Few books that we read as an adult will catch our imagination as those books we read in childhood. It was there we learnt to use and expand our imaginations. It's there we learnt that there are wonders out there beyond our seemingly limited view of that of childhood. It was there that we first expanded out minds. As an adult, most of what I read gives me great pleasure.

But, during adulthood, there are too few books written that will make we cease notice what goes on around me and to take me totally out of my everyday life, lifting and transporting me back to that time of total enchantment and awe.

Thank the great Wizard for Harry Potter.

I felt much in tune with Greene's assertion until the last phrase because of its underlying depression. I do think that many of the books I read as a child are with me still in a world of memories that are sometimes disappointing but more often filled with wonder at how I felt in those long-ago days. Those books are part of who I am today and I see that as a positive thing.

Marda is right that much of what we read in our adult lives is just as crucial to our imaginative reach and intellectual growth as those we read in childhood. One thing I do now that I did not do then is interpret a book on a deeper level, and I know how to do that because I read so extensively as a child. Does that mean that I take even greater pleasure in my adult reading than I did as a child? I guess they really can't be so neatly separated as Greene implies.

Ooh, Harry Potter and the huge piles of fantasy that Rowling has given us for over a decade. I'll miss waiting for the "next book," but at least there are the "next movies." Have you finished the final book, Michael? What's your take on it?

Thanks, Josh, for such a thought-provoking quote.

He didn't say books which we read in childhood. He said "books which are read to us." To me those are two completely different things. I can see where that wouldn't be the same case for many people. I never really enjoyed having people read to me all that much. I wanted to do it myself,so didn't find the experience that satisfying. When someone reads to you,you are held hostage by the inflection of their voice and their interpretation of the story. It's interesting how in a book discussion group,there can be such a difference in interpretation of a story between those who have read the book and those who listened to it being read.As a child I know I wouldn't have found the Nancy Drew collection very satisfying at all if someone had read them to me rather than my reading them myself. I derived a huge satisfaction from books I read later in my childhood,rather than those read to me when I was very very young.

Yes, I have finished it. I won't go in detail about what methinks, as to spoil for those who might be a bit tardy in reading it, or whom might be reading at a slower pace, but I do think Madame Rowling did a great job finishing an almost impossible book to finish the series with. I am pleased with how she ties up all the subplots and am especially pleased with her character developement. Few people in this world are totally good or totally evil.

The books that were read to me as a child evoke almost visceral memories for me. Several were read to me so often I can still recite them from memory almost 50 years later.

However, it's sometimes a mistake to go back and re-read books that were favorites when you were young. Maybe it's gaining more critical thinking about literature, but when I've gone back to books that I loved in my teens or early twenties, I often come away thinking what did I see in this? It's a treat to go back to a book that holds up and still can enthrall as much as it did when I was young.

So we should stick with Austen and Bronte, Melville and Hawthorne--love those 19th-century novelists and their big, fat books. Anybody going to see Becoming Jane this weekend?

I can't remember being read to,tho i must have been. I remember learning to read and finding a new universe that influenced the rest of my life.Rarely do i find a book now that i completely lose track of this world in.
vickie

I've really enjoyed all the comments. Marda,Greene's books were often sort of downers for me but he introduced me to a different way of seeing things, people whose experience and lives were different, foreign places. That's generally why I read an author...as long as the dialogue and character's motivation ring true, I'll go along and hope at the end that I've met and understood another person, way of thinking, way of life.

I interpreted the quote to mean that you can read about (or be read to) EEyore and Toad and Mopsy but when a little older you lose your facile acceptance of talking animals and are disappointed to find out that fairies and dragons are not real. And further disappointed to realize you can never regain that total suspension of reality in the pages of a book.

Pidge, I like John Galsworthy and Trollope, too...

I'll admit though that at least once a year I reread Alice's adventures and Wind in the Willows. Andie, I know most of A Child's Garden of Verses by heart. So some of the magic of childhood reading still remains. josh

Maybe one of the reasons I have so enjoyed the Potter books is because they reintroduce the fantasy that was an everyday experience of childhood reading. I always knew Toad and Alice and the Secret Garden were fantasy when I was a kid. Maybe I want a little of that back. BTW, I am alone among my friends who has read all the books--they look slightly askance at my delight with Harry Potter.

