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Old 01-14-2013, 10:12 PM   #17
Prestidigitweeze
Fledgling Demagogue
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Some of us seem intent on drawing a false parallel between enjoying a piece of writing and benefiting from reading it in the mechanical sense.

Comprehension of a text other than Shakespeare's might benefit from being read after him because the mind has been awakened to various levels of diction, language, specificity and compression.

If the idea is not to comprehend another text but to create one's own, then the quality of his writing might also help to inspire one's own thought, and suggest rhetorical and grammatical structures which are delicately (or even blatantly) balanced for additional effect.

Shakespeare's content could be helpful when, beyond the surface of the language, the reader notices and feels that classical unities provide solid continuity (esp. the unities of time and place), characterization is rich, momentum is electric and history, even flawed history, gains perspective.

There is also a pedal point of self-awareness achieved when readers find phrases in a writer (like Shake) which perfectly express their own experience.

This is contingent, of course, on their feeling that Shakespeare embodies such perfect expression. Many intelligent readers do not (and a few of them are my friends).

Nor is disliking Shakespeare synonymous with disliking difficult writing. Some people dislike Shakespeare for entirely different reasons. The plays, after all, were intended to entertain.

A text which is read after Shakepeare's might or might not benefit in any technical sense if the text is completely different in purpose -- say, a passage in an algebra textbook. For us to know whether it did benefit, we'd have to test the hypothesis.

The assertion that any complex (or busy) painting is better than a spare one is no more true than the assertion that simplicity is always best. Both are statements of subjective preference masquerading as truths.

If the point of a series of tests is to validate the claim that standards of excellence are subjective in the absolute sense, then they're not needed because we already know that.

If the point is to assert that difficult (and, some might feel, excessively revered) books aren't as good or important as people think, then the tests are not only arbitrary but ludicrous. We've gotten entirely too comfortable with inventing ways to make ourselves feel better about comparing geniuses' achievements to our own. "I'm so glad I'm a B," cooed the hypnopedic tape from Brave New World.

One of the main reasons Shakespeare is taught is because teachers have seen the results of studying him. They learn what inspires and motivates students and then continue to use it, as my mother (who taught music and English for a lifetime) often pointed out. She was always looking for literature for high school students which would not only inspire them but improve their comprehension and test their depth.

We all know that kid's chorus from Pink Floyd's well-known song about education. But railing against the appreciation of difficult work is the opposite of railing against authority -- Hitler, in fact, had the same misgivings about difficult modernist work that many supposedly anti-authoritarian readers do today.

To teach is to hand someone a key to a door, not take the key away and build a wall in the door's place.

Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 01-14-2013 at 10:47 PM.
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