That’s sort of cute how it’s in English although it’s sort of generally about literature, although maybe I’m wrong. I always wonder if people in other countries think of English as the gold standard of languages in literature atleast.
w/e
English is still the best.
I cannot express how utterly wrong the idea of a majour being the best is. Besides, Cosmotology majours understand much more about not only proper syntax, but also the machinations that guide the human soul and have throughout all ages of mankind. Not only this, but they can make hair pretty as well.
Could Yeats make hair luster with shine? Or perhaps it is shine with luster. Could Yeats volumize, or even so base a task as de-frizz. I think not. Then what good was he to society, I ask you, silhouette, a man who could not even remove the frizz that plagues so many of us; the frizz that is a dark blight upon our very human condition. Your useless literary stumping will not make my hair coiffured and, dare I say it again, lusterous. Or, perhaps, lusterful, being a combination of lusterous and wonderful.
I’m not saying English is the best major to take in college, I’m just saying it’s the best language.
Shakespeare is the center of the universe, and he invented English. If you had a choice of one language to know, I’d think it would have to be that. If the French wrote more imaginative literature than philosophical tracts and if Shakespeare were a Frenchman, they might be a contender. After English, I am partial to German, although I know only a couple words of the language, however, your understanding the Germans would be incomplete without understanding Shakespeare, who they seem to have adopted more than the other continentals.
For all literature I’ve read, Joyce seems to me the closest to Shakespeare, not necessarily in a literary context, but as an entity. Of people since Joyce, Woody Allen strikes me as a modern-day Shakespeare. They all wrote in English.
Also, I had to rain on your parade, Arac, but good hair is born, not made. Yeats for example.
p.s. For good measure, The Beatles, and virtually all important rock and roll, has been in English .
English is a global language, that’s mainly why it’s so important in the world today. And it’s become that way largely thanks to past British colonization. (Neb, you imperialist tadpole, you!)
There’s more on this in “English as a Global Language” by David Crystal.
Saying that Shakespear “invented” English is a weee bit overdoing it. English was around for a good long while before that, ya know. It just so happened that Shakespear lived during the time when Modern English was emerging from Middle English, even if that “Modern” English still was very much different from our version.
Besides, Shakespear was in his own time something equal to today’s soap operas.
I’ve studied literature in both English and Swedish, and I dunno how it is with you native speakers, but in my classes in English, we were only reading literature originally written in English, and we could not write in any language but English. On the other hand, when I study literature in Swedish, literature from all over the world is represented, though mostly in translations of course. However, if we know the language we could read Journey West in Chinese if we wanted to.
Let’s talk about Queer Theory instead. I’ve been looking forwards to that for a while, but the class on that isn’t until late October. Right now I’m trying to get a grip of Structuralism 
English sucks, says the Spanish major with a minor in German.
Good point on their “global” influence. English still got their fair share with Blake,Byron,Woolf, Dickens, the Irish nobelists, the American writers, beatniks etc. Honourary mention to Pessoa’s and Nabokov’s english works.
And that’s why apples dominate oranges.
You like Shakespeare and you prefer English. Got it. Each new language you learn will probably shake that belief as reading translations doesn’t give you the full picture. Some poets especially get stripped of all their magic.
And I don’t think any single man can “invent” a non-artificial language, such as English.
I don’t think Woody is the correct argument for the superiority of English.
And all good Lied has been in German. Your point?
Beautifully put, my good man.
<I>The Story of Gösta Berling</I> by Selma Lagerlöf is for example enthralling and beautifully written in Swedish, but the English translation was apparently voted in among the ten most boring books ever written. I think it was at Oxford.
No. Most great novels (the primary literary form of the past 200 years) were written in French, Russian or Japanese. English was more prominent in nineteenth-century poetry, but German and Russian also have a very big presence there. Not to mention the fact that the first novels in human history were written in Chinese and Japanese, and the first poetry in Greek and Latin.
Translation: I like Woody Allen, and everything that I deign to like is supremely great, so therefore Woody Allen is a modern-day Shakespeare.
Some of the worst literature and poetry has been written in English also. I guess that makes English both the best and worst language ever.
God bless you, William McGonagall.
You are welcome. I recently faced the exact same issue with two different translations of Rimbaud. One is sparkling, the other boring.
How could Kavafy ever get a Nobel if one can’t read the original? Tranströmer in Greek is a travesty. Translation is a thorny issue.
Say that again.
Let me first say that I am rather fully aware of the history of literature. Now for polemics:
Cultural studies are the balkanization of the humanities, and one of the great tragedies of the modern era. The approach of cultural studies departments to art is something perverse; to paraphrase my modern hero, Harold Bloom, the “queer theorist” approaches a great work, say Twelfth Night, with a glimmer of a political agenda or social program and thinks that by holding it up to this monumental, larger than life work, he will be able to shed light on it’s meaning. However, the great work rather sheds light on him, and all other readers. At bottom, the various theorists of university “English” departments do not enjoy reading.