All this brings to mind a book I taught last semeester, Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune. It's an historical novel AND magic realism all rolled into one, with enough shape-shifting, gender-bending, and identity changes to tease the imagination in all kinds of ways. I'm teaching it this semester in conjunction with Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in a course that pairs a classic text with a contemporary one dealing with the same or similar themes--it will be a blast.

It was your comment about Galsworthy and Trollope (Andie's fave!) that made me think of Allende, Josh! I am very fond of South American writers and their ability to link the everyday with the world of the spirit.

I have only the vaguest memory of being read to. What I do remember is a day when -once again- no one was free to read to me, so I decided to do it myself. I also remember asking bro1 what a word meant, and getting a crash course in basic phonics. From that time on there was no stopping me, and I thought a dictionary was the equivalent of a pirate's chest of gold and jewels... you reached in and pulled out a surprise.

I find I don't agree with the quote. It seems based on the assumption that all books read to one were straightforward and simple and engrossing, and all books read later are so influenced by the reader's own experiences as to be lacking in imagination and unexpectedness, and thus disappointing.

Anyone who has not recently been totally engrossed in a book, needs to read a different genre occasionally.

Josh,it isn't Greene's stories that I never could get into,I thought his End Of The Affair translated beautifully to the screen,but it's his style of writing that turns me off for some reason. When it comes to reading about different places as you mention,E.M.Forster does it for me. I hate to see the Harry Potter series come to an end. They are pure magic.

Getting back to Greene's quote about books read to you being more satisfying than those you've read later,what books have been read to all of you that you would put into that category? I can remember my mother reading to us all the time and the warm experience,but my best reading memories are those of being a kid up in a tree with all those wonderful childhood books from the library which I read on my own. I can still see myself up there reading Anne of Green Gables and falling in love with that book.That wouldn't have been the case if someone else had read it to me.

Besides the short books that I can still recite from memory, like Madelaine, my absolute most favorite book of childhood was one that had been a childhood book of my great aunt Frances - Zauberlinda, The Wise Witch It was published around 1099 & told the story of a young girl living with her older relatives in the Dakota Black Hills while her father was away prospecting to make his fortune so they can move to that book's version of the Emerald City - Chicago. One day after being told by all & sundry that she's being a nuisance she wanders off onto the prairie & meets a prairie dog, who is actually the Prince of the Gnomes in disguise. He takes her off to a magical underground kingdom where she has all sorts of adventures & finally gets home with the aid of Zauberlinda. (If this sounds more than a little like The Wizard of Oz to you, I've often had the same thought)

The book had monochrome illustrations on every page that extended up & through the text & I found it enchanting. I have no idea how many times it was read to me, but my mom used to say that when the reader would get tired of reading & try & skip a few pages, I'd say "No you skipped a part go back" LOL! No rest for the weary adult.

When I got old enough to read myself, I did the equivalent of Marda sitting in the tree, although I had a somewhat more comfortable perch on the porch swing of the screened in porch. There I devoured volumes of "Illustrated Classics" - Little Women, Black Beauty, The Three Musketeers, etc. These books still hold up & I still get pleasure in reading them. I think one led to the other. Being read to got me hooked on books and then knowing how to read let me explore that vast world of literature all on my own.

You really did a great job with the quotes, this last week Jo. As did Andie. As did Lilo. I really respect the forethought put into all those selections. This one plucked the magic twanger and flushed them out of the woodwork.

My first memories of being read to was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I was either on my father's lap or at his feet. My sister would wax and wane at those readings, but I was stuck like glue. I thought it pretty telling that as early as that it was evident who would be the reader, and who wouldn't.

I am sure this introduction to literature was a motivator. I would "pretend" to be reading and ask him incessantly about this letter or that. I wanted to read so badly, I hounded my sister, who was older than I to show me each day what she had studied in school, and was already reading by the time I was enrolled and placed directly into the first grade, bypassing kindergarten.

We were saturated in nursery rhymes and children's songs from my earliest memory, but not those typical children's books. I remember the first time I read Dr. Seuss how silly I thought them. In my little brain, I honestly worried about the man who wrote them. LOL.

