Tuesday, October 08, 2024

About long books

Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books are taken up by the Daily Mail, which confidently pins the blame on social media. By which, inevitably, it means TikTok rather than inane globules of micro-celeb gossip emanating from certain tabloid... ah, right, that would be it...

PS: The Mail, obviously, has previous.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The high school teacher the Atlantic interviewed is not happy with the article: https://cmsthomas.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-did-me-dirty

Vicus Scurra said...

Tl;dr

CulturalSnow said...

She makes some good points, but I bristle slightly at "texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students". That's great but why don't we ask them to think about the vast majority of history and culture that lies outside their experience. (Although the fact that she can get them into The Odyssey if it's a more modern, colloquial translation suggests that in fact it's not the content that's the problem, but the language - in effect, their ability to read outside their comfort zone.)