Why Should We Read William Shakespeare? Four Animated Videos Make the Case

Soon­er or lat­er, we all encounter the plays of William Shake­speare: whether on the page, the stage, or—maybe most fre­quent­ly these days—the screen. Over four hun­dred years after his death, Shake­speare is still very much rel­e­vant, not only as the most rec­og­niz­able name in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, but also per­haps as its most famous sto­ry­teller, even if we don’t rec­og­nize his hand in mod­ern adap­ta­tions that bare­ly resem­ble their orig­i­nals.

But if we can turn Shakespeare’s plays into oth­er kinds of enter­tain­ment that don’t require us to read foot­notes or sit flum­moxed in the audi­ence while actors make archa­ic jokes, why should we read Shake­speare at all? He can be pro­found­ly dif­fi­cult to under­stand, an issue even his first audi­ences encoun­tered, since he stuffed his speech­es not only with hun­dreds of loan words, but hun­dreds of his own coinages as well.

The crit­i­cism of Shakespeare’s dif­fi­cul­ty goes back to his ear­li­est crit­ics. Sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish poet John Dry­den declared that the play­wright “had undoubt­ed­ly a larg­er soul of poesy than every any of our nation.” In the plays, we find “all arts and sci­ences, all moral and nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy.” And yet, even Dry­den could write, in 1664, that Shake­speare’s lan­guage was “a lit­tle obso­lete,” and that “in every page [there is] either some sole­cism of speech, or some noto­ri­ous flaw in sense.” (These issues are some­times, but not always, attrib­ut­able to scrib­al error.)

“Many of his words,” wrote Dry­den, “and more of his phras­es, are scarce intel­li­gi­ble. And of those which we under­stand, some are ungram­mat­i­cal, oth­ers coarse; and his whole style is so pestered with fig­u­ra­tive expres­sions, that it is as affect­ed as it is obscure.” Seems harsh. How could such a writer not only sur­vive but become an almost god­like fig­ure in lit­er­ary his­to­ry?

Maybe it’s all that “poesy.” Shake­speare is sure­ly one of the most musi­cal writ­ers in the lan­guage. Read his speech­es to children—they will lis­ten with rapt atten­tion with­out under­stand­ing a sin­gle word. It is bet­ter that we encounter Shake­speare ear­ly on, and learn to hear the music before we’re buf­fet­ed by exag­ger­at­ed ideas about how hard he is to under­stand.

Writ­ten in a time when Eng­lish was under­go­ing one of most rapid and rad­i­cal shifts of any lan­guage in his­to­ry, Shakespeare’s inge­nious plays pre­serve a riot of bor­rowed, invent­ed, and stolen words, of fig­ures of speech both old- and new-fash­ioned, and of schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar ideas trav­el­ing through Eng­land on their way to and from a glob­al­iz­ing world. The tor­rents of verse that pour from his char­ac­ters’ mouths give us the lan­guage at its most flu­id, dynam­ic, and demot­ic, full of unpar­al­leled poet­ic fugues crammed next to the rough­ness Dry­den dis­liked.

This is the essence of the modern—of lat­er Shake­spearen suc­ces­sors like Samuel Beck­ett and James Joyce who freely mixed high and low and invent­ed new ways of speak­ing. Why should we read Shake­speare? I can think of no more per­sua­sive argu­ment than Shakespeare’s lan­guage itself, which daz­zles even as it con­founds, and whose strange­ness gives it such endur­ing appeal. But which plays should we read and why? The TED-Ed videos above from Iseult Gille­spie, and below from Bren­dan Pel­sue, make the case for four of Shake­speare great­est works: The Tem­pest, Ham­let, A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream, and Mac­beth.

Learn new facts about the plays, and why their tragedy and humor, and their copi­ous amounts of mur­der, still speak to us across the gulf of hun­dreds of years. But most of all, so too does Shakespeare’s glo­ri­ous­ly ornate poetry—even when we can bare­ly under­stand it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 55 Hours of Shakespeare’s Plays: The Tragedies, Come­dies & His­to­ries Per­formed by Vanes­sa Red­grave, Sir John Giel­gud, Ralph Fiennes & Many More

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre in Lon­don

The 1,700+ Words Invent­ed by Shake­speare*

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

Those of us who are deeply dis­ap­point­ed to learn we won’t be see­ing Har­ri­et Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tub­man tea tow­el… or could if the revered abo­li­tion­ist and activist wasn’t one of the fam­i­ly-owned Rad­i­cal Tea Towel’s hottest sell­ing items.

