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Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries & Replies From Everyone Else 3.15.97: Top | Help
Alvin --
Not to pull rank or sound condescending, but you're way too smart to be so closed minded at your age. Spend the next six years reading everything you can get your hands on that is sold as literature, approach every new work with a minimum of preconceptions, and then spend the rest of your life sorting out the wheat from the chaff (without being the least surprised when works jump from one pile to the other over time). Yes, there are works that were recommended to me at your age that I knew I wasn't going to like, so I avoided them, and when I read them decades later, I was right. But there are also ones that meant little or nothing to me but are highly enough regarded that I come back to them at irregular intervals to see if something has happened in the meantime (to me) that would turn them around.
And yes, much that's been written since Shakespeare lacks Sh's grandeur, but to expect otherwise is preposterous. But, as Queen Mab says, there's grandeur in Melville (to name one),. and we could probably each come up with extensive (and non-intersecting) lists of selected 19th and 20th c works that would repay your reading. To be a professor you need a broad vision -- I presume you have one of science fiction -- extend it. (And when you teach your course, include Tiptree.)Posted by JTJ on March 28, 1997 at 06:52:10
In Reply to "Recent stuff is largely junk with no grandeur." posted by Alvin Sidwick on March 27, 1997 at 08:58:24
Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries & Replies From Everyone Else 3.15.97: Top | Help