I still adore Lewis Carroll's stories. They are just as magical as the first time around. And BTW, I still believe in magic and faeries.

I was in high school when The Cat In The Hat was first published which was the the beginning of his series of books,other than one he published much earlier. When I took Kiddie Lit in college for a teaching certificate we read about his influence on children's literature . His main purpose in writing his books was to get children to learn how to read at an early age which he did. He believed strongly in phonetics at a time when that was being tossed out the window in most schools, so I applaud him for what he has been able to accomplish in getting children to learn how to read. Our son never cared for nursery rhymes but I can still see his face when I read Horton Hears A Who...such a poignant story...and then he read it himself. I think the Seuss books are regarded more as mini reading primers than great children's literature,since the purpose is teaching phonetics. In the library where I work,all the Seuss books are in the section with other " I can read early" type books,rather than the general children's literature section. But I would agree Suzy,some of those stories are pretty dorky,but then so was Dick and Jane. LOL

Pidge, how do you connect Galsworthy and Trollop with Allende? Although I myself for some reason think of Barbara Pym when I see Jane Austen's name...it's odd how memory works.

I guess I'm going to have to read a bit of Harry Potter....too many folks whose opinion I value praise it. Somehow the early hype turned me off...

I was allowed to start kindergarten at age 4 (living on military post) and then the next year we started traveling to follow my father from post to post. Not much room for toys, but books were always in the car and my sister, 5 years older, read everything to me from the lyrics of pop songs (from mags published just for that purpose) to some of my books or her favorites.

As soon as we reached our new home, new school, we headed for the libraries. I suppose learning to read early and easily just happened in those circumstances. Even in a new school I felt at home in the library, whereas in the classroom and playground I was the "new kid". Moving every few months there was little time for making friends...not until 4 years later when Dad went overseas did we spend more than a few months in one place. Books were our lodestone.

My Mom wasn't as much of a reader as my Dad. In all the years since I left home he and I usually spent time when visiting one another standing near the bookshelves...I miss that.

Suzy, I've just started the quotes yesterday...but I've had a hard time keeping to the high standards set. The responses really deepen and expand the quotes themselves for me...josh

Horton Hears a Who was out when I was in grade school, I'm almost sure, Marda. I was in about the second or third grade and was very disappointed when it was introduced in class with much hoop-la. And the Grinch arrived when I was about ten only I was out of the country and didn't see him for the first time until I was in College. I thought it was Macabre. LOL. I couldn't get into that either.

You know, I never knew that his series starting with Cat in the Hat, was written intentionally to teach anything, and I guess that puts his books in a little different light. Yes, our first books were Dick and Jane as well. Yes, I thought they were dumb and spent a good deal of my time then staring out the window at the poor janitor who had to mow almost half an acre with a push type reel mower. No motor. I can remember the grass smell yet. But most of our primers, even the aritmetic ones were still in use from WWII. I remember one of our first "word" problems was a story about how a woman wanted to bake cookies, but sugar was rationed and we had to calculate how many cookies she could bake with what she had on hand! I had to go home and ask my Mama what rationed meant.

I suspect, given your education and experience as a teacher, you see things in children's literature I wouldn't notice if it came smacking me up the side of the face. I didn't much like any of the early kid's program on the tube either and that included Captain Kangaroo. I must've been a serious little fart. rofl.

Have to agree with josh. Have tried 3 times to read Harry Potter books and find them an instant cure for insomnia. I'm really faulting me because people whose opinion I value seem to enjoy them. Hey, this is coming from someone who can read Jane Austen's Emma without nodding off and Barchester Towers holds my attention better than the Harry Potter books, maybe I'll try another time.

I've tried to read them as well, Gandle, and can't stay with it. I got through one and halfway through the next and that was it. I am looking forward, however, to one day getting all the films, locking the doors, making great trays of junk food and starting at the beginning and watching them clean through in their entirety. I was reading books like Cloister and the Hearth at fourteen, however. That's what literature is about, thank God, there really is something for everybody.

