On Oct 9, 2010, at 7:34 PM, Leigh Fanning wrote:
And I (also) say "Why English", why not World Literature or something
more expansive... and for the benefit of the women on this list...
why
do we (mostly) read the words of "dead white men"? Really? Without
going all feminist, I'd really like to have more submissions here of
women writers. Until 30 years ago, there weren't that many
published...
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, early 1800s, is a great book. Is it
literature? I'm not
qualified to say, but it's a fantastic story with beautiful writing.
Yes, I certainly think of it as literature. If I were world literature
czar (well, czarina) I would insist every budding scientist read it.
The male dominated Western educational experience is what most of us
have had.
It's all we know, until we jump to other pools of thought and
nonconform to
the establishment that nurtured (controlled?) us in the tender years.
Some of the most unusual and ground-breaking English literature has
been written by women. I mean in particular, Jane Austen, who was
first to understand that the age of reading aloud was dying, and it
was time to write for the reader who reads alone and in his or her own
head. Before Austen, English novels were written to be read aloud to a
group. She is also killingly funny about human nature. On these
grounds alone, Columbia University's core curriculum admitted to the
canon its first female writer in Jane. If you read Charlotte Bronte's
"Wuthering Heights," the novel not the movie, you will hardly believe
your eyes. Astounding stuff. "Jane Eyre" is the grandmother of a
thousand and one derivatives, but is a stunning piece in its own right.
So you see how futile a "top ten" is?
P.
"How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York, especially
when you reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people
in either hemisphere."
Fanny Trollope, "Domestic Manners of the Americans"
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