![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnBackground: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Re: Lehndorff AU!
Date: 2024-01-04 02:32 am (UTC)In fact now that I look back, we did very little solid 18th Century lit, now that I go back and look at our textbook (Norton anthology). I do have an extended version (we used the one-volume version, I have the two-volume Norton). The two-book volume has both Johnson (a lot of Johnson!) and Boswell and Pope and even a couple of poems by Lady Mary (which may not have been in our one-volume anthology), but the only solid pre-Romantic we did was Swift. I think our teacher must have just liked the Romantics more, because we did a lot of the Romantics.
(There is no Hervey in here, either. There is Christopher Smart, whom I love, but I was introduced to him through Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, which the choir at music summer camp did, and not through school.)
The thumbnail bio sketch of Lady Mary in my Norton is great; it leaves out a lot, of course (it's only like a paragraph) but even in that short space one can see the person who wrote it was clearly just as intrigued by her as we are :D It starts out, "In her early teens Lady Mary Pierrepont did something that well-bred young women were not supposed to do: she secretly taught herself Latin." (Did we know this? If so I had forgotten!) It goes through her intro of inoculation, and then this gem of a sentence on the whole Algarotti affair: "In 1739 she traveled to Italy hoping to see [Algarotti]; but the passion that had kindled in their letters was soon quenched when he failed to join her." Aw, Lady Mary.
ETA:
Re: Lehndorff AU!
Date: 2024-01-04 09:39 am (UTC)William Blake: I've always seen him as sui generis, not really fitting into any of the art movements of his era though fitting with later ones (like the Impressionists in Turner's case whom he did not live to meet).
What Swift did you read? Gulliver or the baby eating proposal?
Re: Lehndorff AU!
Date: 2024-01-04 03:23 pm (UTC)I remembered!
(She should have met Émilie! Dammit.)
Right?! I want to live in *that* universe.
What Swift did you read? Gulliver or the baby eating proposal?
So for the last few days, I've been racking my brain trying to remember if I read "A Modest Proposal" for class, or on my own and possibly brought it up in class. I *think* it's the second one, but it's not impossible I was actually assigned some Swift in AP English and had forgotten it when I said I couldn't think of anything we were assigned other than the Pope poem we collectively didn't read.
Re: Lehndorff AU!
Date: 2024-01-05 05:15 am (UTC)We read Gulliver, and I'm trying to remember if we actually were assigned Modest Proposal or if he just told us what it was about and then I went to read it. (This was a thing he did; he also, for example, "warned" us about how salacious the Miller's Tale was, at which point a bunch of us went and read it outside of our assigned class reading. To be fair he also told us he thought D.H. Lawrence's novels were boring (we read a short story of his, which I liked), and I still have not read any of them.) I think he may have actually assigned it, though.
Literary Chat
Date: 2024-01-05 09:59 am (UTC)Blake: anyone who sees and talks to the Prophet Ezekiel as a boy would fit more with the Romantics than with the Enlightenment, but the Romantics would still go...? Mind you, I seem to recall Blake and his wife hung out with Mary Wollstonecraft (the feminist pioneer, mother of Mary Shelley) for a while and through her also knew Mary Shelley's Dad William Godwin, which would put them on the revolutionary or at least progressive side of thought in the late 18th century.
I must admit I still haven't read Gulliver proper, just the (presumably very bowlderized) edition for kids I was given as a child. But I just thought of another 18th century author from the early part of said century whose most famous work you may have read (also in edited for kids version) - Daniel Defoe, i.e. Robinson Crusoe. (I did read the edited for kids Robinson as a child as well. But! I also tackled Moll Flanders as an adult. And I've been meaning to get around to his Plague journal. Also, I just found out as a young man he was a follower of Jemmy's and participated in that doomed attempt to topple James II and make Jemmy King, escaping to France just in time.
Re: Literary Chat
Date: 2024-01-06 11:34 am (UTC)I have a memory of tackling the actual Gulliver's Travels too at the same age, but either I'm misremembering or else it was way over my head--there were a lot of books I "read" beginning to end, but didn't exactly get a lot out of them. I read above my reading level a lot.
Re: Literary Chat
Date: 2024-01-07 10:08 pm (UTC)I also did notice a lot of Defoe in my Norton! We did not read any Defoe in class (my teacher really doesn't seem to have been super fond of the 18th century, or maybe it's that the 18th C entries are mostly prose and he preferred poetry -- most of what I remember reading from that class is poetry, although obviously there were exceptions like Swift), but I am pretty sure I a kids version of Robinson Crusoe way back when which I remember very little about.
Totally random: I'm also remembering that year we had a take-home essay test (we were given something like 3 days to complete it, but could work on it anytime within those three days) where we had to cast Hamlet with the writers we were studying, and I cast Swift as Prince Hamlet. (Definitely the best essay prompt I got in high school!) I don't remember any of my other casting, or even what centuries we had to work with -- I may have to go see if I still have that test somewhere.
Re: Lehndorff AU!
Date: 2024-01-04 03:18 pm (UTC)Sorry,
ETA: [personal profile] selenak's other post made me remember that we did do a lot of William Blake, at least some of which was in the (very late) 18th C. But of course he is considered a Romantic :)
Right, Blake, I think we did at least one Blake poem! Like I said, we did various short poems, and if we did something 18th century and it didn't stick in my brain, then I have no way of remembering we did it. Blake is ringing a faint bell. I had mentally classed him as 19th century, though--my brain tends to do that with anyone who fits in a category that I think of as 19th century.
I don't have my anthology textbook, nor even remember what it was called or who the publisher was, so I have no way of checking what Blake poem it was. It may have been "Tyger, Tyger", or I may just know that one from osmosis.