In the film Donnie Darko, an English Literature teacher is hounded out of her job for teaching Graham Greene's "The Destructors", a pivotal scene of which the eponymous anti-hero is accused of copying. When I originally saw the movie, my first thought was, "Well that's not realistic nowadays".
My second thought was, "Well maybe in
My third thought was a smug and rather self-satisfied, "Well it certainly couldn't happen here. This is
It seems that such smugness, as such smugness usually is, was misplaced. A work by poet Carol Ann Duffy has been removed from the syllabus because of its content and because of complaints by people who have so clearly missed the point that it seems remarkable that they can claim to have read it at all. The poem is called Education For Leisure and begins "Today I am going to kill something. Anything." Its detractors seem to be entirely unaware that far from a glorification of knife crime, it is a bleak polemic about the need for education as a kind of antidote to the narrator's utterly hopeless and nihilistic point of view.
The poet's response was to pen another poem, Mrs Schofield's GCSE, which points out, in the form of a series of exam questions, just how much knife crime there is in Shakespeare. Mrs Schofield was one of the people complaining about the poem and crowing triumphally when it was removed from the syllabus.
3 comments:
Good afternoon
I went to see the RSC's The Merchant of Venice last night because a friend of mine is in it. I would not normally have gone, but I'm glad I did as it was an eye-opener (itself a sly reference to King Lear). There's not much slaying in this play, for legal reasons, but the full on anti-semitism is literally shocking. Now there's a school of thought that says Shakespeare was not being unselfconsciously racist, as we would call it today, but being rather cleverer, and the "If you prick me do I not bleed" speech is a telling one. Certainly writers do not share all of their characters opinions, but nevertheless, the viciousness of much of the language in the play, coming not from Nazis or skinheads but supposed upstanding characters, would probably put a contemporary author in hot water.
We read Merchant of Venice at school way back in the dimly remembered days of my youth.
The part I got to read?
Shylock.
You didn't really need to ask did you.
You are absolutely right though about the whole tone of the play.
and I'm not even going to point out the lack of rhyming in Carol Ann Duffy's work....but I'm not someone else - so I won't. Her work raised a smile from me though
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