You'll pardon me if I note that doesn't weaken my sense that this thread is actively hostile to intellectual approaches to literature.

Certainly. Pardon me if I note that, despite your very clear and informative answers to my questions re: literary criticism, I still feel as if we are being looked down upon for not bowing to those who "do this for a living."

A good way to create appreciation of Shakespeare's comedies might be to begin with, "Shakespeare wrote the way people talked then. He used a lot of current slang. So if something sounds dirty, he very well may have intended it that way." Problem is, school boards aren't going to take that attitude very well.

As it happens, this is exactly how I was introduced to Shakespeare, in my very white suburban junior high school. Our seventh-grade English teacher handed us copies of a paperback edition of R&J/West Side Story, read us R&J I,i, and parsed out all the rude little "We're gonna get your girls and do them three ways from Sunday" jeers and the biting the thumb/flipping the bird parallel, and we were off to the races.

Dirty jokes and streetfights and teenagers lying to their parents and sneaking around and being totally crazy and all kinds of stuff that would horrify our parents, and we were getting to read this for class? We were gonna read this wild juicy subversive teens-on-a-rampage nuttiness and get credit for it? This guy was the best writer ever!

Which of course is an incredibly shallow way of reading Shakespeare, but hell, we were in the seventh grade. It was a perfect way to instill in us a reflexive Shakespeare YAY response that would serve us well at whatever future point we ran into serious professors who wanted us to dig into the meat of the work. I can't speak for the rest of the class (having not spoken to any of them in over two decades), but I know that when I first ran into a large ponderous weighty Shakespeare assignment much later on, my first thought was not God help me I can't do it, but Ooooh, fun!

Michele, I've never gotten the impression, in any argument/discussion I've seen you participate in, that you particularly worried about insulting other people. As far as I can tell, this is your conversational style. Fine. But I don't understand how you're perpetually amazed when people respond poorly. And I don't mean to turn this into a discussion of any one person's behavior. I just don't understand when we, the board, lost the ability to disagree about things without words like "snob" and "anti-intellectual" and "oppressive" being thrown around.

(And someone may wish to call me a Pollyanna, and that may very well be fair.)

First up for me: Why The Count of Monte Cristo has a mealy-mouthed, meaningless ending.

Damn! I've been told to read that since high school, and I still haven't gotten around to it. Even when it showed up as a plot point in Sleepers and I thought it was a sign I was supposed to read it.

My personal hate-on is Persians, by Aeschylus. It consists of a cavalcade of characters all coming onto the stage and saying the same thing, that the Persians are dead. I think there are supposed to be characters, but God, give me Sophocles (or hell, even Euripides) any day.

Oh, and I did already mention that My Antonia is all summary and no scene.

Okay, Monte Cristo. Whitefont for the innocent:

The Count should have died in the end. His punishments were so elaborately baroque, and actively cruel -- but he was punishing people for being heartless and thoughtless. None of them knew in advance he'd be stuck on the Chateau D'If for eternity; and he really just fell through the cracks of the system. (Hello to lack of habeas corpus!) Since the Count was NOT "doing justice" as he claimed, it would have made much more thematic sense for him to be killed in the completion of his revenge-acts.

Also, this would have allowed Haydee to fall in love with Albert Morcerf, instead of ickily with her own guardian. Thus, both Haydee and Albert get good endings, and we avoid ickiness.

Who else has read Monte Cristo? Or Minty Cristo, as I typed the first time?

Why The Count of Monte Cristo has a mealy-mouthed, meaningless ending

Ah ha! The Count! En garde, mon amie--though for what it's worth, I thought the Indian princess was a bit out of left field myself.

So much of the book depends on the era. I don't think it was ever intended as much more than a beach book of the time. Honor and revenge are the driving forces, and I htink the point is that Mercedes feels she is too dishonored to do more than retreat from the world.

Oh, and I did already mention that My Antonia is all summary and no scene.

I like that one too. The language is beautiful.

I was introduced to Shakespeare in 7th grade by a guy on whom I had a massive crush. He was reading one of the comedies and grinning, and I worked up the nerve to actually ask this paragon of hotness a question. Out loud, even. He went off on this long screed about the coolness of the play, and how there were all these amazing insults and jokes, and so on. With all the energy of a crushed out 7th grader, I found a book of Shakespeare's plays and spent the next few months devouring them. Ah, the power of hormones. And I found out that he was right about the plays.

The guy moved away around 10th grade (and I moved in the 11th) and I've never seen him since. But I still love the plays. I think this may be the healthiest thing romantic feelings for another person ever did for me.

So, to take that back to the discussion of canon, what makes it okay to say "No thanks, I don't like fantasy" and not okay to say "No thanks, I don't like whaling?" Why is one percieved as an expression of individual taste and the other percieved as a hostile attack on intellectualism?

Jessica, I wouldn't quarrel with anyone who didn't read MD for that reason. Life is too short to read everything, and everyone has to have criteria for what they will and won't read. But the non-fan of whaling shouldn't look down the nose at someone who loved MD.

Nutty, I read the unabridged CMC just last year. Wonderful, sprawling story of the type I'm a sucker for. And much of it is extremely vivid. But I can't remember the ending for the life of me.

I like that one too. The language is beautiful.

Huh. I don't recall the language; I'll take a look at my copy when I get home. But if we're talking beautiful language, I go with Lolita. Which does get a bit weird in the last hundred pages, but man. Oh, the last paragraph nearly made me cry.