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NikkolasKing posted:Do you have any experience with which "classics" are most hated and any theory on why this might be? I think a lot of the hate for Catcher in the Rye is directed at the fanbase, so to speak, rather than the book itself.
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Feb 7, 2021 20:46
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 02:23 |
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im permabanned poster phoneystomper58. i first started reading catcher in the rye when i was about 12. by 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of “authenticity” and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like “society is phoney” and “adults are liars” in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing things in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia. im now on antipsychotics. i always wondered what the kind of “authentic” style of living was all about; i think it’s the unconscious leaking in to the conscious, what jungian theory considered to be the cause of schizophrenic and schizotypal syptoms. i would advise all people who “get” catcher in the rye to be careful because that likely means you have a predisposition to a mental illness. peace.
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Feb 7, 2021 20:54
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Are there any other Shakespeare plays (or famous works in general) where the reputation and/or image in popular culture is so different from the actual text that it gets remarked upon by folks in the field? I think people have some weird ideas about Hamlet sometimes. I think people sometimes refer to it in ways that emphasize the title character's more indecisive moments and forget how ruthless he is sometimes, in addition to errors like conflating the "Alas, poor Yorick" speech with the "To be or not to be" speech.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:06
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Also, people sometimes have odd impressions of Midsummer Night's Dream. Because it's a comedy with fairies in it it gets softened in popular memory; this was probably more true in Victorian times than now, but even in 2011, the dreadful anti-Stratfordian film Anonymous had Oxford writing Midsummer Night's Dream as a fairly young child.
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Jun 8, 2021 21:16
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Brainworm posted:Silver2195 brought up some good ones. Here are a couple more: To be fair, the gravedigger scene does seem to indicate that Hamlet is around 30.
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Jun 9, 2021 02:01
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CommonShore posted:Heh Shakespeare is overrated but that doesn't mean he isn't first-rate. Bardolatry just hits levels of uncritical worship that aren't a useful lens for understanding anything. Agreed.
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Jul 27, 2021 20:00
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Wallet posted:This is maybe a stupid question, but what do you mean by this? Google seems to think it's a chart you assign school children to demonstrate reading comprehension. Brainworm wrote a whole book about all of this called something like Shakespeare's Storytelling. That said, I feel like the book didn't do much to establish that those storytelling techniques were original to Shakespeare; it just sort of asserted this and focused on explaining the techniques themselves and how both Shakespeare and later writers used them. Which I guess fits the book's intended purpose (introducing undergraduates to useful lenses for analyzing Shakespeare and other fiction), but doesn't really provide much help in the debate over whether Shakespeare's reputation is truly earned.
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Aug 2, 2021 21:55
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Fuschia tude posted:Well, isn't that asking to prove a negative? What you're asking would require an exhaustive survey of every single written work predating Shakespeare (at least in English), to prove that none of them had ever done all of those things that he did together in one work before. Heh, fair point. I'm actually agnostic about whether Brainworm is right about this; I've read and watched some Shakespeare plays, as well as some non-drama English literature contemporary with and prior to him, but I haven't actually read or watched any plays by his English contemporaries. (I have read slightly-later French plays by Moliere and Racine in translation, and came to the conclusion that Racine's work is "less flawed" than Shakespeare's, but that this isn't necessarily the same as being "better." The key difference lies is Stendhal's classical vs. romantic distinction; Shakespeare was more willing to take risks by breaking neoclassical "rules.")
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Aug 2, 2021 22:33
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 02:23 |
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I think Brainworm has said that he doesn’t like the concept of “theme” very much, because it’s rather reductive.
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Feb 7, 2024 13:50
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