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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Hello confusion.I didn't really read higer up than this 84 Charring Cross Road + Kaidan (missed a few days). The Title looked interesting to me as being maybe a book about burning disasters and charcoal drawings that had a link somehow with 84 Charing Cross Road and I thought OK : a nice wordplay with this road. Now it appears to really be 84 Charing Cross Road. Have to think up a new suspence. 
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Joined: Aug 2006
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Aug 2006
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Sorry, Faldage, but while I currently reside in Australia, I grew up in the US and attended all 12 years of schooling there - mostly in the State of Florida. The list I got was from my year 6 language arts teacher, and I believe I was 12 at the time. (We were a bit of a nerdy "advanced" class, in that everyone in it tested at year 11 or 12 reading levels, hence the complexity of some of the reads we were expected to comprehend...) 
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Carpal Tunnel
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You answered my question well enough, bk. It's just my question was wrong. More power to you if you made it through that list at age twelve and I hope others of your class did too. I got turned off to Shakespeare in high school (I was probably 15 at the time) by a totally incompetently presented English program.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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year 6 = 6th grade.
Wow. I didn't hit Tolstoy or the Brontes till college.
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Carpal Tunnel
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We were a bit of a nerdy "advanced" class Welcome home, then. [open arms e]
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Carpal Tunnel
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bkmdano, could you please tell me what is a language art teacher.
All these international systems of education are so different. We have laguage teachers and art teachers. I never heard of a language art teacher.
When I hit Tolstoy and after 4 pages he still didīnt hit me back, I honored Tolstoy in movies of War and Peace only.
But Dostojevski, he hit me with all he wrote and never gave me reason to hit him.
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Joined: Jan 2002
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
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I have an impression after having read only few works of each. If I put my mind to it and invested some effort, I think I could make a good thesis of it.
Dostoyevski is much more black and white. The good characters are nearly saint-like (Prince Myshkin, the younger Karamazov brother ); the villains epitomize evil (Karamazov's old man, The Grand Inquisitor). Those in-between characters are foolish and perpetuate evil, mostly because they are stupid and fail to respond to evil in themselves or in others.
Tolstoy's characters are more balanced. He's much more sympathetic to his characters, even the bad guys and the foolish ones. I noticed this first with Anna Karenina when I was mentally berating Anna's husband for being such an ass, and then thought suddenly, "You know ... I'm just not sure. Had I been in his situation, I might have behaved the same way."
Of course lots of books have characters that make you question your values, but a great many of those stories are contrived. People who really ARE wise are made to look stupid. People who are evil are made to appear good. Aristophanes can make Socrates look stupid when he's telling his own story. Doyle can make Holmes appear logical, when he's not. But Tolstoy's characters, particularly his central characters, are just like real people - partly because some of them are, and partly because even the fictional characters ACT like real people.
There's a lot of writers whose contributions I think are grossly overrated by intellectuals, or by other writers, or by people in general: Fitzgerald, Ibsen, Melville, Joyce. All of them clearly have or had some keen ability, to be sure, but not so great as they are reputed to be (at least not in my admittedly uneducated and unrefined estimation). I can see how someone would say that Melville is a Great Writer, but I just can't agree that he is, or ever was, the greatest writer in the English language or that Moby Dick was ever the greatest book.
I'm not saying that Tolstoy, as I've occasionally heard, is the greatest writer. But, imo, he's up there. I'm not surprised that others think he's there. I can say that he is among the greatest writers I've ever read and when I hear others say the same thing, I never suspect a hint of hyperbole.
OTOH, Madame Bovary is a solid refutation to the notion that sympathetic treament of all characters is necessary for a Great Writer. This really is a brilliant book, even if the characters are stilted. The druggist (was his name Homais?) is one of the truly despicable characters from literature. Nevertheless, I do wonder - could there really be someone quite that evil?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Bran, it's just a fancy, dare I say post-modern, way of saying "English teacher."
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addict
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addict
Joined: Oct 2005
Posts: 557 |
There is a sort of naming problem as in an English speaking school, your English teacher (hopefully) doesn't have the same goal as your Spanish teacher. Is the ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher an English teacher or not?
Is "English IV: British Literature" a redundant course title?
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Joined: Mar 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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And is an English teacher someone from England? 
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