Early in my career, I taught a fun class on post-WWII American fiction. Since we were seeing her once a week and they were graduate level readers, the course consisted mostly of lively discussion and relied on student engagement in a challenging series of novels. I was. Sophie’s Choice, sometimes a great concept, Cries of Lot 49, formula When Antelope’s wifeamong others.
About Cormac McCarthy’s sessions all pretty horses, I was somehow obsessed with showing a scene or two from the heavily maligned 2000 film version to supplement our usual discussion. It wasn’t the director Billy Bob Thornton and team’s fault, though, who insisted they shot a much longer cut, which Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein denied. ) As for novels, McCarthy’s prose is characteristically terse, avoiding attribution of speech and mostly punctuation. It is also bright and transparent. After seeing a scene from a movie featuring Matt Damon, her friend, and a horse, a student (let’s call her Rhonda) said: King, it was hilarious, but not funny in the book.
That simple assertion struck a chord with my Spidey senses and triggered an epiphany that still resonates 17 years later. But Rhonda’s statement crystallizes a seemingly ubiquitous phenomenon that gets to the heart of people’s reading experiences and abilities. People (even high-level readers, as in this case) generally project too much seriousness onto literature, overlooking lighter elements such as humor and kindness.
Since that class, I have been using film frequently in my literature classes. In fact, one of my main courses is Literature and Film. This highlights and connects the parallel student experience of reading a printed text and seeing its film adaptation. When teaching the complex relationship between literature and cinema, I challenge my students to avoid Rhonda’s perspective and instead use their imagination. Especially when reading dialogue. I tell themrather try to felt how You might hear what this character is doing while she speaks. ’ Or, as theatrical practitioners say, ‘Find the subtext.
However, since most humans never overcome this deficit, people, not just students, mostly avoid laughing at the lines of movie scenes, including lines, characters, and settings that are more or less directly quoted from books and plays. I can’t seem to get it.Pages, they pass by with what I call “”schindler’s list Face”: “This is literature and must be a serious issue.”
This problem of reading texts with excessive gravity is most commonly manifested by people who cannot appreciate humor, but it is not the only one. More broadly, students tend to read literary characters negatively But when I see and hear those characters in the film, I feel more connected. Indeed, it can be a valid analysis in that the filmmaker or actor may have chosen to emphasize the more positive traits of the character. schindler’s list Phenomenon: The character descriptions and dialogue are unchanged from the text to the film, but the recipient’s perception is altered as the magic of the film materializes potential for the viewer that the reader was unaware of. increase. The words on the page look solemn and serious, but the sensuous addition of the film medium brings things to life.
of schindler’s list Reading plays aggravates this syndrome. Logically yes. The reader’s perception of the tone and character of a play depends almost entirely on the dialogue.Therefore, a student may call Tracy Lord philadelphia story And then you find her (and pretty much every character) sick, stuffy, unsympathetic, and incomprehensible. Still, the magic of George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart made Tracy a strong, independent, and attractive woman. Wealth, Philip Barry’s dialogue becomes interesting.
Recent plays like Joshua Harmon admission I get similar results. Wait a minute, is this comical? ” In the case of Shakespeare and Beckett, an even greater challenge arises. Even Oscar Wilde’s glittery lines often require contextualization for students. the importance of being serious is “vile and critical,” but that doesn’t mean she’s the villain we’re supposed to worry about, despise, or take seriously.
serious beginning
In my class, I ask my students if and when they tend to express Rhonda’s sentiment that “the movie was funny, but the book wasn’t.” is still fighting the battle.I really want you to think about that humor teeth It was present in the text like it was in the movies and I couldn’t make sense of it while reading. As for how to instill in the reader the imagination to hear tones and subtexts other than the one — but I have developed a working theory as to their origin.
For most people, K-12 schools and teachers have dictated the majority of their reading experience by the time they enter college. All our lives we have been obliged to read plays, poems, stories, essays and novels. There are considerable stakes in how well these duties are met.we are slanted About how well you can mine texts to find hidden deep and serious meanings. And those grades bring results. For example, which universities will accept us, and therefore (so is the story) how successful we will be in life. Literature is presented as made up of esoteric symbolism, profound allegory, and esoteric imagery.
Poetry in particular creates the realization that one must brave the labyrinth of terror and torture chambers, from which the jewel of correct secret reading must be extracted. Given this experience, the pressure to improve English grades by painstakingly and earnestly excavating texts rather than enjoying them makes readers feel serious and sober, whatever the text they are assigned. It’s no wonder that authors don’t spend their lives forever pondering serious problems (even Hamlet is a pretty funny guy), but rather laugh, cry, and desire. It’s easy to forget that we’re the people who create characters who hold onto and sometimes act silly.
Is there a workaround schindler’s list syndrome? If my theory about the origin of this phenomenon is correct, university English professors face the daunting task of countering years of unconscious conditioning in students.The Literature of General Education You Need class represents perhaps the last stop on the train, the last phone call to order a new perspective on how to read a text.
Outside of situations where a more open reading methodology can be taught or demonstrated (which is beyond the scope of my class), perhaps the best way I can offer is to show students the arguments of this essay. That’s it. Don’t you think it’s pretty silly that the movie is funny and the text is not funny in a movie? along with some anecdotal success.
- Start with the face value of the poem. Do not assume that words have deep, symbolic meanings hidden that must be revealed.
- Anchor your reading by imagining a real person in a particular setting rather than an abstraction.
- Consider that a given poem might be light and fun, that the sound and feel of the words might be at least as important as the meaning. is not.
These principles, along with their message to students, are arguably uninteresting when in fact most of us are conditioned to expect the reading assigned to us in school to be very serious and important. The side that doesn’t read too seriously. Be the one channeling Rhonda to say, “I don’t know, but I think this should be funny,” instead of needing the film version to convey the humor ostensibly lacking in print. encourage students to
whether you are reading Romeo and Juliet, dance with wolves, hunger game Or Emily Dickinson, let’s open our minds to the possibilities of comedy. Literature serves many functions — to teach, to enlighten, but perhaps most importantly, to entertain. Lighten up!