I never could get into,forgive me Pidge,the Lord Of The Rings..any of them. I tried and tried and said,phooey..no more. One Saturday a couple of years ago I decided to clean out a room from top to bottom,so rented all 3 films,put them in the DVD player and was totally mesmerized.The room was barely touched. LOL Sometimes the films are enough and I think the first Harry Potter movie was one of the most charming things I have ever seen.Still need to read the last 2 books.

Ive slogged through Lord of the Rings several times but feel as though im reading English as another language each time.
Harry Potter? I was hooked from chapter one.....
I think the 1st book, besides reading primers, i read and remember was "The Boxcar Children" and the "My Fathers Dragon" series.

I've been reading Harry Potter with a young girl who needed a reading mentor. She has vision issues and reads a couple grades below her age level. If I leave it to her to pick out books they are usually way below level. I had to finally start stepping up the SRA levels she could choose from. I'm pretty sure she would have stayed in the fourth grade level forever if I had let her! I'm not sure how much of her vision and reading levels is behind her lack of desire to read (and vice-versa) but Harry Potter is one thing she will read without any prompting on my part. We can get them in large print, one of the few age-appropriate large print books in our library system.

At the end of this last school year she read all of the fourth book....it was HUGE! I honestly didn't think she'd get through it. I about fell over when she told me she had turned it back in. I started to question whether really really read the whole thing, but she said she did.

We might have turned a corner...I hear she's been burning up pages all summer in our church library reading program. I'm interested in seeing her reading list.

I had been lackadaisical about reading HP on my own, but I do enjoy them. I've been reading them side by side with her so I can catch up!

I was a huge reader as a child (still am as an adult), I read just about anything I could get my hands on. I particularly loved The Secret Garden. It's been kind of hard to wrap my mind around a child who doesn't read and who so desperately needs that release from reality!

Lisa

Joah, I was just thinking of long and wonderful historical novels when Allende came into my mind. And I was also looking for someone in at least the 20th century if not the 21st--though DofF is written in this century--I think!

Marda, I've never READ LOTR! I've only ever seen the films and loved them.

You mean to tell me all that oohing and aahing and swooning over those strange little people was just for those 3 movies?? Shame on you professor. Seriously,have you ever wanted to read them?

Never could get into LOTR, or Harry Potter. Although I loved the Wizard of Oz &, of course, my fave. Zauberlinda as a kid, I just don't like fantasy fiction (or sci fi) as a genre. For the most part it makes me want to Zzzzzzzzz. However, give me a big, triple-decker Victorian novel & I'm in hog heaven.

As for Dr. Sues, I was too old for A Cat in the Hat & all the rest of his books that came out in the late 1950's. And yes, he wrote them with a limited vocabulary (I think something like 250 words) to get kids to read. I never got the attraction of the Cat with the big hat, but I have to admit being absolutely charmed by Green Eggs & Ham.

The early Dr. Suess, however, are really quite remarkable - To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, &, of course, Horton, who should be awarded some kind of literary Nobel Peace Prize for defending the weak & small. Who can forget him defending the Whos ("A person's a person no matter how small") as the nasty crowd want to throw the flower holding the dust speck into the boiling oil chanting "Boil that dust speck!" His efforts to hatch an egg in the face of scorn & derision also show that he was truly an elephant for the ages.

Josh, you've really opened up the memory banks on this one!

I've so thoroughly enjoyed this thread that I'm going to risk overdoing it...putting a link that so well describes the joy of books and reading that I gasped when I read it. Might be familiar to some of you but here goes: josh

Here is a link that might be useful: Italo Calvino

Dr.Seuss "Lorax" almost started a civil war in this community - it is about cutting and killing trees, and the son of our influential owner of a timber supply mail order company came home and accused his Daddy to be a tree killer... well, daddy raised Cain with the school board and a lot of protests were simmering - for and against - this was about the time of "Redwood Summer" and environmentalist's protests all over the place, and poor Mr. Bill already felt the heat, and then his son asked questions.
Mr. B. started paying his employees in cash - dollar bills, stamped with "Timber Dollars" - things got a bit nasty for a while, but eventually simmered down.
It was a time of Judy Barry and Earth First! and the loggers, and much of the storm was ignited by a chidlren's book, which essentially explained that greed was hurting everyone. Of course, that was in the eighties, when the password was "greed is good"

Andie,he didn't win a Nobel but did get a special Pulitzer sometime in the 80s,don't remember the year,for his contribution to the education of children.

