"Obi - why are you so opposed to reading modern works? You realize you are just as for not exposing yourself to modern works - "classic" or not" - as I suppose you think others are for ignoring your moldy oldies...For the record...I read Shakespeare...and I find it of little entertainment value. I don't' want to have to study an ancient form of my language to get the jokes...Apart from that, it is the same violence, intrigue, murder and mayhem I can get from other modern masters, just done with sword and sorcery instead. It is unique perhaps because it was a *first*....but now it is just old and dated."
Conflated the two comments there...
1. I'm not opposed to reading modern works at all. I think the newest thing on my bookshelf is A Visit From the Goon Squad, which was the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner (which I was assigned for class and is...eh...I can see why some people really praise the style, and I think there is some nice stylistic innovation, but when it tries to predict the future and comment on the present it just falls flat, and its characters are just lifeless.) Newest I read for my own enjoyment was The Road, 2009, so that's pretty recent too. It's just that I first have a dual love for 16th-17th century English Lit as well as Jazz Age/Modernist Lit, such cool time periods with great authors, so I naturally read more from those eras than others, and in any case, again, I think that not only do you need to wait a bit to ascertain whether a current work will hold up or not, but the more current the work, the more background you have to have read. Read something in the Modernist era and you'd better have a good understanding of not only that time, but the century preceding which shaped the authors' views, and then there's centuries worth of allusions and references the authors from that era will make, so you need to have read that as well. You need a strong foundation before you start building up; you need to read and know a lot of earlier works and have what hero-of-mine Eliot called "the historical sense" before you can really start to appreciate recent authors who are standing on the shoulders of centuries-worth of giants.
2. So again, I'm not forgetting or ignoring newer works...it's simply proportional for me--the same way the top of the pyramid is slimmer than the vast foundation, so too do I just think that the further you go back (to an extent) the more useful works there are. If you read only or mostly new works, you're missing a lot of the discussion...it's like coming into a debate that's been raging for 300 posts and only reading the last 3 posts--maybe it's easier, but you won't get the fullest sense of what's really been said and why and the track things have taken.
3. And I'm going to be an anal English major type for a second ("Oh, just a second?" thinks everyone to themselves) and point out Shakespeare is NOT an ancient form of your language...Shakespeare is Early Modern English--it's not as if you have to learn a whole new mode of language as is the case with Early and Middle English...you can watch Shakespeare and generally, even if you're not at all very good with literature or languages or any of that, you can get the general gist of what's being said...the vocabulary can sometimes be difficult for some, but vocabulary from 50 years ago is dusty and alien as well--unless anyone here says "groovy" or "psychedelic" on a daily basis? The Comedies especially are so accessible and recognizable as, in essence, still the general language we speak today, just with 400 years of old vocab. And if you have to study up to get the joke in:
Petruchio: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
Katherine: In his tongue.
Petruchio: Whose tongue?
Katherine: Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
Petruchio: What, with my tongue in your tail?
Or,
Benedick: The world must be peopled!
Or just the humor of a girl playing a guy that's in several of the plays.
You can argue those jokes aren't funny...not so much that those jokes are so ancient and hard to understand you need a dictionary to understand them.
4. Well yeah, all stories are essentially repeats of a past story...Shakespeare steals from Kyd who steals from previous writings and other contemporary authors who steals from Medieval stories who steal from the Bible and Homer who steal from previous religious stories and older forms of those myths...if you're looking for original plots in literature you'll often be disappointed, and if your reasoning follows that if plots are the same why not just read new ones--
Well, why listen to any music from 50, 40, 30, 20, hell, even 2 years ago?
Who needs to hear OLD songs about a guy in love with a girl when NEW songs about that are being written all the time...hell, 3 of them have probably been written down in the time it's taken to write this, there's so damn many.
Why listen to old songs about sadness or angst or anger--just listen to a new one...they're singing about the same thing...so same thing, right? New beats Old, so why not just throw everything from Mozart and Beethoven to the Beatles and Queen to Elvis and Ray Charles in the trash and just listen to some Taylor Swift and Pit Bull?
Same thing, right? Unless there's something to songs and literature besides the very very VERY basic detail of mere plot?
Where has the Mediterranean Gone?
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