The pop­u­lar design, based on one of Charles Ross’ murals in Cam­bridge, Maryland’s Har­ri­et Tub­man Memo­r­i­al Gar­den is cur­rent­ly out of stock.

For­tu­nate­ly, the com­pa­ny has immor­tal­ized plen­ty of oth­er inspi­ra­tional fem­i­nists, activists, civ­il rights lead­ers, authors, and thinkers on cot­ton rec­tan­gles, suit­able for all your dish dry­ing and gift giv­ing needs.

Or wave them at a demon­stra­tion, on the cre­ators’ sug­ges­tion.

The need for rad­i­cal tea tow­els was hatched as one of the company’s Welsh co-founder’s was search­ing in vain for a prac­ti­cal birth­day present that would reflect her 92-year-old father’s pro­gres­sive val­ues.

Five years lat­er, bom­bard­ed with dis­tress­ing post-elec­tion mes­sages from the States, they decid­ed to expand across the pond, to high­light the achieve­ments of “amaz­ing Amer­i­cans who’ve fought the cause of free­dom and equal­i­ty over the years.”

The descrip­tion of each tow­el’s sub­ject speaks to the pas­sion for his­to­ry, edu­ca­tion  and jus­tice the founders—a moth­er, father, and adult son—bring to the project. Here, for exam­ple, is their write up on Muham­mad Ali, above:

He was born Cas­sius Clay and changed his name to Muham­mad Ali, but the name the world knew him by was sim­ply, ‘The Great­est.’ Through his remark­able box­ing career, Ali is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and cel­e­brat­ed sports fig­ures of the 20th cen­tu­ry and was an inspir­ing, con­tro­ver­sial and polar­is­ing fig­ure both inside and out­side the ring. 

Ali start­ed box­ing as a 12-year-old because he want­ed to take revenge on the boy who stole his bike, and at 25, he lost his box­ing licence for refus­ing to fight in Viet­nam. (‘Why should they ask me to put on a uni­form and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bul­lets on brown peo­ple in Viet­nam when so-called Negro peo­ple in Louisville are treat­ed like dogs and denied sim­ple human rights?’ He demand­ed.) It was per­haps the only time he sur­ren­dered: mil­lions of dol­lars, the love of his nation, his career… but it was for what he believed in. And although his views on race were often con­fused, this was just exam­ple of his Civ­il Rights activism.

Ali became a light­ning rod for dis­sent, set­ting an exam­ple of racial pride for African Amer­i­cans and resis­tance to white dom­i­na­tion dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. And he took no punch lying down – nei­ther inside the box­ing ring nor in the fight for equal­i­ty: after being refused ser­vice in a whites-only restau­rant in his home­town of Louisville, Ken­tucky, he report­ed­ly threw the Olympic gold medal he had just won in Rome into the Ohio Riv­er. So, here’s an empow­er­ing gift cel­e­brat­ing the man who nev­er threw in the (tea) tow­el.

The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el blog is such stuff as will bring a grate­ful tear to an AP US His­to­ry teacher’s eye. The Fore­bears We Share: Learn­ing from Rad­i­cal His­to­ry is a good place to start. Oth­er top­ics include Abi­gail Adam’s Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion advo­ca­cy, the bridge designs of rev­o­lu­tion­ary philoso­pher Thomas Paine, and Bruce Springsteen’s love of protest songs.

(The Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el design team has yet to pay trib­ute to The Boss, but until they do, we can rest easy know­ing author John Steinbeck’s tow­el embod­ies Springsteen’s sen­ti­ment. )

Lest our edu­ca­tion­al dish­cloths lull us into think­ing we know more about our coun­try than we actu­al­ly do, the company’s web­site has a rad­i­cal his­to­ry quiz, mod­eled on the US his­to­ry and gov­ern­ment nat­u­ral­iza­tion test which would-be Amer­i­cans must pass with a score of at least 60%. This one is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, geared toward pro­gres­sive his­to­ry. Test your knowl­edge to earn a tea tow­el dis­count code.

