My son was homeschooled through high school. A large part of the reason for this was that my wife and I wanted a different education than the one typically provided in normal schools. Part of that 'different' was that we wanted to approach literature as something one read for enjoyment, rather than something that one read and then analyzed because a grade depended on it.
[Paradise Lost is] a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
— Mark Twain, Disappearance of Literature
For the most part, this worked out the way we hoped. "I should probably read [Dante's Inferno] ...," said my son one afternoon a few years ago after finishing reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards. We were reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God because we had tripped over a reference to it while learning about The First Great Awakening as part of studying history. He wondered if the speech was available, and in a moment of blazing insight we realized that the text might be available on the Internet (it was).
Occasionally, my son would drop astute observations that suggested that he was occasionally thinking about what we had read. Not often, one understands ... this is a teenage boy. But occasionally. "[Marlon] Brando would make a good Kurtz ...," he offered out of the blue after finishing Heart of Darkness. He did not know that "Apocalypse Now" existed. And he hated Heart of Darkness. The observation was clearly anchored in something, though.
This essay is an attempt to capture some lessons learned while reading literature over a number of years while trying to not turn the child off of literature.
Warning: Homeschooling is 1-on-1. Teaching a class of 25 students, or five such classes, has many more constraints. Don't read this as a homeschooling vs. traditional schooling screed. It is not comparative!
When trying to decide is something is working, it really helps to know what the goal is. So ...
Outside of the professional context of Professor of Literature, the primary reasons to read literature are (a) because reading literature is enjoyable and (b) because reading literature makes one's mental world a more interesting place.
People don't feel a pressing need to justify wanting to go to Disneyland or Hawai'i. They go to those places because doing so is enjoyable. And people don't find a pressing need to explain why they want to travel to other, less touristy, places and see new things. Travel can be fun, too, even if not the same sort of fun as going to Disneyland. And travel can be interesting. And the interest can remain after the travel.
Were I living in the Star Wars universe, I think I would want to see more than the planet on which I was born. Seeing other worlds would make my life more interesting. Something similar holds for reading literature. Getting to know Dante as he travels through hell makes my mental world more interesting. As does getting to know Don Quixote. And discovering Narnia.
W. Somerset Maugham says something similar in his Books and You long essay in 1940:
The first thing I want to insist on is that reading should be enjoyable. Of course, there are many books that we all have to read, either to pass examinations or to acquire information, from which it is impossible to extract enjoyment. We are reading them for instruction, and the best we can hope is that our need for it will enable us to get through them without tedium. Such books we read with resignation rather than with alacrity. But that is not the sort of reading I have in mind. The books I shall mention in due course will help you neither to get a degree nor to earn your living, they will not teach you to sail a boat or get a stalled motor to run, but they will help you to live more fully. That, however, they cannot do unless you enjoy reading them.
—W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You, chapter 1 (emphasis mine)
As does Anthony Esolen:
You do not read good books so that you can scramble up some tricks, so that you can write clever things about them, so that you can do well on a test and secure a prestigious job and then die. You learn about the language and about what writers do, so that you can read good books and learn to love them, because they are companions who will tell you what they have seen of the truth, and they tell you it in a way you will not soon forget.
—Anthony Esolen, Read Literature to Learn and Love the Truth
Introducing a child to literature in such a way that he or she grows to hate literature is counterproductive to my goal.
Additionally, one of the things one observes about people reading for pleasure is that they tend to not write 3-5 page essays about what they have just read. Paul Graham discusses the linkage between composition and literature in modern high school in "The Age of the Essay". He writes:
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.
Mods
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
—W. Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
I'd also add that having to write a mostly boring and pointless essay about something you just read doesn't make the reading any more enjoyable.
The upshot is that when homeschooling, we decoupled composition from literature. Reading literature was about reading and understanding the text. Composition was about lots of subjects, and rarely about literature. An occasional essay, or some non-essay writing, might get written about what we had just read if there was something interesting to say. After reading the first Don Quixote book, my son wrote up Don Quixote as a Dungeons & Dragons character and provided the sketch of an adventure around that character. But this wasn't a required 3-5 page essay.
... abstain from doing harm ...
— Hippocratic Oath
The last principle was to avoid doing harm. To avoid creating animosity towards a work or an author because the work was not targeted towards high school students. This led to some works being deferred ... they can be read later. It isn't like there aren't plenty more worth reading.
