Mensen die geen Gymnasium doen/gedaan hebben.

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Op dinsdag 30 mei 2017 20:48 schreef magnetronkoffie het volgende:
En een roman kan dit niet net zoals een encyclopedie dat kan. Een goed ereden om het lezen van encyclopedieën te verplichten, want ten slotte kunnen romans het niet op een manier zoals de manier waarop encyclopedieën dat kunnen.

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Ja/ Weet je dit zo zeker?
Heb je enig idee wat ik aan het doen ben hier? Waarom meen je te denken dat ik dit niet zou kunnen? Alleen maar omdat ik me daartegen verzet?

Dus omdat ik me daartegen verzet, zou ik het niet kunnen. Dit probeer ik naar jouw inzien te verbergen? Is dat hoe je denkt?

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wtf man....denk ff na.

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Op dinsdag 30 mei 2017 20:49 schreef Hippocratos het volgende:

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Dit kan zeker wel. Een voorbeeld hiervan is bijvoorbeeld wetenschappelijke literatuur. Die staat vol met nomenclatuur waar je bijv. geen hol van snapt en dat kan het lezen van de tekst moeilijk maken. Maar je kan wel de tekst zo analyseren (dus niet volledig lezen), zodat je daar een samenvatting van kunt schrijven en de essentie kunt benoemen zonder dat je enig benul hebt waar je het over hebt.

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So educators are usually really bad at explaining why you read the things you read for school. The core concept to grasp here is the literary canon: that is, the body of works that are the foundation of [Western] literature. They are the most historically and culturally significant pieces of literature being studied currently. But how do works get added to the canon?

The surface layer is that they get into the canon because old stuffy [usually white, usually male] scholars want to study them, so they do, so it's expected that their students study them, so they do, so it's expected that to prepare for college you have to study them, so you do. It's not like a few Ivy League professors sat down in a dark, smokey room and discussed the future of the literary canon...but also it kind of is like that? Keep in mind, there are multiple "sub-canons". There is the American literature canon (featuring Anne Bradstreet, Thoreau, Emerson, Faulkner, Hemingway, Whitman, etc.); the British literature canon (Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, Jane Austen, etc.), the poetry canon (Frost, Emerson, Whitman, Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, etc.), the historical foundational canon (Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, etc.), the science fiction canon (Mary Shelley, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, etc.). I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you; the point is that there is the canon and then there is "I'm studying English poetry in the late 1800s, these are the people I should be reading".

Which then raises the question, why do those scholars want to study those works? We have the benefit of hindsight, so today we might read Hemingway and [rightly] think he's boring and dry. But at the time his writing style was revolutionary. Before Hemingway, prose was all very eloquent and had propensity for verbosity. Hemingway wrote in a short, clean, different style. You may not like it, but he made it ok to not write in the old, stuffy way that everyone had been writing before him. That's not to say Hemingway was the first, or the best, but he was good and he was famous and he showed everyone that you could write in a different fashion. Suddenly everyone was writing in this new minimalist style, which in turn led to other changes in literature that allowed for the kinds of books we read today for fun. Without Hemingway, our literature today would look very different. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson did the same thing for poetry. Those are some very specific examples, but I hope they can demonstrate how authors can influence literature, and sometimes they're a part of the canon for those reasons.

The very old part of the canon is in there for much the same reason, but more in the sense of inventing literature at all. Homer's Odyssey is the foundational work for so much of western literature. Literally everything you've ever read, ever, was influenced by the Odyssey. And Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest great work of literature - the oldest version of That Movie That Everyone Saw. It's the first ever example of real literature, which is kind of a big deal. Studying them can help you understand how storytelling evolved, by showing you how it started. I won't go into too much detail here about what, exactly, you would learn (narrative structure, framing devices...) because I don't need to give you an English lesson, eh? Suffice it to say, there's a lot there to unpack.