Begin your Rad­i­cal Tea Tow­el explo­rations here, and don’t neglect to take in all the rad designs cel­e­brat­ing the upcom­ing cen­ten­ni­al of wom­en’s suf­frage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

We might think we have a gen­er­al grasp of the peri­od in Euro­pean his­to­ry immor­tal­ized in theme restau­rant form as “Medieval Times.” After all, writes Amy White at Medievalists.net, “from tat­toos to video games to Game of Thrones, medieval iconog­ra­phy has long inspired fas­ci­na­tion, imi­ta­tion and ven­er­a­tion.” The mar­ket for sword­play, armor, quests, and sor­cery has nev­er been so crowd­ed.

But whether the his­tor­i­cal peri­od we call medieval (a word derived from medi­um aevum, or “mid­dle age”) resem­bled the mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions it inspired presents us with anoth­er ques­tion entirely—a ques­tion inde­pen­dent and pro­fes­sion­al schol­ars can now answer with free, easy ref­er­ence to “high-res­o­lu­tion images of more than 160,000 pages of Euro­pean medieval and ear­ly mod­ern codices”: rich­ly illu­mi­nat­ed (and ama­teur­ish­ly illus­trat­ed) man­u­scripts, musi­cal scores, cook­books, and much more.

The online project, called Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis, hous­es its dig­i­tal col­lec­tion at the Inter­net Archive and rep­re­sents “vir­tu­al­ly all of the hold­ings of PACSCL [Philadel­phia Area Con­sor­tium of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Libraries],” a wealth of doc­u­ments from Prince­ton, Bryn Mawr, Vil­lano­va, Swarth­more, and many more col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty libraries, as well as the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, Nation­al Archives at Philadel­phia, and oth­er august insti­tu­tions of high­er learn­ing and con­ser­va­tion.

Lehigh Uni­ver­si­ty “con­tributed 27 man­u­scripts amount­ing to about 5,000 pages,” writes White, includ­ing “a 1462 hand­writ­ten copy of Virgil’s Aeneid with pen­ciled sketch­es in the mar­gins” (see above). There are man­u­scripts from that peri­od like the Ital­ian Trac­ta­tus de mal­efici­is (Trea­tise on evil deeds), a legal com­pendi­um from 1460 with “thir­ty-one mar­gin­al draw­ings in ink” show­ing “var­i­ous crimes (both delib­er­ate and acci­den­tal) being com­mit­ted, from sword-fights and mur­ders to hunt­ing acci­dents and a hang­ing.”

The Trac­ta­tus’ draw­ings “do not appear to be the work of a pro­fes­sion­al artist,” the notes point out, though it also con­tains pages, like the image at the top, show­ing a trained illu­mi­na­tor’s hand. The Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis archive includes 15th and 16th-cen­tu­ry recipes and extracts on alche­my, med­ical texts, and copi­ous Bibles and books of prayer and devo­tion. There is a 1425 edi­tion of Chaucer’s Can­ter­bury Tales in Mid­dle Eng­lish (lack­ing the pro­logue and sev­er­al tales).

These may all seem of recent vin­tage, rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing, for a medieval archive, but the col­lec­tion reach­es back to the 9th cen­tu­ry, with hun­dreds of doc­u­ments, like the 1000 AD music man­u­script above, from a far ear­li­er time. “Users can view, down­load and com­pare man­u­scripts in near­ly micro­scop­ic detail,” notes White. “It is the nation’s largest region­al online col­lec­tion of medieval man­u­scripts,” a col­lec­tion schol­ars can draw on for cen­turies to come to learn what life was real­ly like—at least for the few who could read and write—in Medieval Times.

via Medievalists.net

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Alice B. Toklas Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

toklas cookbook

Alice Babette Tok­las met Gertrude Stein in 1907, the day she arrived in Paris. They remained togeth­er for 39 years until Stein’s death in 1946. While Stein became the cen­ter of the avant-garde art world, host­ing an exclu­sive salon that wel­comed the likes of Ernest Hem­ing­way, Pablo Picas­so, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Tok­las large­ly pre­ferred to stay in Stein’s shad­ow, serv­ing as her sec­re­tary, edi­tor and assis­tant.

That changed in 1933 when Stein wrote The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Alice B. Tok­las – a retelling of the couple’s life togeth­er with Tok­las serv­ing as nar­ra­tor. The book is Stein’s most acces­si­ble and best-sell­ing work. It also turned the shy, self-effac­ing Tok­las into a lit­er­ary fig­ure.

