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Gleri posted:Also, for the guy who doesn't like Shakespeare, you should really just watch Shakespeare performed. It's written to be performed. Give your ear a few minutes to get attuned, if you are a native English speaker, it shouldn't be any harder to understand than the Wire. I prefer watching Original Pronounciation performances if I can get it, because I find it much easier to understand than Received Pronounciation, but I'm a Newfie and OP is much closer to my native dialect. Your mileage may vary. I'll echo this, 100%. I actually think teaching Shakespeare in English classes in school is a massive disservice both to pupils and Shakespeare himself. His plays are honestly really really good, but you're only likely to realise that if you actually go to a good quality performance of his work. Becuase of the changes in the language, Shakespeare's text can be difficult to understand, but if you see it performed by actors who understand what they are saying, you understand what they're saying, because the tone and manner with which it is said carries the meaning just as well as the actual words. Having a bunch of bored, disinterested kids read it aloud--or worse, having an English teacher read the whole thing and do all the parts--mangles the whole thing and ruins the text. For example, when I was in school one year we did Richard II. There is a scene in which Richard gets a very, very, long soliloquy in which he is having to give up the crown. It's a speech in which the main character appears to wallow in self-pity, and basically compares the injustice of having to give up the crown to the cruxifiction of Jesus. As speeches go, it is actively utterly awful, in which the speaker is the undisputed eternal king of drama queens. And when my class read Richard II in English, I completely missed the fact that that was the point, to emphasise how pathetic a person he was, due to the way the play was read and taught. It wasn't until I saw a production (reluctantly, at first) years later and saw the man playing Richard going to pains to emphasise how ridiculous the speech was, and the other actors putting on bemused looks of being embarrassed even to be there, that I got it. There is probably something to be said for reading Shakespeare without seeing it performed, if you want to do analysis unbiased by the stage, but if you just want to enjoy it, go see a performance. And if you are really on the fence, I would recommend the BBC's renditions of The Hollow Crown, which you can get on DVD. They are not complete unabridged productions of the four plays in the series, but they are completely watchable and done by very competent and well experienced Shakespearean actors (Or, if you prefer, Captain Picard, Loki, and Scar from the Lion King), and large chunks of Henry IV parts one and two are actually genuinely hilarious. I realise that will sound crazy if your only experience with Shakespeare is from English classes, but I absolutely guarantee that Shakespeare's jokes are actually funny when the actor knows how to tell them.
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Jun 18, 2014 23:24
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Pessimisten posted:I'll engage in this flawed thread in a more productive way from now on, since the line of discussion i was on seems to be about as dead as most of the authors discussed here. This isn't a recommendation on the basis of Steinbeck so much as it is your preference for Genre fiction, and I would recommend much, much older works than tend to get floated in many literature discussions as introductions. Part of the reason is that frankly the stories are better if your idea of a good story is genre fiction style work, and the other part of it is that the texts tended to be aimed at everyone in the period they were written including people with literally no education or ability to read, rather than readers of literature. As such the language is much more down to earth (personally, a major obstacle I have with modern literature is that I apparently cannot perceive what is described as "beautiful prose" as actually being beautiful, making many modern works simply interminably boring, and perhaps you might feel the same way from what you've said before). My automatic preference here would be to recommend The Canterbury Tales, but that really is a work best read in Middle English, which is hard enough when English is your first language. It's also poetic, which might be a turnoff, but it follows the classic conventions of rhyme and meter, and the comedic tales use the structure to set up jokes and punchlines. Relevant to the thread, Chaucer is better at writing about farts than GRRM or Joyce. In the same bawdy ballpark would be Lysistrata by Aristophanes, about a sex strike by the women of Greece. Other Greek works I would recommend would be Antigone by Sophocles, a play about religious vs secular law, and The Odyssey, which contains plenty of witches and magic and fun poo poo. So does Beowulf, though that one's in Old English and you'll need a translation probably. Have you read the Eddas, incidentally? I don't know if they'd be part of Swedish schooling as standard, but if you haven't, read those too. Frost Giants and inter dimensional travel and aliens and squabbling gods, they are the godfathers of genre fiction, pretty much.
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Jun 20, 2014 02:20
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