That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton’s original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.
What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you’ll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you’ll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.
As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ideologically charged a field is, the more such cases you’ll find where the modern range of mainstream opinion has in fact regressed away from reality relative to old authors. In economics, for example, you’ll find a lot important insight in The Wealth of Nations that modern economics textbooks, and even modern treatments of Adam Smith, are silent about.
Even in hard sciences, when it comes to questions that raise deeper philosophical issues, revisiting classics can be a fruitful source of ideas. For example, Julian Barbour developed his ideas by studying the history of mechanics and relativity, and Arthur Ekert claims that the idea of quantum cryptography first occurred to him due to an insight he gathered from the classic EPR paper. (Ekert writes, “I guess I was lucky to read it in this particular way. The rest was just about rephrasing the subject in cryptographic terms.”)
Another point you’re neglecting is that truly good writers are extremely rare. Many classic works have remained in print after so many years exactly because people who wrote them were such good writers that virtually none of the modern authors working in the same field are able to produce anything as readable.
Yes. Anyone who thinks Chaucer and Shakespeare are valueless for being old has misunderstood the field. As long as humans are savannah apes, they will find their works of value. We still read Chaucer and Shakespeare not because they are antecedents, but because they’re good now.
Are Shakespeare’s comedies—containing mainly sexual innuendo, mistaken identities, abuse, and puns, and using the same extremely improbable plot devices repeatedly - really great works of art? They’re good, but are they really first-tier?
Do any of Shakespeare’s tragedies contain insights into human nature that are as important or as difficult for you to discover on your own as those you would find in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel? I think not. (Honestly, is King Lear deep? No; just dramatic and well-written. Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters. (Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that people who make and critique films tend to be more impressed by visual effects than by content; and people who make and critique books tend to be more impressed by verbal effects than by content.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters.
Shakespeare’s centrality in English Lit curricula comes from it’s historic place in the Western canon. Post-modernists are distinguished in particular by their opposition to any kind of canon.
And yet, I know English lit people who simultaneously love postmodernism and Shakespeare. There is a pervasive emphasis of style over content, which I have been attributing to postmodernism; but maybe I oversimplify.
Postmodernism isn’t really characterized by a position on which works should be read so much as how they should be read. While postmodern thinking opposes canons it also supports reading culturally relevant texts with a critical/subversive eye. Shakespeare is rich with cultural context while also being complex and ambiguous enough to provide a space for lit critics to play with meanings and interpretations and get interesting results. Hamlet, which is far and away Billy Shake’s best work, is particularly conducive to this. They do the same thing with Chaucer, actually, particularly the Wife of Bath’s tale. I don’t think it is about style over substance but about the freedom to play with cultural meaning and interpretation. You can’t say Hamlet is short on substance, anyway.
But the extent to which authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare have become less central in lit departments is almost entirely due to this crowd- it’s archetypal postmodernism which gives genre films and television the same importance as the historical Western canon.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead probably boosts the Bard’s popularity in the pro-postmodern scene.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they’re canonical. It’s like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you’d be missing out if you didn’t recognize the references.
Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.
We do now! But apparently, the original Elizabethan audiences went in expecting a happy ending—and were shocked when it turned out to be a tragedy. Tricky fellow, that Willy S.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they’re canonical. It’s like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you’d be missing out if you didn’t recognize the references.
Yes. Same reason some familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible is culturally useful.
I didn’t mean they would know how it would end—I meant they would know that Lear used shallow indicators to judge character, and Cordelia would turn out to be the faithful daughter.
It looks like audiences since before Shakespeare’s time would have gone in knowing the outline of the story. But I’m mostly replying to confess—the same Wikipedia article that I myself quoted makes it clear that there was no really happy ending to King Lear until 1681. I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
diegocaleiro:
That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton’s original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.
What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you’ll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you’ll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.
As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ideologically charged a field is, the more such cases you’ll find where the modern range of mainstream opinion has in fact regressed away from reality relative to old authors. In economics, for example, you’ll find a lot important insight in The Wealth of Nations that modern economics textbooks, and even modern treatments of Adam Smith, are silent about.
Even in hard sciences, when it comes to questions that raise deeper philosophical issues, revisiting classics can be a fruitful source of ideas. For example, Julian Barbour developed his ideas by studying the history of mechanics and relativity, and Arthur Ekert claims that the idea of quantum cryptography first occurred to him due to an insight he gathered from the classic EPR paper. (Ekert writes, “I guess I was lucky to read it in this particular way. The rest was just about rephrasing the subject in cryptographic terms.”)
Another point you’re neglecting is that truly good writers are extremely rare. Many classic works have remained in print after so many years exactly because people who wrote them were such good writers that virtually none of the modern authors working in the same field are able to produce anything as readable.
Yes. Anyone who thinks Chaucer and Shakespeare are valueless for being old has misunderstood the field. As long as humans are savannah apes, they will find their works of value. We still read Chaucer and Shakespeare not because they are antecedents, but because they’re good now.
Are Shakespeare’s comedies—containing mainly sexual innuendo, mistaken identities, abuse, and puns, and using the same extremely improbable plot devices repeatedly - really great works of art? They’re good, but are they really first-tier?
Do any of Shakespeare’s tragedies contain insights into human nature that are as important or as difficult for you to discover on your own as those you would find in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel? I think not. (Honestly, is King Lear deep? No; just dramatic and well-written. Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters. (Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that people who make and critique films tend to be more impressed by visual effects than by content; and people who make and critique books tend to be more impressed by verbal effects than by content.)
(Don Quixote, though, is golden. :)
Shakespeare’s centrality in English Lit curricula comes from it’s historic place in the Western canon. Post-modernists are distinguished in particular by their opposition to any kind of canon.
Good point!
And yet, I know English lit people who simultaneously love postmodernism and Shakespeare. There is a pervasive emphasis of style over content, which I have been attributing to postmodernism; but maybe I oversimplify.
Postmodernism isn’t really characterized by a position on which works should be read so much as how they should be read. While postmodern thinking opposes canons it also supports reading culturally relevant texts with a critical/subversive eye. Shakespeare is rich with cultural context while also being complex and ambiguous enough to provide a space for lit critics to play with meanings and interpretations and get interesting results. Hamlet, which is far and away Billy Shake’s best work, is particularly conducive to this. They do the same thing with Chaucer, actually, particularly the Wife of Bath’s tale. I don’t think it is about style over substance but about the freedom to play with cultural meaning and interpretation. You can’t say Hamlet is short on substance, anyway.
But the extent to which authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare have become less central in lit departments is almost entirely due to this crowd- it’s archetypal postmodernism which gives genre films and television the same importance as the historical Western canon.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead probably boosts the Bard’s popularity in the pro-postmodern scene.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they’re canonical. It’s like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you’d be missing out if you didn’t recognize the references.
We do now! But apparently, the original Elizabethan audiences went in expecting a happy ending—and were shocked when it turned out to be a tragedy. Tricky fellow, that Willy S.
Yes. Same reason some familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible is culturally useful.
cf Richard Dawkins on his lifelong love of the King James Bible
I didn’t mean they would know how it would end—I meant they would know that Lear used shallow indicators to judge character, and Cordelia would turn out to be the faithful daughter.
It looks like audiences since before Shakespeare’s time would have gone in knowing the outline of the story. But I’m mostly replying to confess—the same Wikipedia article that I myself quoted makes it clear that there was no really happy ending to King Lear until 1681. I wasn’t paying close enough attention.