something is missing the mark, and possibly harmful.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
joined channel #unixgurus
sid060> did you know that the abbreviations you and your "homeys" use are codes from the mainframe days?
Rayn3> what do u mean?
sid060> Well... I don't know if I should tell...
Rayn3> u have 2. give an example.
sid060> Okay. "how r u" is code for "I am absolutely bereft of gorm."
Rayn3> r u seri^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
``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.
Hamlet, for examplem, is a story delivered by a writer that likely invented more new words and phrases that "stuck" with the language than any other single person, this particular play being a prime example. Is translating this story(and a translation is effectively what it is) to a particularly crude and simplistic laguage that is designed for brevity, sometimes comedy, and not much else some sort of crime? Well, no, not really, because you can translate it well, or poorly. Let's say it's poor(and it will be). This means you have a poorly translated classic. What will happen? No-one will read it, and those that do won't recommend it to their friends. This is no more relevant than a Coles Notes of Hamlet, or Reader's Digest Abridged. Last time I checked, Reader's Digest, sitting on a humble hamper in my mother's bathroom, hasn't brought about the end of civilization as we know it. It's introduced a story to someone who likely wouldn't have read it in it's original form.
What *is* bad is the lack of support for reading the original in general. Like video games and violence, I don't think cel-speak causes illiteracy. I think the illiterate are drawn to it.
DT
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).
From the Fine Article (and the summary):
'We are confident that our version of 'text' books will... raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy"
Wow, that's good news. I was afraid they would raise the standards down.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
To some extent is is just an alarmist attack on progress. It's more efficient to write "How R U?" into a cell phone if the other person is familiar with the language. But previous generations have been right about culture loss from progress. How many people speak or read Latin today? 50 years ago there were thousands if not millions more who knew at least a little. Instead we knoew computer languages and "L337 Speak".
;-) When you're part of them, you can teach them the old ways of english, and dazzle them with complete sentences.
http://1337hax0r.com/ the URL there wouldn't have made sense 10 years ago, now it does to some people.
With every little bit lost, we gain in another area. Old people don't want change because we have to leave behind stuff that works already, and learn on top of it too. Such is life though, so embrace your leet speaking underlords when possible so you don't get left too far behind
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The Skinhead Hamlet - Shakespeare's play translated into modern English
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
Not to mention that Billy S. was writing for a popular audience, not for the annuals of liturature and lit professors.
He had theatres to fill and Groundlings to amuse. The PhD thesies on his writing came much, much later.
DG
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The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
That is close to correct English grammar, but is not English spelling. Old English and Middle English are very different from modern English. I know what you're saying, and I think that you know better. We aren't experiencing the evolution of a language, we're experiencing the destruction of a language. People don't know how things are supposed to be spelled, and they don't bother with grammar.
For example, if you take the average person on this site, you'll tend to get passable to good grammer and spelling. Some people are very proper, some don't try, and most make only a few mistakes: a typical distribution.
1337-speak and txtspk are, respectively, ridiculous and a throw-back to Old English. I don't like trying to read Old English, because you almost have to subvocalise it to read it. That everyone spelled different from one another does not make it better.
Double plus good Idea!
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We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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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