Marjorie Perloff, Why Teach Literature Anyway
I mentioned before that my Uni is the home to four publishing companies. What you, and me, do not know that is that my Uni has become a haven for university humanities publishing. Within the past two years my Uni has gone from a relatively unknown satellite university to being nationally and internationally known for snatching up these failing publishers and bringing them to our little city and having them thrive.
They are also renown for their American Book Review Reading Series. Today we hosted Dr. Marjorie Perloff, EPC entry, Wiki.
The topic of the lecture was, "Why Teach Literature Anyway" and it was incredible. The topic came from the MLA lecture series this past year. She mentioned how Literature is being disregarded as a legitimate and wanted part of curriculum to teach people.
One of the ways that she pointed this out was by mentioning the latest election. Remember how everyone was talking about, "Who was Barack Obama?" Well, in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, which was written over ten years ago, we find out who he really is. Unlike Audacity of Hope, this was not a foundation of his political format but an actual look into his character and motivations.
The audacity of his critics and opposition to not know who he was, is because they didn't read the book. She mentioned about how people are always being briefed on things, like how Clinton was on Iraq's WMD, and that they are not reading and re-reading things.
This she also contributes to the dumbing down of the media and how they keep making these outlandish claims and never get any flak for being wrong. If they were in any other type of career field they would have already been fired.
Marjorie also talked about how the reason to teach Literature is that it shows us another world. We communicate through language in words that facsimiles of reality, similar but not quite able to reach the scope of real. It teaches us the differences of people.
That is why assignments such as, "What would you do if you were Ahab?" are ridiculous because there are so many circumstances that in exist in that world of that novel that make it impossible for those of us who live in this world to comprehend, understand, or be able to change. It is like trying to say, "What would you do if you were George Washington?" Could any of us being to say without doubt and with clarity of mind of what we would do?
In the real world we group things, people, together as if all people of a certain belief system; creed; race; ethnicity; economic background; etc are made of the same cloth and are the same. We generalize people to put them into a concept we can understand and it is through Literature - writing materials of all sorts not just heavy handed well-renown books but also that of fiction; non-fiction; fantasy; sci-fi; comic books, etc - that we are shown the differences in the generalities. That not all black men from poor neighborhoods are the same nor is a person who of a mixed raced. Many things come together to bring this person to life and it is in literature that we are given the sights of separate universes and realities from our own in which we can examine and understand that which we may never see or experience in our real lives.
It is why she believes that book awards are subjective to politics because two works of literature are not the same and cannot be judged on the same scale as mathematics and science can in finding truth and what does and does not work. The only thing about literary awards is that from a business perspective you are able to sell more books because it won a fancy award.
This was brought forth about a discussion about the Nobel Prize in Literature and how the U.S. has been snubbed for a while. She mentioned that we, America, are being snubbed because the rest of the world is tired of us being so hypocritical about globalization and acceptance of foreign works of literature, but only once we translate it into English, which thereby causes the work to lose its sense of meaning.
She is right about that. We do need to bring more works of literature to the States without having to translate them. The problem is that we do not have enough of a market of foreign language speakers in our land to make this profitable. We try too late to teach foreign language to students, when it should really start in Kindergarten, not to mention we don't even know which language to teach them anymore. It used to be French and German because of the relevancy in college. But now? It could be anything from Arabic to Japanese to Portuguese to Spanish.
I think a compromise would be best achieved. By bringing the literature in both it's original language and with an English translation perhaps with a glossary on terms and points of reference to things we may not understand. After all, to understand a book of literature we must understand what they are referencing to. That is what reading while aware is about. *she used some other phrase but I'm blanking on it.*
I took about a year and a half of Japanese in college. I've lost most of that knowledge but it was through that experience that I have come to appreciate works in their original language. I would just like a translation and a guide on the pronunciation of the words with a glossary to understand what certain phrases and references mean.
I think with that we can finally achieve a balance between in translation works being able to appeal to the mass market and with keeping to the original language.
Also, Marjorie recommends the works of Japanese/German writer Yoko Tawada, she is a Japanese writer who went on a trip to Germany and never came back and a lot of her works deals with the complexity of understanding the nuances between the two languages and cultures. And this website called Pennsound, "PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives," it allows you to hear writers read their works of art.
Marjorie, unlike most in the publishing world does not think that Literature is going away or that publishing will cease to exist. Instead, she believes it will adapt and find a way to survive. Sure some things like news is going extinct in paper form, but that books and literature itself is thriving. There will always be people hungering for works of written art, no matter what form of literature they are interested in.
