Beowulf

[porphyry]

Most of us had to read “Beowulf” in our teens, struggling through the 1,000-year-old ramblings of some anonymous author.

Well, leave it to 3-D special effects and computer imagery to make this epic poem palatable.
__________

The name “Beowulf” surely will inspire painful memories of high-school English class and pangs of dread.
(this one was accompanied by a photo of Angelina Jolie trying out for the remake of Goldfinger wearing only a pair of six inch spike heels: Grendel’s mother, evidently)

These are the lead paragraphs in the reviews of the Beowulf film in our two local newspapers. Note first the complete disappearance of the paragraph: every sentence is offset as a seperate paragraph; and this continues throughout both reviews. Second, note the substitution of placing the title of a work of literature in quotation marks for italicization. Finally, note the bizarre use of hyphens in both pieces. I suppose Beowulf is not the only thing that filled the authors with dread in their English classes.

Who is this aimed at? Who is this 'we' they mention? Who would hate Beowulf? Certainly not us. That was the only thing my Baptist-trained English teacher could not trample the joy out of. Mde. Malkhos actually learned Old English for the express purpose of reading Beowulf. We are not being well served by our papers. It does no good to complain. I’ve actually written in about the film reviews in the past, only to be told they have to cater to the mass audience. No risk of educating them instead, I suppose.

Comments

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

What a difference only a few years makes. I suspect everyone imagines their literary studies to be more worthwhile than those conducted afterwards but, man, I am so happy to have escaped the burdensome mush of Maya Angelou. Later, as a somewhat older-than-normal graduate student, I often remarked how thoroughly versed in horseshit my younger colleagues were.

For the record we read GRENDEL in Americna high school (in modern English) but also Chaucer in Middle English.

Oh, one more thing. Years later I was hired to proofread the new edition of the anthology we read in high school. One of my tasks was to be sure that there remained no cross-references to Emerson, who had been summarily dismissed from those pages. Okay, American culture is pretty shallow, but erasing the first real American philosopher from this book can only be explained by dimwit high school lit teachers who found the excerpted versions of his work impenetrable.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I had a similar unfortunate experience in graduate school; one of the newly hired professors commented, when I bemoaned the students' lack of knowledge about the first group of American philosophers; namely, Emerson and Thoreau and the whole Transcendentalist tradition, looked at me with disdain and said, "Why would everyone need to read them? I'm from the South; they have nothing to say to me."

"You're the reason academia is in the condition it is today," I told her, omitting You goddamn idiot.

Needless to say, she wasn't on my dissertation committee.

[siamhussein.livejournal.com]

Ah the wonderful world of identity politics. Nothing pertains to anyone, really, unless the philosopher in question happened to live across the street. Thank you, Maya Angelou, etc.

Quelle horreur.