As with opera, it is helpful to have a hint about what is coming if one wishes to follow the story. It also helps to have some knowledge of the characters encountered by Dante during his journey and why they matter. This means that you want a guide to pace your reading.
Since Virgil is unavailable as a guide, an excellent second choice is Anthony Esolen via his eight lecture (30 minutes each) "Dante's Inferno" DVD series from Catholic Courses. Prof. Esolen recommends reading the various cantos of Inferno before watching the corresponding lecture. I recommend watching the lecture first, then reading the cantos.
The Iliad can be read and understood without a guide if one selects a translation that emphasizes comprehensible prose rather than the sound of the text. Robert Fagles' translation does just that while still allowing a good sense of the original language and poetry to come through. Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker wrote:
Four decades after Lattimore, Robert Fagles's 1990 translation took the field, establishing itself as the preeminent English translation. Fagles uses a loose five-beat line. It can be a bit too loose — it sometimes feels like stacked prose — but has an admirable clarity
Note the last bit: "it has an admirable clarity." If one is reading for enjoyment and understanding, rather than as a painful duty, there is a lot be be said for clarity! And Fagles does pay attention to the poetry in the original text, he just doesn't subordinate the clarity to the poetry.
You still want a guide, however, to explain a bunch of the motivations. Why, after all, does Agamemnon insist on taking Achilles' slave girl away at the beginning of the poem? Why not wait for the next raid with booty? A good guide will explain these sorts of things. The Great Courses has a 24 lecture "Iliad of Homer" by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver that serves nicely. I'm sure that there are others.
Middle English looks terrifying ... sorta like modern English, but quite obviously not. This encourages reading Chaucer in translation.
With a little bit of work, however, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales can be "read" in the original without (a) too much trouble, or (b) losing track of what is going on.
The trick is to read Chaucer while listening to a competent Middle English narrator reading the text in Middle English. The audio without the text can be quite challenging, and the text without the audio is differently challenging, but the pair work surprisingly well together. You will still fail to understand pieces because the words will be totally unfamiliar or the meaning will have changed in the past 600 years. Still, there is something to be said for reading the actual words that Chaucer wrote. If nothing else, it is moderately cool. And there won't be too many bits where you'll be totally lost. One can read a translation, too (either before or afterwards) to get the bits missed with a Middle English approach.
Piers Ploughman, by William Langland, is less well known today than the Canterbury Tales, but the language is similar enough to be comprehensible using the same strategy one can use with the Canterbury Tales — namely reading the text while listening to the Middle English.
Part of the excitement of Piers Ploughman, though, is that we have various versions that are different versions of the work produced by William Langland at various times. He just kept working on the thing! So which one to read? The practical answer is to read one for which we have a Middle English audio recording, and this turns out to be the B-text.
As with the Iliad, you won't need a guide to understand what is happening, but you probably will need a guide to understand why. And probably to understand who some of the players are and what they are supposed to represent. I don't have a good suggestion for that, yet.
The poetry in the Canterbury Tales and Piers Ploughman works the way we expect poems to work ... they rhyme and the meter isn't too strange. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is different.
The Sir Gawain poem emphasizes alliteration, rather than rhyming. So, using J.R.R. Tolkein's translation:
When thesiege and the assault hadceased at Troy,
and thefortressfell inflame tofirebrands and ashes,
thetraitor who the contrivance oftreason there fashioned
wastried for histreachery, the mosttrue upon earth
The first line alliterates on the 's' sound: siege, assault, ceased.
The second line on 'f': fortress, fell, flames, firebrands
The third and fourth lines on 't'
A useful way to think about this for folks who have read The Lord of the Rings or played Dungeons and Dragons is that Chaucer and Langland are writing Elvish poetry and the Gawain author is writing Dwarvish poetry. Neither is a 'broken' version of the other. They just work differently.
The Sir Gawain poem has a second challenge. Chaucer wrote in a London dialect of Middle English and this dialect grew up to become modern English. Sir Gawain is written in a North West Midland (think Birmingham) dialect and the language is further away from modern English than is Chaucer. To warn us, the text helpfully includes a 'thorn' character:
in the very first word: siþen! Modern English has no þ character. Understanding the text will be tougher than Canterbury Tales or Piers Ploughman. Here, the basic strategy breaks down: even with audio, the Middle English is too difficult. Read Chaucer first, if possible, to get used to the language of Middle English. Then read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in translation, either J.R.R. Tolkein's or Simon Armitage's. I recommend the Armitage translation. Then, if you feel very brave, try reading the Middle English while listening to Armitage.