LOL, Marda, the truth is I never even wanted to read them. I did read The Hobbit early but that is as far as I got. The trouble with LOTR is that it is a totally male world in the books and women are not encouraged to engage with them. The roles of women in the films is greatly enhanced from Tolkien's portrayal. If I read them now, it would probably be with the aim of pondering the homoeroticism that is so apparent in the films and wondering about the man who created them. From what I understand from those who have read the books, Tolkien, who was married with children, has an intense interest in male-male relationships at the expense of male-female ones. That said, my sci-fi fan daughter has read the novels multiple times and it's she who turned me on to even watching the films. It's also she who understands better than I do the homoeroticism embedded in Tolkien's work.

I recall several years ago, in a course on the British industrial novel, wondering about the imagery and characterizations in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet in terms of whether or not it was a homoerotic novel. One of my students, himself a gay man, took up my suggestion and wrote a brilliant paper outlining the many ways in which the novel could have been the protoype for the development of queer theory. Kingsley was a minister, married with children, a big, brawny athletic kind of guy, but buried under all that was something entirely different. I wonder if that is the case with Tolkien.

Josh, I haven't read enough Italo Calvino to speak intelligently about his work. You make me think I better do something about that.

Well, that's a school of thought that I have never heard about Tolkien. What the English language is really lacking in is that it doesn't have but one word to describe the many types of love that there are. Agape, eros, and philia are the Greek words that come to mind.

Some folks just see, um, ah ________ everywhere, maybe in some cases where it just might not be.....

*Ducks and runs....*

Of course you are right, Michael, but I think it's also true that we have been trained not to see homoeroticism where it might sometimes be. I also agree that there are many kinds of male-male love that are not homoerotic. What comes to mind in that vein is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a love story through and through in which the love of one man for another has nothing to do with sex. Maybe that is the case with Tolkien, but not having read the books myself I cannot really judge and am relying on a third party for my conjecture. But the Kingsley book--I stand by my analysis of that one because I've read it multiple times and looked carefully and critically at its themes.

I just logged on after 3 weeks vacation and blissfully offline..... I read and reread the Boxcar Children, etc. My Seuss favorite was "On beyond Zebra", which, like "MAdeline", I can recite from memory. The Butter Battle Book came along as my sons were small, and it too almost started trouble, but that, in my opinion is what the best books do. Over the years, I have read aloud "The Giver" and LOTR, (all of it), as I read to the bigger boys when the little one nursed, and we went through Huck Finn and Black Beauty, plus again LOTR, aloud.
My youngest son came to Israel before he learned to read English, and though his spoken English was native level, his reading was far, far behind. I began reading the Potter series to him from the very beginning, and it was a lifesaver. I have just finished reading aloud the very last book, (he's going to be 16 next week), and he adores being read to. I truly believe that those books helped him grow up, as a feeling thinking teenage boy, like the very best of books. The movies are good, but what goes on in their heads and how it's written about their hearts and what the spirit goes through is irreplaceable. Besides my own addiction to sci-fi, cyberpunk, etc., the best fantasy is another parent, teaching and guiding the young soul to negotiate their inner and outer worlds. Read Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series, especially the Arrow trilogy, and you'll see - the grey areas of good/bad, the process of discovering what you really are - comes from here, and the kids who grow up without them are poorer for it. I am also convinced that their attention span is lengthened and strengthened by being read to, something sorely lacking in the rest of their world.

Having not read Kingsley or read abut Kingsley I can't say anything one way or t'other. There are other books that are definitely homoerotic, or are looked at that way by someone who wants or needs to see it that way. The books of Anne Rice come to mind.

It's not a question of "wanting" or "needing" to see homoerocitism, Michael. If it's there, it's hard to miss unless you really want to suppress it. I have a colleague who could not under any circumstances talk to any of her classes about Willa Cather's lesbianism even though she knows as well as I do that it's coded into every word she writes. She "wants" and "needs" NOT to notice.