After Stein’s death, Tok­las pub­lished The Alice B. Tok­las Cook­book in 1954, which com­bined per­son­al rec­ol­lec­tions of her time with Stein along with recipes and mus­ings about French cui­sine. Yet it wasn’t her sto­ries about tend­ing to the wound­ed dur­ing WWI or her opin­ions on mus­sels that made the book famous. Instead, it was the inclu­sion of a recipe giv­en to her by Moroc­can-based artist Brion Gysin called “Hashish Fudge.”

In this 1963 record­ing from Paci­fi­ca Radio, Tok­las reads her noto­ri­ous recipe. The snack “might pro­vide an enter­tain­ing refresh­ment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chap­ter meet­ing of the DAR,” Tok­las notes in her reedy, dig­ni­fied voice. Then she gets on to the recipe itself:

Take one tea­spoon black pep­per­corns, one whole nut­meg, four aver­age sticks of cin­na­mon, one tea­spoon corian­der. These should all be pul­ver­ized in a mor­tar. About a hand­ful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them togeth­er. A bunch of Cannabis sati­va can be pul­ver­ized. This along with the spices should be dust­ed over the mixed fruit and nuts, knead­ed togeth­er. About a cup of sug­ar dis­solved in a big pat of but­ter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a wal­nut, it should be eat­en with care. Two pieces are quite suf­fi­cient.

Tok­las con­cedes that get­ting the key ingre­di­ent “can present cer­tain dif­fi­cul­ties” and rec­om­mends find­ing the stuff in the wild, which might have been pos­si­ble to do in the ear­ly 1960s. Nowa­days, the best course of action is to move to Wash­ing­ton, Col­orado or Uruguay.

In the record­ing, Tok­las then goes on to recall how hashish fudge came to be includ­ed into her book.

“The recipe was inno­cent­ly includ­ed with­out my real­iz­ing that the hashish was the accent­ed part of the recipe,” she says with­out a trace of face­tious­ness. “I was shocked to find that Amer­i­ca wouldn’t accept it because it was too dan­ger­ous.”

“It nev­er went into the Amer­i­can edi­tion,” she says. “The Eng­lish are braver. We’re not coura­geous about that sort of thing.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary 2014.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejec­tion Let­ter from Pub­lish­er (1912)

Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Gertrude Stein Recites ‘If I Told Him: A Com­plet­ed Por­trait of Picas­so’

Pretty Much Pop #18 Discusses Stephen King’s Media Empire

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Is the most pop­u­lar writer of our time actu­al­ly a good writer? Or maybe he used to be good but has long since run out of inspi­ra­tion? What are the most effec­tive ways to adapt these very read­able short sto­ries and nov­els? Does show­ing us the evil in a film lessen its impact? While you’ve been think­ing about those ques­tions, King has already writ­ten anoth­er book.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt share their expe­ri­ences with and opin­ions about King’s oeu­vre and the films and shows that have come out of it, includ­ing It, “The Body” (aka Stand By Me), The Shin­ing, In the Tall Grass, The Dark Tow­er, The Stand, Chil­dren of the Corn, From a Buick 8, Under the Dome, The Out­sider, Mr. Mer­cedes, Cas­tle Rock, Pet Sematary, Mis­ery, The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion, and more.

Some arti­cles we read to pre­pare for this dis­cus­sion include:

If you’ve nev­er actu­al­ly read a Stephen King novel­la, go ahead and read “The Body.”

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

 

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Novel Adaptation

The human imag­i­na­tion can be an extra­or­di­nary cop­ing device in times of trou­ble, a tiny win­dow pro­vid­ing men­tal escape from what­ev­er cell fate has con­signed us to.

Diarist and aspir­ing pro­fes­sion­al writer Anne Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen con­cen­tra­tion camp at the age of 15, chafed at her now-uni­ver­sal­ly-known con­fine­ment in the Secret Annex. She chafed at her mother’s author­i­ty and the seem­ing­ly effort­less saint­li­ness of her old­er sis­ter. Doc­u­ment­ing her dai­ly phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al real­i­ty offered tem­po­rary respite from it.

