Posted on 03/27/2012 6:46:41 AM PDT by rhema
The rise of ‘young adult lit’ has been a disaster for children’s literacy. There is plenty of genuine literature that kids can and should be reading. Instead we have an industry that caters and panders to them with lowest common denominator fare. And a good teacher will provide analysis. Usually Lit is presented as part of a class with a theme - American Lit, British Lit and so forth. It supplies a de facto analysis...a history lesson of what a culture was writing.
Yes that’s the one.
Interesting point about the Son/sun language dichotomy. That was the real plot twist at the end, kind of surprising (and a bit of welcome warmth), given the series’ staunch, cold secularism.
In high school literature is only used to buttress the leftwing ideology like history class. It is one of the big reasons that kids hate reading, they never learn to like it, just analyze it from a leftwing perspective. They’ll assign students to read novels like the Adventures of Huck Finn, the Great Gatsby and then give tests and assessments that lead them to conclusions about characters attitudes and motivations. Students come away never learning to appreciate literature but to analyze it from a leftwing perspective. This is brainwashing.
Look at those who are Godless, they worship government as God or worship Gaia or their own bodies’ pleasure.
Everyone has a God.
Reminds me of the last few paragraphs of Brideshead. Something like the single lamp left in the [chapel’s] window guiding the crusaders home. But the passage you cite describes the entire notion of modern “art,” banal, venal, mindless precisely because of the absence of God.
Somehow Waugh slipped under my radar for many years, and I’ve only started really getting acquainted with his work in the last year or two...truly a fascinating individual.
-—No they’re not. The kids know them because the kids read them and talk about them. Kid culture self perpetuates very well without any help from the schools.-—
Like Harry Potter, it’s not an either/or, it’s a both/and.
Read ‘A Handful of Dust’. It’s great.
That episode was titled, "Bread and Circuses." Coincidental to it's references to Imperial Rome, its original broadcast date was on the Ides of March, 1968.
It’s generally an either/ or. What does sometimes happen is schools realize that tons of their kids are consuming a media product and decide to try to figure out if there’s something in there that can be spun into their curriculum. But that isn’t pushing it as reacting to it.
Waugh anticipated post-Christian Europe, which could be the theme of “Brideshead Revisited,” one of my favorite TV dramas.
-—Usually Lit is presented as part of a class with a theme - American Lit, British Lit and so forth. It supplies a de facto analysis...a history lesson of what a culture was writing.-—
This means of categorization is like the Dewey decimal system, or alphabetical order. It’s not very informative.
It would be like categorizing religious beliefs by chronological order.
Like David Copperfield?
Is that the South American tribal chieftan who insists on captives’ reading Dickens to him? (I never remember titles!)
I think I saw that episode. Uhura realizes (I think toward the end) that the sun worshippers are actually Son worshippers, and she explains this to the captain or Spock or somebody. Am I remembering it correctly?
Right. Dystopian literature is almost always religion-free.
Copperfield sort of touches it because you get the idea that he’s actively telling you the story now. But most of the story is in the past. Most of the time you see present tense it’s in spy stories, it adds a lot of immediacy to the story, especially if it’s first person. First person past tense you always have the nagging feeling that the narrator lived through the current scene because he’s telling you it happened in the past, move it to present tense and the poor slob could die at any time, of course they don’t but it feels that way.
Yes, you are. Ends with her declaring “...he is the son of God!” A hard-to-find episode.
Very well said. Whether Hollywood or the author intended to, the film is a conservative tour de force about the evils of a dictatorial central government that oppresses and enslaves its citizens, and the flickering of freedom and the spark that will start a revolt to throw off the yoke of the oppressor. Seems very topical to the US, the Obama Administration,and what conservatives need to do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.