With regard to some of my own perspectives on education, the act of delving into and reading classic literature is something which has always held a deep significance for me. Of course, this is not a topic which has much traction amongst the majority of American students (and actually far more teachers than I would have wished!).
As a tiny start to try to find ways to address this, I found a wonderful quote from the Italian fabulist Italo Calvino about reading the classics:
“Why Read the Classics?” — Italo Calvino
http://biblioklept.org/2011/05/13/why-read-the-classics-italo-calvino
From Italo Calvino’s The Uses of Literature—
- The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, “I am rereading . . . ” and never “I am reading . . . “
- We use the words “classics” for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them
- The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
- Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
- Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.
- A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
- The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).
- A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives much pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.
- The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.
- We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the “total book,” as Mallarmé conceived of it.
- Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
- A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
- A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
- A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.
With this, I have some other examples of how to leverage author’s perspectives (outside of their works…). In this case, it is a Guardian article, where they asked a number of successful science fiction authors to describe the book which had the greatest influence on them…
This is also a list of worthwhile books to consider reading, as well as a bit of a tutorial in the art of literary criticism (OK…maybe high level book reports may fit the bill more closely). In any case, the whole article is worth reading…
The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
Russell Hoban
HP Lovecraft (1890–1937)
The main thing about HP Lovecraft is his too-muchness; he never uses three adjectives when five will do, but he writes words that haunt the memory: "In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." My recall of the multiplication table is shaky but those words disquiet me today as freshly as when I first read them.
Where did dead Cthulhu come from? Why did he rise up from the murky depths of Lovecraft’s mental ocean? I say it’s because there is a need for him and the rest of the maestro’s monsters. Why is there such an appetite, such a hunger for scary stories and films? I think there is a primal horror in us. From where? From the Big Bang when Something came out of nothing? From the nothingness we must become at life’s end? I don’t know, but I know it’s there and we like to dress it up with a bolt through its neck or a black rubber alien suit; or as Cthulhu. Get a load of this: "A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings,” with elements of "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,” "but it was the general outline of the whole that made it most shockingly frightful". Close your eyes and try to imagine this creature of non-Darwinian evolution. Just the look of this bozo is already a major horror, and we’re not even into the story yet. While he’s dead and dreaming in his house at R’lyeh ("Dun Foamin"?) his Cthulhuvibes are spreading worldwide and causing strange rites and observances here and there. Lovecraft is not everybody’s mug of Ovaltine but I have always found him horribly cozy.
China Miéville
The Island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells (1896)
In his own thoroughly strange 1946 novel Life Comes to Seathorpe, Neil Bell appropriates the term "rare books" to designate members of a new, dissident literary canon. A book, he says, is rare if "[i]t stood by itself . . . among all books . . . [and] was in a way unique." Of those mooncalf, ill-fitting, ineffably strange examples he lists, his first and most outstanding is The Island of Doctor Moreau.
He is right. This short, merciless novel of a vivisectionist’s efforts to remake beasts as humans is a shattering text. A peerless piece of science fictional horror, saturated with wrongness all the more powerful for its cold prose, it doesn’t evoke so much as demand visceral, social, philosophical dread. Wells was always politically the most interesting and cantankerous of the Fabians, but, as so often, the critiques, contradictions, and catastrophes in his fiction go further by far than those in his self-consciously political non-fiction. Like all worthwhile fiction, the book evades allegorical reduction, but among the phenomena it is "about,” one, ostentatiously, is colonialism. It oscillates in extraordinary superposition between two countervailing critiques of empire: one we might roughly gloss as reactionary – that those colonized cannot be "civilized"; the other more radical – that the colonial project is a nightmarish House of Pain.
Like its earlier close relative Frankenstein, Moreau is regularly traduced as a warning against hubris, of the dangers of meddling With Things that Should Be Left Alone, and so on. In fact, both texts are rebukes to that tedious and craven finger wagging – though, published a mere biblical lifespan apart, in poignantly opposed ways. Where for Shelley monstrousness arises out of Frankenstein’s refusal to engage with the social reality of what he has done, for Wells, it is brutal, ongoing engagement itself that is the cause of the horror. Frankenstein warns of disaster if we fail the Enlightenment: in nihilist Fabian terror, Moreau cries out that the Enlightenment has failed.