The lib­er­at­ing pow­er of the cre­ative mind is one of the aspects writer Ari Fol­man and illus­tra­tor David Polon­sky sought to tease out when adapt­ing Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a graph­ic nov­el.

The graph­ic nov­el for­mat decreed that entire pas­sages would be cut or con­densed. Polon­sky can use a sin­gle pan­el to show logis­tics it took Anne para­graphs to describe. The inter­per­son­al con­flicts she dwelt on are now con­veyed by facial expres­sions and body lan­guage.

As with Sid Jacob­son and Ernie Colón’s 2010 Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Autho­rized Graph­ic Biog­ra­phythe diary’s small stage is expand­ed to give read­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly those unac­quaint­ed with the orig­i­nal text, a his­tor­i­cal con­text for under­stand­ing the wider social impli­ca­tions of Anne’s tragedy.

But this graph­ic retelling is unique in that it traf­fics in mag­ic real­ist visu­als that should play well with 21st-cen­tu­ry youth, who cut their teeth on CGI, fast-paced edits, and stream­ing teen-focused enter­tain­ments where­in char­ac­ters are apt to break the fourth wall or break into song.

These are the read­ers to whom the project is most inten­tion­al­ly pitched. As Fol­man told Teen Vogue’s Emma Sar­ran Web­ster:

I tru­ly believe that in a few years, when the very last sur­vivors will have died, the angle that will be tak­en from the sto­ry will be that with every year, we are 10 years fur­ther away from the orig­i­nal. […] There is a severe threat that the things we have to learn from it will not be taught and learned if we don’t find a new lan­guage for them. So any new lan­guage in my opin­ion is blessed, as long as it stays with­in the frame­work and reach­es young audi­ences by means of their tools, which are now very visu­al.

Ergo, Kit­ty, Anne’s nick­name for her diary, has been per­son­i­fied, emerg­ing from the lit­tle plaid book’s pages like Peter Pan’s shad­ow, ear atten­tive­ly cocked toward the secrets Anne whis­pers into it.

The melo­dra­mat­ic Mrs. van Daan’s prized fur coat has an anthro­po­mor­phized rab­bit head col­lar, capa­ble of join­ing in the dia­logue.

Polon­sky pays homage to artists Edvard Munch, whose “degen­er­a­tive” work Hitler had removed from Ger­man muse­ums, and Gus­tav Klimt, who paint­ed many works that were con­fis­cat­ed from their Jew­ish own­ers by Nazi decree.

Young read­ers’ mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties also guid­ed Folman’s approach to the text. The spir­it of the orig­i­nal is pre­served, but cer­tain phras­ings have been giv­en a 21st cen­tu­ry update.

The snarky Secret Annex menus and diet tips he allows his hero­ine harken to the direct address of var­i­ous meta teen come­dies, as well as the blis­ter­ing par­o­dy of the Sara­je­vo Sur­vival Guide, a pur­port­ed trav­el guide writ­ten dur­ing the Siege.

Noble goal of engag­ing the next gen­er­a­tion aside, there are no doubt some purists who will view these inno­va­tions as impo­si­tion. Rest assured that Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graph­ic Adap­ta­tion is sanc­tioned by Anne Frank Fonds, the char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion estab­lished by Anne’s father, Otto.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Only Known Footage of Anne Frank

Read the Poignant Let­ter Sent to Anne Frank by George Whit­man, Own­er of Paris’ Famed Shake­speare & Co Book­shop (1960): “If I Sent This Let­ter to the Post Office It Would No Longer Reach You”

How Art Spiegel­man Designs Com­ic Books: A Break­down of His Mas­ter­piece, Maus

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 4 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Louise Jor­dan Miln’s “Woo­ings and Wed­dings in Many Climes (1900). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Peruvian Scholar Writes & Defends the First Thesis Written in Quechua, the Main Language of the Incan Empire

We hear many trag­ic sto­ries of dis­ap­pear­ing indige­nous lan­guages, their last native speak­ers dying out, and the sym­bol­ic and social worlds embed­ded in those lan­guages going with them, unless they’re record­ed (or recov­ered) by his­to­ri­ans and archived in muse­ums. Such report­ing, sad but nec­es­sary, can some­times obscure the mil­lions of liv­ing indige­nous lan­guage speak­ers who suf­fer from sys­temic neglect around the world.