When I was a kid there was no TV. My parents read to us each evening. My mother often read from the Bible. I remember one time when my father read Treasure Island to us, a chapter each night. We could hardly stand to go to bed not knowing what would happen next. One other favorite book that my mother read was Just So Stories by Kipling. The copy she had had wonderful illustrations by Nicholas. I read these stories to my children and they loved them too. A few years ago I went on the internet and found nice used copies with of the old book (long since out of print) with the illustrations we had loved and sent them to all my bothers and sisters. Everyone was thrilled.

I guess I am more in the camp of the New Critism crowd. Works should be judged solely on the merits of the story. Biographical information about the author is un-necesary to critique the work under consideration.

Michael, I was trained in the New Crit mode but that was literally 30 years ago and theory has developed in a wide array of methods of interpretation since then--formalism has given way to structuralist, feminist, marxist, psychological, postructuralist, post-colonial, gay/lesbian/queer, etc. I'm not doing a biographical analysis of Cather's work--that in itself would be limiting--but discussing her lesbianism allows me and my students to investigate all kinds of historical, cultural, medical, economic, religious issues as they pertained at the time the works were being written. One reason Cather codes her sexuality is because, like James, Forster, Hart Crane, Countee Cullen, to name only a few, she was writing at a time when it would have been the kiss of death to live outside the closet. That circumstance makes the works even deeper and richer than looking at them as unchanging exercises in language and imagery. New Crit is itself an historical phenomenon that developed in Southern universities as an antidote to what they saw as the elitism of northeastern college. I cannot imagine reading a piece of literature as if it existed in some kind of vacuum outside of history. Also, when we read a work historically, we are enabled to better understand our own time and place and how we got there. If you, personally, do not want to consider the sexual orientation, economic conditions, gender, country of origin, etc., of a writer because you don't find it relevant or significant, no one would question your choice of how you want to interpret a work. But to me, it would truncate the work to dismiss the historical circumstances. I can't read a work from an east African writer or a writer from the Pacific Rim, for example, without considering the curcumstances of the work's production. I teach a course in non-western ethnic literature and there is simply no way that it can be looked at "as if" were just another piece of literature in the western mode. That literature does all kinds of things with the form and infuses it with content that is often unfamiliar to my western students. It simply can't be judged as if it were not anchored in cultural particulars.

I have to think that there are perhaps three types of art. In this I include for example literature, visual art, music and perhaps other genres. THere is a the art that is relavant and meaningful to a specific culture or subculture. This can be studied by others, but only in a perhaps academic way. Then there are "classics" which can speak across cultural and temporal barriers. There can often be value in examining the situations which produced these works when that examination serves to make them more meaningful. Then there are transcendent works things like certain of the Shakespear plays, some music by Mozart, sculpture by Michaelangelo where no commentary is necessary. In fact the commentary is often just so much dross compared to the wonder of the original. If someone is able to appreciate crosscultural art the analysis may actually detract but in other cases it may serve like subtitles in movies in that it clarifies what is actually going on. However, often it seems as if analysts get carried away by their own imaginations, the typical example is Georgia O'Keef who explained she painted flowers because they were a lot cheaper than hiring models.

When reading to a small child, the two individuals are usually warm and snuggled,the pages lit dimly by a lamp, and those are often very relaxed if not sleepy. I think the author of this quote did mean to say "read to us", specifically. He also adds, " for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules..." In my opinion, that's the point of the quote. The simplicity of our worlds as children.

I never missed a nap time or a bedtime without reading to Mike and Linz. Mike turned out to be an avid reader but not Linz. She never stopped asking me to read to her if the situation arose. If I was helping her with a paper in high school, she would beg me to read the needed text. With a sigh, I'd give in,lol. (Honestly I was torn. Part of me would think: "Read your own stuff!" and the other part of me loved that we could turn the clocks back a bit, be all snuggled and warm, and be off in our own world absorbing the writer's words.)
On the Fourth of July, I bravely spent the rainy day going through Linz's stuff. Let me rephrase that. I didn't have it in me to go through her stuff, I would say, I sorted her stuff. The children's books that I read to her when she was young were kept safely with other belongings that some might deem more important. To her, these books were to be treasured.
Just as some might hold on to a special toy or doll as a special keepsake into adulthood, some might hold onto the books that were read to them. After all, it's about the precious childhood memories that have that sentimental value or importance. I believe Greene was pointing this out, in his own way.

