Posted on 08/02/2006 7:39:12 PM PDT by Stoat
Good luck with that! Seriously. I was really impressed with the Omnibus book,and ordered it, but found it was beyond me to teach by myself. I have left the books on the book shelves for the kids to pick up whenever and they have read a couple of them on their own. You may want to read the Gilgamesh Epic with yours as there are graphic sexual themes. We ended up opting not to have ours read it.
Those aren't discourses, they're pathologies. Insofar as painting the corpus of children's literature in different shades of black and furthering the careers of obfuscators and charlatans, they're perfectly useful. It does not occur to the purveyors of this sort of intellectual mishmash that they themselves will be the subject of similar critical studies some years hence when the principal question will be how anyone could have been so deluded as to think that they were accomplishing anything by it.
This sort of abuse is to the study of literature what an autopsy is to the study of a living body. "He who breaks something in order to understand it has left the path of wisdom."
Original texts, or mutations thereof?
I'm increasingly impressed with how original Aesop, Grimm, and other tales were strikingly harsh introductions to the real world - not the TV-and-grocery-store fantasies we have today. Birth, life, suffering, conflict, success and death were _not_ treated or avoided gingerly, but presented starkly to teach children the ways & dangers of the world before fully encountering them. They were often far from happy fairy tales - they may involve faries, and may even be happy, but the stark reality of nature, survival, and tribalism were taugh in earnest.
Maybe, but this kind of nonsensical sophistry hadn't been institutionalized, corporatized and mandated here in this country, till relatively recently.
Sophistry goes back to the Sophists doesn't it? :)
An English class at university required a reading of "Balloon Man"; the TA was adamant that the short story was really about a child molester, not a well-loved old man selling balloons to kids. My view was that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and my report was not well received, as I discovered the author had committed suicide, and mentioned that in my report. The goofball about blew a gasket "You've been doing outside research!!" etc. etc. That's not allowed, apparently. What was the point of the exercise? In any case, the people running the universities outside the rational sciences are just beyond sick.
Seeking stories which teach MULTICULTURALISM.
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