However, the forced misinterpretation or even, if you will, denegration of books some among us consider sacred isn’t even the real tragedy, which is the turning off of entire generations of young people to literature in specific and art in general. The horror stories told by unassuming college students about their first English classes rival Shakespeare’s tragedies, and are among the saddest stories I hear. Sadly, I must believe Bloom’s prediction that the study of literature will continue along its current decline until departments of English are the size of Classics departments, and those who in another age would have been the mythical “common reader” must look elsewhere, and look hard, for the experience literature has provided his precursors.
My theory of Woody is a recent development of mine, born out of wondering who has even attempted Shakespeare’s scope, especially as regards the continuum of comedy and tragedy, of which the surprising answer is “not many”. Joyce is the clearest example to me, and Joyce of course had an immense agon with Bill. Less obvious, and through a less personal confrontation than Joyce, is Woody, who seems to understand what Shakespeare was getting at. I never bought (or even understood) how Allen maintains frequently in interviews that he is a kind of everyman, more at home in his underwear watching a ballgame than reading the Russian novelists, until I understood it by analogy to Shakespeare. For me Shakespeare appears as a kind of many-armed Hindu deity floating in the clouds, who is everything and nothing and creator and destroyer. When I am sad or downcast, to cheer myself up, I oftentimes consider the image of Shakespeare eating dinner by himself; the main course is usually chicken or turkey. He as once the most sublime artist and the common man. As well exploring the same themes, and with the same kind of bearing as in Yeat’s “Lapis Lazuli”, of happiness in tragedy, Allen shares the same flair for wordplay as his predecessor. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be a good example.
Ouch man, ouch.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. While I admire your passion for the arts, I think it’s almost disturbing how high of a pedestal you put Shakespear on. Yes, he wrote great stuff like The Tempest and Macbeth(although I found Romeo and Juliet a little boring), but I don’t think he deserves that much praise. I mean, fuck, a deity? whoa man, whoa. Then again differeing opinions, like always, I just figured I’d comment on that.
I didn’t mean it to be negative. It will be a rebirth, where the people who seriously care about it can study it with meaning, as classicists study the classics.
It is quite plain that all writers since him have been haunted by Shakespeare’s ghost, some more than others, and some more than others have been more successful in sublimating his challege. It’s not my decision, or anyone else’s, to like Shakespeare; we can only hope to subsume as much of his essence as possible in hopes of one day conquering him, at least in our imaginations.
Wow, I had no idea I was so humbled as a writer. I’m shocked.
Really. All this time I thought my inspiration and will to write was my own, but in reality I have been chained to this writer born in a country I have never been to, who wrote plays and poems out of which I can’t stand most of it. The language is beautiful, I’ll give him that, but his characters are unsympathetic morons.
Okay, seriously, your shakespearism is pretty scary, Sil.
Skakespeare was great but he’s not accesible.
You hold dear scope, while someone else may consider (for example) depth more important. Woody may explore comedy/tragedy but he’s not alone in the field and in my opinion his texts aren’t that smashingly good to prove English are the “best” language. Impressive, we’ve reached the preference barrier.
On the Shakespeare ghost thing: Isn’t that your father, Hamlet? Just joking.
Idolising S doesn’t really enhance your critic ability. And he didn’t leave such an impression on everyone who’s read him. People seemed to do fine before he came and many simply prefer other writers. If I said Göethe’s ghost haunts everyone but we must live up to it, still the sentence can’t be proved.
Curtis: Actually, I’d say that he’s very accessable even now. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we have to live up to what Shakespeare has done, but I think that his plays are very easily read (comparative to other literature of the time). And if we’re talking about his time, his stuff was just as accessable as today’s genre fiction to both upper and lower classes.
Linguistically speaking I’ve heard that English is one of the more awkward languages and is historically a bastard child of French, German and Latin. So from a technical standpoint, I’m not sure if it’s the “best” language.
I’d like to reemphasize a point of SK’s, too. The novel has taken root as the definitive means of literary construction since the Age of Enlightenment, i.e., the “modern world”. During this time period sizeable contributions have been made in other languages. America has historically contributed very little in terms of “great books,” and England’s influence seems to have waned throughout the last century. If one were to look over the larger scope of history, English-speaking contributions to the Western canon are relatively small. Shakespeare obviously is a tremendous influence, particularly on German writers as Silhouette stated. Besides this though Greek, French, German, Latin, and probably Russian and Hebrew have had more of an overall impact. In the Asian world Chinese and Japanese writings vastly predominate English contributions to their culture.
I think using poetry as evidence is misleading in this kind of debate. Poetry is very language-centric, and as such it’s hard to appraise the quality of different lanuage/culture’s contributions to the field without a sound understanding of the native tongue. But I still prefer my Baudelaire to Longfellow, anyway.
oh I’m in it for the long haul. But I’m leaning towards not doing it professionally.
hear hear!