Dumbing Down

The Ilkley Gazette has an article on the forthcoming (October 1-17) Ilkley Literature Festival.

“We are looking forward to playing our part in encouraging people to get out and about in this wonderful county, which has inspired writers for centuries from Charlotte Brontë to David Peace; and to welcoming people from further afield who hear about Ilkley Literature Festival via the yorkshire.com website.” (Suzy Poole)

Karen Cooper, director and programmer of Film Forum (New York) speaks to The Nation.

What are you reading these days?
[...] I decided not to leave that behind, but also to read Edith Wharton and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch. It's very different to read or reread this work as an older person who has seen something of life, and is able, I hope, to absorb some of the wisdom that those novelists bring to their situations and characters. I feel that's helped enrich my life. (Christine Smallwood)

Parents whose children attend Kingsmead Community School in Somerset (UK) may agree with her, as the Daily Mail reports that,

A father has started a petition against 'dumbing down' after his daughter's school ditched literary classics in favour of The Simpsons. (Laura Clark)

The headmaster defended this decision:

But headmaster Geoff Tinker said: 'The National Curriculum requires that students study a range of texts including moving image texts.
'We, along with many other schools, use The Simpsons to develop analytical essay writing and thinking.
'The Simpsons is excellent for analysing the use of satire, parody, irony and humour - enabling students to become critical readers and analysts of complex media texts.'
He said students also studied Shakespeare, classics such as Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and poets including Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. (Laura Clark)

Also accused of 'dumbing down' the classics is Stephenie Meyer on NewsTime (South Africa):

Meyer’s novels and the films they have spawned are not really vampire works at all. They could best be described as Gothic romances, and all post-nineteenth-century Gothic romances are spritzers composed of the potent ingredients present in “Jane Eyre”. If you remove the feminist elements and the bildungsroman structure of “Jane Eyre” – in short, everything that makes it a great novel -- then you are left with a Cinderella-ish story of an unconventional, intellectual girl who tames a mysterious, equally unconventional anti-hero. It is no accident that Meyer’s vampire hero shares Mr Rochester’s Christian name. (Digby Ricci)

Libby Sternberg continues promoting her upcoming book Sloane Hall now posting on her blog a quiz on the film versions of Jane Eyre. Check it out here.

The Brontë Parsonage Blog posts Heidi Büchner and William Callaghan's opinion on English graveyards in connection to the discussion of the car park near Anne Brontë's grave in Scarborough. Les Brontë à Paris writes about William Weightman in French. O déspota esclarecido has a post on Emily Brontë (in Portuguese). Freefalling Me posts about Jane Eyre and Classic Literature Podcast has uploaded the 18th part of the novel.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References