There is only one copy of the text in existence, so unlike Piers Ploughman there is no choice to make with regard to version.
For Shakespeare's plays, the key insight is that plays are intended to be watched rather than read. A secondary insight is that beating a text to death leads to hatred of that text. And possibly hatred of literature as a whole.
Some people are afraid of Shakespeare. He wrote 400 years ago. He uses archaic words, strange grammar, complex plots. You have to read footnotes.J.R.R. Tolkein says something similar:
Other people are bored by Shakespeare. The plays are long. Individual speeches are long.
...
Some people overtly hate Shakespeare ... I think the hatred arises from the fear and the boredom. And the necessity to write papers in a Shakespeare course. But the real villain, the real creator of boredom and fear and hatred is not, I think, the fact that Shakespeare wrote long ago and therefore requires footnotes. Footnotes are a necessary evil, but the real villain is excessive footnoting, excessive explanation, or the wrong kind of explanation.
In the American educational system, I think the real villain is the high school class that spends too much time on a single play. Months and months. There are many good high school teachers of Shakespeare. There are many good class sessions on Shakespeare in high school. But there are some teachers who believe that their job is to explain every single line, or who are required by some regulation to try to do so. And that's impossible. Not even professional scholars can do that.
And most teenagers don't have the attentions span to devote two months to a single text even if it's as good as Hamlet or Macbeth.
I think you should have 'em read it, show them a videotape, devote some classes to the big things. I think a good idea is to have them try to act out a few scenes and get into it that way. And then move on to something else. Doing more with an individual text with young readers can kill a play. Chop it up. Dissect it. Make it cease to be a play.
Peter Saccio, Shakespeare: The Word and the Action, disc 1
... [watching a production of Hamlet] emphasised more strongly than anything I have ever seen the folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study), except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter (76) to Christopher Tolkien, 8 July, 1944
Were one interested in films, it would be obvious that reading the scripts and failing to watch the actual films was a great mistake. So, too, with Shakespeare's plays. Or most plays, for that matter. Plays are meant to be watched!
In the 1970's, Albert Mehrabian showed the importance of tone and body language in conveying meaning. This eventually became summarized in the "7:38:55" rule, which is easily mis-interpreted as claiming that 93% of information is conveyed non-verbally. This is a vast overstatement, but it is true that considerable information is conveyed non-verbally. Especially information such as emotions and attitudes. Simply reading a Shakespeare play means that the typical high school reader, who is quite unfamiliar with the play and the characters, misses most of this non-verbal information. The play becomes boring and flat and unnecessarily confusing, too. Skilled actors performing the play provide this non-verbal information in a way that the text of the play does not.
So ... watch a given play first (I disagree with Peter Saccio about this), then read some bits, maybe watch a bit of explanation (Peter Saccio provides this!) and maybe read a bit of explanation. Then move on to the next play.
Put Shakespeare on hold when things gets tedious and come back for more later. Start with comedies and light(er) fare first. Henry IV parts 1 and 2 with Falstaff are good non-comedy starting points, though Falstaff provides a lot of comedy. Richard III is another good play to begin with. Don't be in a hurry to get to the heavier plays, such as Hamlet or Macbeth. If a play isn't working, try another one or try another production or try the play again in a few years.
Before watching any of the plays, watch Ian McKellen's "Acting Shakespeare"! Really, just do it! Then watch a few plays.
As with Shakespeare, the Greek plays are plays and were intended to be watched, not read. Unlike Shakespeare, these plays are not produced regularly and so finding performances on DVD can be tough. Still, performances do exist.
In addition, as with other non-English works, one has to choose a translation if one is going to read the play.
There are a few saving graces with ancient Greek plays:
Combined with a good translation, this means that it isn't terribly difficult to understand what is going on and also to understand much of the motivations.
Good news is that there are some translations that read well without a need for excessive footnotes or puzzling over what is actually happening. Robert Fagles, again, makes an appearance with translations of some works by Aeschylus and Sophocles. These read well, just as his Iliad translation does.