Some works are a part of the canon because they're just easy to digest. F. Scott Fitzgerald is fairly easy to analyze and understand on a more abstract level, mostly because all of his symbolism is the same (that is, everything represents the "unobtainable American Dream"). It wouldn't do any good to say, "Here kids, learn how to analyze literature by analyzing the most difficult literature possible". Of course, unfortunately that's often exactly what English classes do. It's akin to saying, "Here kids, let's learn how to do math. Shall we start with calculus? No? Trigonometry then..." Which is unfortunate, because literature is awesome and there's some really cool stuff to learn...once you learn the tools you need to do it. But I digress.

But most of the canon boils down to be cultural icons of the time when they were published, or sometimes later when people rediscovered them. They can be both a window into the culture surrounding the person that wrote the works, why they wrote what they did, what symbolism they were using at the time, how they thought and viewed the world; and also a window into how that one piece of literature or author or movement changed the culture they were in, which trickled down to influence our own culture. They can also be ways to understand ourselves by analyzing our own reactions to what we're reading, and the literature in the canon often elicits strong reactions in its readers.

None of that is to say that the canon is perfect; far from it! I studied English and I hate huge chunks of the canon (don't even get me started on Catcher in the Rye). But that's the idea of it: important literature that had a powerful influence on people and the times they were from, which encourages others to study that literature, which is itself a strong reaction that encourages others to study why the first people studied it, etc., so that it continues to have influence and continues to be important literature worth studying. TL;DR: The literary canon is literature that is "worth studying".

EDIT: Important thing I totally missed. The literary canon is also supposed to be an introduction to your own national identity. When you so much as watch cartoons you'll be getting references to cultural icons
. Seriously, as an adult go back and watch Animaniacs (it's on Netflix!) and see how many references you didn't get when you were a kid. When you read the American literary canon it's in part teaching you what it means to be an American. It helps build a unifying web of understanding, because when you make a joke about how painting a fence is "fun" and someone else laughs, you think This guy also read Tom Sawyer and you feel a connection with that person. Enough of those cultural connections help form the glue that is our national identity. It kind of sounds like indoctrination...and it kind of is. And that's not bad because it's teaching you about your country and how to be a citizen of that country, which is perfectly fine as long as it doesn't get out of control.

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Op dinsdag 30 mei 2017 21:03 schreef Hippocratos het volgende:
Mensen die reddit linkjes posten als valide bron neem ik bij voorbaat al niet serieus. Aan dat niveau verspil ik m'n tijd niet.

x oneindig

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Op dinsdag 30 mei 2017 20:59 schreef magnetronkoffie het volgende:
En nu is het culturele invloed?

Het totaalpakketje maakt nog niet dat de individuele factoren doorslaggevend zouden moeten zijn. Feit blijft dat de dingen die men door romans leert, ook op andere manier leren kan.

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En ik ben het niet met je eens met je implicatie dat iedereen die geen literair werk leest, zichzelf per definitie tekort zou doen. Het is ook niet sociaal dit te denken, misschien dat je dit vanuit je eigen overtuiging moet doen?

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Waarom is dit punt eigenlijk zo belangrijk voor je? Serieus??

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Nogmaals dan voor je:

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Op dinsdag 30 mei 2017 21:04 schreef magnetronkoffie het volgende:

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Het gaat dus gewoon om fakkin dogma's?

Het enige echt interessante stukje dat buiten de dogma's gaat, is de edit in het door jou gequote stukje tekst:

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Vetgedrukte is weer dat groepsgebeuren. Eerlijk gezegd vind ik dit een goede reden om dat soort literatuur zelfs te ontmoedigen.

Groepsdenken is de kern van dingen zoals pesten, nationalisme, oorlogen, de kanker van de mens is daarop gefundeerd.

Winston Churchill zei er ook al iets over.

Het gaat dus om dat fakkin groepthink? Is dat alles?

Mijn god.....wat een teleurstelling weer [ afbeelding ]

En jij (Guus Geluk) vindt dit een goede reden om dit om deze reden te promoten?
Je vindt dus dat groepsgebeuren zo belangrijk?