So what do you think of Literature, the publishing world and the state of it?
They are also renown for their American Book Review Reading Series. Today we hosted Dr. Marjorie Perloff, EPC entry, Wiki.
The topic of the lecture was, "Why Teach Literature Anyway" and it was incredible. The topic came from the MLA lecture series this past year. She mentioned how Literature is being disregarded as a legitimate and wanted part of curriculum to teach people.
One of the ways that she pointed this out was by mentioning the latest election. Remember how everyone was talking about, "Who was Barack Obama?" Well, in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, which was written over ten years ago, we find out who he really is. Unlike Audacity of Hope, this was not a foundation of his political format but an actual look into his character and motivations.
The audacity of his critics and opposition to not know who he was, is because they didn't read the book. She mentioned about how people are always being briefed on things, like how Clinton was on Iraq's WMD, and that they are not reading and re-reading things.
This she also contributes to the dumbing down of the media and how they keep making these outlandish claims and never get any flak for being wrong. If they were in any other type of career field they would have already been fired.
Marjorie also talked about how the reason to teach Literature is that it shows us another world. We communicate through language in words that facsimiles of reality, similar but not quite able to reach the scope of real. It teaches us the differences of people.
That is why assignments such as, "What would you do if you were Ahab?" are ridiculous because there are so many circumstances that in exist in that world of that novel that make it impossible for those of us who live in this world to comprehend, understand, or be able to change. It is like trying to say, "What would you do if you were George Washington?" Could any of us being to say without doubt and with clarity of mind of what we would do?
In the real world we group things, people, together as if all people of a certain belief system; creed; race; ethnicity; economic background; etc are made of the same cloth and are the same. We generalize people to put them into a concept we can understand and it is through Literature - writing materials of all sorts not just heavy handed well-renown books but also that of fiction; non-fiction; fantasy; sci-fi; comic books, etc - that we are shown the differences in the generalities. That not all black men from poor neighborhoods are the same nor is a person who of a mixed raced. Many things come together to bring this person to life and it is in literature that we are given the sights of separate universes and realities from our own in which we can examine and understand that which we may never see or experience in our real lives.
It is why she believes that book awards are subjective to politics because two works of literature are not the same and cannot be judged on the same scale as mathematics and science can in finding truth and what does and does not work. The only thing about literary awards is that from a business perspective you are able to sell more books because it won a fancy award.
This was brought forth about a discussion about the Nobel Prize in Literature and how the U.S. has been snubbed for a while. She mentioned that we, America, are being snubbed because the rest of the world is tired of us being so hypocritical about globalization and acceptance of foreign works of literature, but only once we translate it into English, which thereby causes the work to lose its sense of meaning.
She is right about that. We do need to bring more works of literature to the States without having to translate them. The problem is that we do not have enough of a market of foreign language speakers in our land to make this profitable. We try too late to teach foreign language to students, when it should really start in Kindergarten, not to mention we don't even know which language to teach them anymore. It used to be French and German because of the relevancy in college. But now? It could be anything from Arabic to Japanese to Portuguese to Spanish.
I think a compromise would be best achieved. By bringing the literature in both it's original language and with an English translation perhaps with a glossary on terms and points of reference to things we may not understand. After all, to understand a book of literature we must understand what they are referencing to. That is what reading while aware is about. *she used some other phrase but I'm blanking on it.*
I took about a year and a half of Japanese in college. I've lost most of that knowledge but it was through that experience that I have come to appreciate works in their original language. I would just like a translation and a guide on the pronunciation of the words with a glossary to understand what certain phrases and references mean.
I think with that we can finally achieve a balance between in translation works being able to appeal to the mass market and with keeping to the original language.
Also, Marjorie recommends the works of Japanese/German writer Yoko Tawada, she is a Japanese writer who went on a trip to Germany and never came back and a lot of her works deals with the complexity of understanding the nuances between the two languages and cultures. And this website called Pennsound, "PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives," it allows you to hear writers read their works of art.
Marjorie, unlike most in the publishing world does not think that Literature is going away or that publishing will cease to exist. Instead, she believes it will adapt and find a way to survive. Sure some things like news is going extinct in paper form, but that books and literature itself is thriving. There will always be people hungering for works of written art, no matter what form of literature they are interested in.
So what do you think of Literature, the publishing world and the state of it?