"The canon" as most people would recite... Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, etc.... is now at least 60 years old, if not 100. It's a fuzzy thing, but it's certainly old.
Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point.
However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society.
But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"?
It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text.
Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead.
But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.
Right, but nothing's new about that. I, like I assume every other American high school student of my time (high school in the 90s), read it and discussed it. We had the standard book with the text on one side and definitions and help on the other. What's so different about this generation that they can't handle that?
Part of your argument is that Shakespeare is not worth learning or being a part of "the canon", which is fine, but it being difficult is irrelevant.
re: Shakespeare, any edition of the plays that high school or undergrad students are being asked to read will have line/word glosses that address the vocabulary problem. When I read Shakespeare in high school we also read key passages aloud together in class and discussed the meaning, and in some cases were asked to memorize a passage. We covered one Shakespeare play in each of my four years of high school, and I got plenty out of it.
In other words, you read a translation but with extra steps.
We might as well cut out the extra steps.
I did say that there's plenty of literary content there, but there's no reason to jam the original in student's faces and insist "THIS! THIS IS LITERATURE! oh by the way here's the definition of every tenth word and commentary on every third phrase".
You could get the content with a pure translation. But part of Shakespeare is the cadence, and that's really hard to preserve in a translation.
You think that's not important for modern people? Hip hop would disagree with you. So would many preachers (including politicians). And showing high school students who are into hip hop "look, Shakespeare is doing the same things" is a really interesting hook for them.
When I was a teenager, about 20 years ago. I read shakespeare without any issues. Beowulf was challenging but doable with effort and didnt require outside source. What has changed so much in the last 20 years that the teenagers should need a translation?
Your homework is to go find a teenager and ask them:
What is a bodkin?
What is "contumely"?
What is "dispriz’d love"?
What does "his quietus make" mean?
Finally, you can give them the entire passage and ask, what is Hamlet actually contemplating here?
A abnormally well-read teenager stands a chance at that last one... but only a chance. An average teenager does not.
I will be blunt. I don't believe you read it "without any issues". Either you're just saying that so you don't bear the dread stigma of "couldn't read Shakespeare", you had a commentary you were reading it with, or you don't even know what you were missing. That's just a single portion of one famous passage from Hamlet. The plays are rife with these issues, it's not like those are the four missing vocabulary things that you need to know to read Shakespeare and after that it's smooth sailing. I could read 18th century stuff in school fairly comfortably and read into the 17th century, I know what's that's like, and even then Shakespeare was something I could just barely catch the main plot for. The innuendo, the subtext, the historical interrelationships, much of the actual literature of the literature, no way. The change hasn't happened in the past 20 years, it's the past 100 at least.
And people need to stop pretending otherwise. People need to stop pretending that, oh, yes, I totally caught Shakespeare's commentary on the politics of medieval Italy, quite obvious really, who could be stupid enough to miss it it's so obvious to anyone? It's not helping. It's hurting people and turning them off to literature. It needs to stop.
Did you never read Shakespeare in school? You are not asked to read the bare text, there are glosses in the margins. Go look at the Amazon preview of a Folger library Shakespeare play, e.g. [0]. You also have a teacher to provide context and guidance. You are getting worked up into a tizzy in an attack on a straw man.
Merely being old is not a problem. Great literature is perhaps not literally "timeless", but it can survive being pulled out of its original context, and to the extent that students have to engage with a foreign context, that can be part of the point.
However, that's 60-100 years of language shift since the canon was canonized, and that is a problem. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it's one that needs to be taken into account. I don't see anyone taking it into account, because if anyone questions the canon, they are obviously just a drooling arm-dragging uncultured buffoon who should be evicted from sophisticated society.
But, you know, I'm in my mid-40s, and I've seen real, bona-fide language shifts in American English. Even the English of the 1980s is getting dated. Reading back into the 1950s will result in readers encountering a number of dead words. I remember reading in that era, and every celebrity seemed to be described as "indefatigable". One can assemble from the roots a good guess about what it probably means, and in this case, such a guess is correct, but you can't actually be sure without looking it up or reading it in a lot of contexts. When's the last time you saw an actor described as "indefatigable"?
It doesn't take many of these sorts of things before you are unable to analyze, enjoy, or even necessarily comprehend the "great literature" because you're too busy just figuring what on Earth it is actually saying. It's hard to analyze subtext when you're a normal reader struggling to grasp the text.
Of course, I say this into a culture that is still holding up the original Shakespeare as the sine qua non of Literature, despite the fact it is now over a century past the point that a "normal person" ought to be expected to comprehend it on a base level. If someone wants to teach Shakespeare to a modern teenager, it ought to be done in translation at this point. That I wouldn't mind; there's still a lot of "literature" in it that could be studied through a translation. But the idea that a teenager should be expected to read
and get anything out of it is just insane. At least 4 lines have a major vocabulary issue, more depending on what you expect from your teen. All the rest have at least minor issues, using words that are at least unusual in modern English, and many of them with connotations that are even more unusual if not dead.But 18th century literature is starting to read similarly to a modern teen, and 19th is a bigger stretch now than it was when I was young. It is not wrong to account for this in trying to figure out how to reach modern students, it's just realism.