Do you hate old literature?

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Confusing sentences and terms and metaphors. I have my grammar issues but sheesh! I feel these people should get F's across the board. The first few pages of Moby Dick turned me off. Cato and sword?? Just say what you mean in PLAIN ENGLISH not jargon terms that the reader might not know. The latest assignment for my Literature of the Sea course really confused me and made no since AT ALL! Of course I grew up with Goosebumps and enjoy more popular reads such as Twilight and Harry Potter so old literature confuses me. Old movies (I enjoyed It's a Wonderful Life and King Kong) Both Black and White BTW and I also enjoy old videogames PONG,Donkey Kong,Pacman etc. but old literature is a MESS! There is a REASON people don't write that way anymore!!

I enjoy old literature, and never found it difficult to read. Middle English can be quite a challenge, but anything after that is easy enough.

Try reading the scarlet letter in its original form. Holy smokes that thing makes you want to poke your eyeballs out and sit on a blender blade to end the painnnnn

Hwæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

I got to study Beowulf in the original Old English and loved it Used the Seamus Heaney text.

I've never read it but it sounds like torture LOL!

Awesome. That sounds very interesting.

Awesome, I have that book. I also have a parallel text with The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and modern. I'm going to study OE and ME some day, but too busy now.

I generally like prose from the 18th century on.

I bought my kindle just to read old stuff from project Gutenberg.

Kindle also helps reading old stuff thanks to the built in dictionary. It really helped me to understand Alexander Pope and a few arcane passages from Jonathan Swift...

If you really can't "get it" try to find an entry for the work at sparknotes or cliff's notes.

For major stuff, they'll usually have summaries and analysis. That can really help a lot.

Also, if you have the time, try to summarize/translate the work every page or so. This method helped me understand Pope's Essay on Man...

Pope is quite sadistic... combining poetry and philosophy? What a bastard!

sounds like my type of bastard. Example? I cant get google hits on this

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Not only is 'old' a subjective term, but most 'classic literature' (I believe that is the proper term) is fantastic.

Heh.... What midlifeaspie said!

You can download Pope's Essay on Man from Manybooks.net

My favorite quote:

Last edited by GoonSquad on 09 Feb 2011, 5:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

<-- translated the entire Alliterative Morte Arthure (badly) out of Middle English for kicks.

I agree about Moby Dick, but its incomprehensibility is not a function of its age; there's a faction within high literature that venerates obscurely written crap like Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, All The Pretty Horses and suchlike garbage. The literary equivalent of a high-priced restaurant where they serve three sticks of asparagus and a toasted lemon as aperitif for a minuscule portion of caramelised bat droppings.

Another horrible bane of 'old' literature is that half of it was written in serial form - in the worst cases, such as the execrable Count of Monte Cristo (I've only read it in translation but that didn't leave me gagging to try the original!), written in serial form by many different writers with apparently different ideas as to how the story should turn out. It can work, but usually doesn't.

Natheless, there's lots of good stuff, even so; try The Manuscript Found In Saragossa or A Hero Of Our Time.

There's good and bad written in all ages.

I must disagree with your opinion on Ulysses and anything written by Cormac McCarthy. There is something nice about literature that is meant to be hard to read.