Without a blink, I knew Linz's favorite in the pile of books. It's Steig, but not "Shrek"

Here is a link that might be useful: Amos and Boris

Shadowgarden, I think that Shakespeare's plays live not because they are "transcendant" or "beyond commentary" but because they are so deeply embedded in the historical particulars in which he lived and that "commentary" on them occurs every time a writer offers a contemporary version of one of his plays. WS had his finger so completely on the Elizabethan period pulse that we look to him for how to understand our own world. He never wrote an original plot in his life but he was able to take all those old plots and drama forms like the revenge tragedy and give us the history plays and Hamlet which are works enormously useful for examining contemporary culture. For example, when I teach The Tempest, written at the time that England was just beginning its colonial ventures, I teach it in conjunction with John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, a novel in which Wideman investigates in great depth the way Caliban informs American cultural perceptions of race and language. Or Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, a contemporary spin on King Lear, written as American agribusiness was beginning to wipe out small farmers, in which Lear is presented less as a pitiful old man whose daughters don't love him than as a greedy and abusive American big business farmer who not only "rapes" the land that supports him but also his daughters. Transcendant? Not in a million years. Shakespeare used the writers who became for him for his material, and contemporary writers use him for material.

Writers don't live in ivory towers--to very loosely paraphrase Virginia Woolf, they have to deal with children, money, houses just like the rest of us.

Will may not have had an original idea for a play, but he did have a genius for the way he put words together. Else we would not remember him the way we do.

The above conversation brings to mind some of his sonnets. They could be interpreted as same sex love. Some of the sonnets are positively dripping with it. Course, you could say the same about the ones concerning the Dark Lady. Taking these sonnets together one could easily posit that ole Will was a switch hitter. I don't reckon we will ever know for sure. But I'm finding out that these are types of conjecturing that English Departments like to indulge in. One phrase that the department instructors are fond of using, that I find amusing is referencing a term paper topic to ...In The Post-Lapserian World....

Did anyone see the episode last week or so of Doctor Who that incorporated ole Will and the Dark Lady in a very entertaining bit?

Now, Michael, I had to go find some explanaton of that term..."The sub-lapsarian maintains that God devised His scheme of redemption after the "lapse" or fall of Adam, when He elected some to salvation and left others to run their course. The supra-lapsarian maintains that all this was ordained by God from the foundation of the world, and therefore before the "lapse" or fall of Adam."

So what would the post-lapsarian label mean exactly?

Pidge, I prefer reading novels written in the era I'm interested in because they are more authentic than "historical novels" written in a later time. No matter how carefully the author tries, his/her perspective is bound to be different a few decades or a century later. That's why I couldn't follow you when you said Galsworthy and Trollope reminded you of Allende. I might enjoy Allende's book but wouldn't read it to get a real sense of an earlier time (and "magic realism" doesn't really appeal to me). Truly it's lack of time that limits my exploring the newer authors...wish I wasn't so near the end of Suzy's roll... LOL josh

I've always read postlapsarian as meaning whatever comes after the fall and the casting out of Eden. Is there something more complicated?

Michael, I have no idea whether WS was a switch-hitter though plenty of folks interpret some od his works in those terms. I do know there is plenty of gender-bending in his plays with all those women disguised as men or men disguised as women, not to mention that ALL the roles, male and female, were played by men because women were not permitted on the Elizabethan stage. Funny that I never teach him that way myself, and here I am saying that we ought to pay attention to such things. It may be that I feel that we know so little about Will S that I teach him from the perspective of the larger culture that shaped him. Hmmmm....good conversation. Thanks for bringing this up--there are always more ways to look at this stuff than we originally think, aren't there?

Josh, I guess I threw you a curve ball with the Allende comment. It's just that when you brought up some more 19th-century writers, my mind leapt to the 20the century to suggest that other centuries produce writers of long and complicated books with lots of characters, subplots, etc. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Have you read anything about the literary theories loosely gathered under the rubric "New Historicism"? There's too much going on in that field to cover here, but it's in part the lens through which I read writers like Shakespeare. It's why I will teach him along with Allende, to show how the issues and themes that concerned him in terms of cultural shifts reappear in Allende in her novel about the cultural shifts in 19th-century California. In a world of changing identities or old identities being redefined, both these books "work" for college students doing a lot of growing up themselves. Thanks to Michael, I'll probably even mention that WS's own sexuality is not fully understood this time around.