In addition, Peter Arnott translated some ancient Greek plays with the explicit aim that his translations be performable. One of the implications of this is that footnotes must be, essentially, optional. The audience won't be reading the play with the footnotes, but instead will be watching a performance without footnotes. This also means that the Arnott translations are fairly accessible without bogging down studying required footnotes. Going back to Peter Sacco speaking on Shakespeare:
Footnotes are a necessary evil, but the real villain is excessive footnoting, excessive explanation, or the wrong kind of explanation
Peter Arnott skips most of this with his translations, though he acknowledges the tradeoffs:
... we see that whatever happens something must be forfeited. If we concentrate on conveying the full implications of the Greek and reproducing every fine shade of meaning, the play loses impact. If we try to preserve the force and attack necessary to stimulate an audience, we must concentrate on the principal meaning to the exclusion of all others, thus over-simplifying the author's thought and, inevitably, misleading. A translation must be either frankly literary or frankly dramatic. Many fail to realize this and try to act the one and read the other. The prevalence of literary translations in the past has created an impression that Greek drama is dull and prosy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you are going to read Sherlock Holmes (and you should), then you should also read some Arsène Lupin short stories. Project Gutenberg has some in translation. Start with Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. For folks who enjoy Arsène Lupin and also like science fiction, Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat is worth exploring.
Then a few of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories provide another approach to the whole 'reason it out' style of crime-fighting.
F. Scott Fitgerald's Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby capture life falling apart for young-to-middle-aged upper-middle-class or higher people. I'm unsure how will this will resonate with a typical 16-year-old. It did not resonate with me. There may be benefit to waiting to read this until the student has experienced life a bit.
... abstain from doing harm ...
— Hippocratic Oath
Empirically, it seems to be very easy to teach high school students to hate poetry. This is bad.
I have few concrete observations to avoid instilling this hatred. But:
Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Gerard de Nerval, Thomas Kyd, Chaucer, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conrad, Milton, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, Oliver Goldsmith, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker.It is safe to say that very few students will be familiar with more than a handful of these allusions.
"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."This is also the first paragraph. And it is 98 words. A modern author might write something more like this:
A number of years ago a child was born in a workhouse.Dickins can be quite fun, however, and after reading 30-50 pages you will probably find that:
Don Qixote is quite readable, but Cervantes, unfortunately, padded the text. Somerset Maugham explains:
The first book I wish to speak of [in the chapter about books in languages other than English] is Don Quixote. Shelton made a translation of it early in the seventeenth century, but you may not find it very convenient to read; and since I want you to read with delight, I suggest that you should read it in Ormsby's more recent version, published in 1885. But I should like to warn you of one thing: Cervantes was a poor man and he was paid to provide a certain amount of work; he had by him, one may presume, some short stories, and it seemed to him a very good notion to use them to fill out his book. I have read them, but I read them as Doctor Johnson read Paradise Lost — as a duty rather than with pleasure — and if I were you I would skip them. In Ormsby's version, in order to to make it easy to do this, they are printed in smaller type.
—W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You, chapter 2 (emphasis mine)
By chance, this was the translation used. It is great. Try to get a version with the Doré engravings. Project Gutemberg has this translation (with Doré engravings).
I favor the Samuel B. Griffith translation. Griffith was a Marine before World War II and learned Chinese while in the Marines. He fought in World War II with the Marines, and finished his military career as a Brigadier General. He then went to Oxford and earned a D. Phil in Chinese Military History. Then he produced his translation of The Art of War.
I favor this translation because I think giving up a little bit of pure skill in Chinese is worth adding the perspective of an actual general who fought in actual battles. Very few (maybe none?) of the other translators bring this perspective.
You aren't going to be able to read all the works you want. Nevertheless, there is value in being familiar with plots, characters, and themes of these works, even if not yet read. Knowing who and what the Frankenstein monster is has some value. As does knowing about Dr. Frankenstein himself. We might want to read the actual Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley, but not have the time. So ... what then?
A reasonable solution to gaining familiarity with texts that you either don't have time to read, or don't have time to read yet, is to read a summary. You will not get the full value/fun of reading the actual work, but you will know at least the high points.
Cliffs Notes are one solution to this, but Cliffs Notes are mostly designed to help high school and college students pass tests without reading the assigned text. They are not designed to capture the emotional spirit/essence of the works. Our goal is not to pass a test, but to get the gist and flavor of the story.
Wikipedia plot summaries tend to be summaries, and thus dry.
Some solutions to get a sense of the characters while still getting the plot are:
None of these are replacements for actually reading the work. If our choice is between reading the Fagles translation of the Iliad or reading the Classics Illustrated comic, reading the translation is better. But if our choice is between reading the Classics Illustrated comic or not reading any form of the Iliad, at least with the comic we gets a handle on the plot and the personality of the main characters.