Some other Brontë-related news for the first Saturday of June.
The New York Times once again resurrects one of those somehow tiresome topics. The reason why adult males don't read is that as teenagers they are not pointed in the direction of more suitable literature
One reason the average American male reads only one book a year may be the emotional trauma suffered in trying to hack his way through “Wuthering Heights” at the age of 14. (Joe Queenan)
Andrea Potos is also
an old acquaintance of this blog. She is a poet and a Brontëite and this article in
The Capital Times is a good example:
For Madison poet Andrea Potos, growing up in a Greek immigrant household in Milwaukee seemed normal. Sure, her grandmother sometimes said words in a language that Potos didn't speak, but the food was excellent and the family stories never stopped entertaining.
"For me it was a very ordinary way of growing up," Potos recalled.(...)
Currently Potos is finishing her second manuscript, a process she said has been made easier by the lessons learned in assembling "YaYa's Cloth."
Titled "We Lit the Lamps Ourselves" (a line taken from an Emily Dickinson poem), the new collection focuses on women writers and the act of creation and includes a series of poems about the Bronte sisters and other women writers, as well as personal poems about Potos' own creative experience. (Heather Lee Schroeder)
And now for some short notes. A couple of blogs post about their recent visits to the Brontë Parsonage Museum:
Robin Hill (
the guitarist) and
Sassy McFrench Abroad. Meanwhile
Twitch Film reviews the new DVD edition of Jane Eyre 1944.
Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, Brontëites, Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights
I thought this comment by the author of the NY Times piece was interesting:
ReplyDelete"But if my son’s experience held true, perhaps it was merely a case of my being too young to appreciate Hardy’s genius when first exposed to it."
Perhaps, especially with boys, these works are being forced fed at too young at age. It takes some life experience to appreciate reading these works and to have empathy with the characters. I started to read authors like the Brontes and the other Victorians when I was in my early 20s during graduate school. My motivation was to expand my horizons and I had a liking for the 19th century. I am not sure what would have happened if I was forced say to read Jane Eyre in high school. The whole academic exercise of finding symbolism and other types of literary analysis might have turned me off. At such a young age, I would have not appreciated the beautiful prose Charlotte uses to describe the scenery as Jane goes for her walk where she meets Mr. Rochester for the first time. But when I did read it I was a little older and as part of the maturation process I started to appreciate the beauty of the twilight in winter and those words hit right at my soul. I was saying to myself Jane's feelings are on par with what I feel in a similar environment.