Josh, I am wildly taken with South American writers, including those who write with more or less "magic realism" at their core. I pick up Garcia Marquez or Fuentes or Ferre or Allende practically drooling with the adventure I am about to enter. I am so not a "spiritual" being that it surprises even me that I love this literature so much.

It pretty much means what Pidge has said it means. I guess it's used as a catch phrase. One of those buzz word type of thingies that trigger much more that the short word or phrase has any right to do so. It's one of those phrases that professors are fond of using. Now I has always argued that if one argues from any particular -ism, then one is arguing for a narrow view point. But I will also argue that we need to hear the -isms oriented arguments simply because it by listening to all of them that we can get an over all idea of the BIG PICTURE. That means listening to the -isms we respect and listen to the -isms we don't. That's the only way to get closer to the "Truth" about a subject. Feminism, racism, Darwinism, Obectivism, White Breadism, and so on. All have something to add.

There aren't any isms in what I teach. 'Bout the only controversy in Math is whether one is in the Newton camp or the Von Leibniz camp. Do you use dots to show the various derivatives or do you use prime marks? (We won't discuss those who use the big D operators....)

Michael, you're right that it's a catchphrase but not one I'm guilty of using! You are also right about arguing from one particular "ism" at the expense of others because the BIG PICTURE is capable of holding all of them. That's one of the things that "deconstruction" tries to do. It's interesting when I teach a theory course the ways in which this or that student latches on to a particular method of interpretation because that's where her or his interests lie, but is still required in a paper or an exam to recognize that the chosen method is only one of many. I don't think they are all equally valid or even important, but they do have to be taken into account. What is even more interesting is when a student is introduced to something really new, like "ecocriticism" or, more narrowly, "ecofeminism," and then to watch the wheels turning.

Michael, I don't know how it is where you teach, but one of my colleagues in the math department practically despairs of the quality of knowledge students bring with them to university. Perhaps you teach upper division courses where the motivation and background is there, and so does he. But when he gets freshmen, he is ready to tear his hair out with frustration at the baby basics he has to teach to get anywhere at all. What's your spin?

I teach upper level classes so I am teaching the math majors, minors and/or future engineers. I hold these students to a higher standard than the students who are merely taking core requirements I see now that I am supervising the math lab. I have to have a different mind set with these students. It's part of my job and I have to realize that not all high school diplomas are equal.

Pidge, Thanks for the further explanation of the newer theories. And I've enjoyed your discussion with Michael. I suppose I do notice and try to take into account lots of factors when reading an author, and I'm sure I miss a lot. What I took away from a book in my twenties would not be the same as rereading that author today. Your classes must help your students to drill in and thoroughly mine for various interpretations. It would be fun and hard work I think to take one of your classes...the kind of classes I enjoyed most.

I was so tickled to read how you still got such a thrill from your "magic realism" books. Your enthusiasm must make you one of those very special teachers.

Michael, I agree with your "Big Picture" and try and keep up with all the isms. Y'all just threw me a couple I'm going to go study up on. Thanks to you and Pidge for adding your voice and perspective to this thread. It's been great! josh

Josh, thank YOU for introducing this thread. I'm putting together syllabi this week and it's good to get the wheels cranking again for the fall slog. I even had an e-mail yesterday from an incoming student about what books to buy--they try to get them cheap before they hit the bookstore and I don't blame them--and it's only three weeks until we hit the ground and start running.

Do you know that Michael is also a poet? So he sees literature as both artist and analyst.

Oh, yes, I remember Michael's fine poem, and hope I congratulated him on the fact that it was published. Actually, he speaks very eloquently on the GP about his boats and sailing, as do you about your movies...I always read even if I don't comment. It's all part of what makes the GP a daily destination for me... josh

Bumpidity bump to prevent a very entertaining thread from falling off into the electronic ether.

And thank you for bumping it. At first when I saw the date I thought, WTF? However, it's been a pleasure to read the conversation.