The sit­u­a­tion is begin­ning to change. The UN has called 2019 the Year of Indige­nous Lan­guages, not only to raise aware­ness of the loss of lan­guage diver­si­ty, but also to high­light the world’s con­tin­ued lin­guis­tic rich­ness. A 2015 World Bank report esti­mat­ed that 560 dif­fer­ent lan­guages are spo­ken in Latin Amer­i­ca alone.

The South Amer­i­can lan­guage Quechua—once a pri­ma­ry lan­guage of the Incan empire—claims one of the high­est num­ber of speak­ers: 8 mil­lion in the Andean region, with 4 mil­lion of those speak­ers in Peru. Yet, despite con­tin­ued wide­spread use, Quechua has been labeled endan­gered by UNESCO. “Until recent­ly,” writes Frances Jen­ner at Latin Amer­i­can Reports, “the Peru­vian gov­ern­ment had few lan­guage preser­va­tion poli­cies in place.”

“In 2016 how­ev­er, TV Perú intro­duced a Quechua-lan­guage dai­ly news pro­gram called Ñuqanchik mean­ing ‘All of us,’ and in Cus­co, the lan­guage is start­ing to be taught in some schools.” Now, Peru­vian schol­ar Rox­ana Quispe Col­lantes has made his­to­ry by defend­ing the first doc­tor­al the­sis writ­ten in Quechua, at Lima’s 468-year old San Mar­co Uni­ver­si­ty. Her project exam­ines the Quechuan poet­ry of 20th cen­tu­ry writer Alen­cas­tre Gutiér­rez.

Col­lantes began her the­sis pre­sen­ta­tion with a tra­di­tion­al thanks­giv­ing cer­e­mo­ny,” writes Naveen Razik at NITV News, “and pre­sent­ed her study titled Yawar Para (Blood Rain),” the cul­mi­na­tion of sev­en years spent “trav­el­ing to remote com­mu­ni­ties in the moun­tain­ous Canas region” to “ver­i­fy the words and phras­es used in Gutiérrez’s works.” The exam­in­ers asked her ques­tions in Quechua dur­ing the near­ly two hour exam­i­na­tion, which you can see above.

The project rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant per­son­al achieve­ment for Col­lantes who “grew up speak­ing Quechua with her par­ents and grand­par­ents in the Aco­mayo dis­trict of Cus­co,” reports The Guardian. Col­lante’s work also rep­re­sents a step for­ward for the sup­port of indige­nous lan­guage and cul­ture, and the recog­ni­tion of Quechua in par­tic­u­lar. The lan­guage is foun­da­tion­al to South Amer­i­can cul­ture, giv­ing Spanish—and English—words like puma, con­dor, lla­ma, and alpaca.

But it is “rarely—if ever—heard on nation­al tele­vi­sion or radio sta­tions.” Quechua speak­ers, about 13% of Peru­vians, “are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly rep­re­sent­ed among the country’s poor with­out access to health ser­vices.” The stig­ma attached to the lan­guage has long been “syn­ony­mous with dis­crim­i­na­tion” and “social rejec­tion” says Hugo Coya, direc­tor of Peru’s tele­vi­sion and radio insti­tute and the “dri­ving force” behind the new Quechua news pro­gram.

Col­lantes’ work may be less acces­si­ble to the aver­age Quechua speak­er than TV news, but she hopes that it will make major cul­tur­al inroads towards greater accep­tance. “I hope my exam­ple will help to reval­ue the lan­guage again and encour­age young peo­ple, espe­cial­ly young women, to fol­low my path, “she says. “My great­est wish is for Quechua to become a neces­si­ty once again. Only by speak­ing it can we revive it.” Maybe in part due to her exten­sive efforts, UNESCO can take Quechua off its list of 2,860 endan­gered lan­guages.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

The Atlas of Endan­gered Alpha­bets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Pre­serve Writ­ing Sys­tems That May Soon Dis­ap­pear

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A Flowchart of Philosophical Novels: Reading Recommendations from Haruki Murakami to Don DeLillo

Do you want to read a philo­soph­i­cal nov­el? Sure, we all do. But the ques­tion of exact­ly what kind of philo­soph­i­cal nov­el you want to read, let alone which indi­vid­ual book, isn’t quite so eas­i­ly answered. But now a pro­fes­sion­al has come to the res­cue: “Ben Roth, a philoso­pher who teach­es in the Har­vard Col­lege Writ­ing Pro­gram, has put togeth­er a kind of flow­chart rec­om­mend­ing philo­soph­i­cal nov­els and sto­ries,” reports Dai­ly Nous’ Justin Wein­berg. “With cat­e­gories like ‘about a philoso­pher,’ ‘by a Ph.D.,’ ‘hor­ror,’ ‘the com­pli­ca­tions of his­to­ry,’ and many more, the chart is pret­ty big.”

