Then and Now

I've lost count of how many times students have asked, "Can we just watch the movie?" I knew times had really changed when I was about to show a video of King Lear, and a student asked, "Do we have to watch the whole movie?"

Dwight MacDonald's essay "Updating the Bible," in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain reminds me yet again of just how much the study of literature has changed in the last twenty years.

No one reads; no one has time; no one has patience for anything complex. Which is exactly one of MacDonald's complaints about the felt need to revise the King James Version (KJV - 1611) of the Bible and replace it with the Revised Standard Version (RSV - 1952).

The words, phrasing, imagery that had been etched into the minds of most English speakers for nearly 350 years needed updating to better reflect the culture, character, and education of mid-century Americans. According to MacDonald, the whole enterprise was pretty much a dismal failure, replacing the reverberating "Thou Shalt Nots" with the more modern, but mundane, "You Shall Nots"  (by far not the worst of many sins).

MacDonald wrote about the failure to appreciate the KJV in 1959. What he said then applies to the study of literature now.

Speaking of what he claims is the exaggerated difficulty of the KJV:

Almost all of it is perfectly understandable to anyone who will give a little thought and effort to it, plus some of that overvalued modern commodity: time. Those who don't can hardly claim a serious interest in the Bible either as literature or religion. (172)

Which is exactly the criticism I have of contemporary students ( and just as often, their professors).


We err by making the "study" of literature today a study only of theory, of graphic novels, television, and tattoos. In doing so, "what is now simply a blunder...will become a catastrophe. Bland, flavourless mediocrity will have replaced the pungency of genius" (172).

But genius itself is suspect; canonical literature is a pale copy of theory, and the whole of the academy  is bent on catering only to what is relevant to and fun for eighteen-year-olds.

When "lol" and "bff" are one's linguistic currency, how fun can the "strange, wild, romantic, complex turns of style"(170) of Elizabethan English be?  - whether in the KJV or Shakespeare?

We will have lost something of great value when all we have is a cartoon version of the synopsis of King Lear with characters "txting."

And still someone will ask, "Do we have to watch the whole movie?"