The choic­es you make in nav­i­gat­ing it could land you on the work of a writer from one of a vari­ety of coun­tries, one of sev­er­al eras, and one of a capa­cious range of def­i­n­i­tions of “philo­soph­i­cal.” If you take the word in the sense of a nov­el­’s being about or steeped in the work of a par­tic­u­lar philoso­pher, Roth rec­om­mends books like Thomas Bern­hard’s Cor­rec­tion (Wittgen­stein) and Teju Cole’s Open City (Ben­jamin and Barthes). Else­where on the map he also includes nov­els writ­ten by philo­soph­i­cal­ly cre­den­tialed aca­d­e­mics like William Gass, Iris Mur­doch, and Anuk Arud­pra­gasam.

If you pre­fer nov­els where “fic­tion writ­ers drop into straight essay­is­tic mode,” Roth offers a choice between the easy mode of Milan Kun­der­a’s The Unbear­able Light­ness of Being and the hard mode of Robert Musil’s The Man With­out Qual­i­ties. (If you just want­ed to read about a bunch of phi­los­o­phy stu­dents, well, there’s always Don­na Tart­t’s The Secret His­to­ry.)

To those who go in for more “nov­el­ly nov­els,” as Geoff Dyer (a known Bern­hard enthu­si­ast and author of some pret­ty philo­soph­i­cal fic­tion him­self) mem­o­rably put it, Roth presents more forks in the road: Would you like to read sci­ence fic­tion? Exis­ten­tial­ism? Post­mod­ernism? A book free of ‑isms entire­ly, or any­way as free as pos­si­ble?

Your answers to those ques­tions and oth­ers could have you read­ing any­thing from J.G. Bal­lard’s Crash (“body hor­ror”) to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea (“mid-cen­tu­ry French clas­sic”) to David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s Infi­nite Jest (post­mod­ern, ency­clo­pe­dic, on addic­tion). Oth­er choic­es may lead you to selec­tions less obvi­ous­ly involved with phi­los­o­phy: J.M. Coet­zee’s Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians, or Vir­ginia Woolf’s To the Light­house, Haru­ki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Won­der­land and the End of the World. Of course, you may not want to read a philo­soph­i­cal nov­el at all: you may want to read philo­soph­i­cal short sto­ries, in which case Roth rec­om­mends such form-defin­ing fig­ures as Edgar Allan Poe, writer of “dis­turb­ing sto­ries”; Lydia Davis, writer of “short sto­ries” (empha­sis his); and Jorge Luis Borges, writer of “awe-induc­ing sto­ries.”

Borges and quite a few oth­er names on Roth’s philo­soph­i­cal-nov­el flow­chart also appear in crit­ic David Auer­bach’s “Inquest on Left-Brained Lit­er­a­ture,” a reveal­ing look at the authors read by “engi­neers with a lit­er­ary bent.” Both also include Don DeLil­lo, whose work Auer­bach char­ac­ter­izes as mak­ing “heavy use of phan­tas­mago­ria, com­ple­ment­ed by very sophis­ti­cat­ed nar­ra­tive con­struc­tion,” and “sim­ple, vis­cer­al, clas­si­cal themes approached in [a] flashy, nov­el way.” Roth, for his part, describes DeLil­lo’s White Noise as his “favorite book ever.” Else­where on the flow­chart, to the philo­soph­i­cal lit­er­a­ture enthu­si­ast who’s read every­thing he offers “the most under­rat­ed philo­soph­i­cal nov­el of all time,” Dino Buz­za­ti’s The Tar­tar Steppe. No, I haven’t heard of it either, but I have to admit that it keeps good com­pa­ny.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

A Clock­work Orange Author Antho­ny Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopi­an Nov­els: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

R. Crumb Illus­trates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea: Exis­ten­tial­ism Meets Under­ground Comics

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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