A cultural divide?

[damigella]

"here encountering the first knot in the smooth skein of her argument." (V. Woolf, Orlando: A Biography)
"the smooth skein of his imagination had encountered the first knot:" (my fic A Member Of The Wedding)

How come quotations from Gone With The Wind, The Muppet Show or The Little Mermaid (Disney, not Andersen) are immediately recognized while a sentence lifted almost verbatim from Virginia Woolf goes unnoticed? 
Maybe I should use precise quotations. Maybe it's a US/UK issue. Feedback appreciated.

Comments

[cuddyclothes.livejournal.com]

Because we're illiterate?

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

Or because you understand English without subtitles?

[ETA: When in the US I have trouble phoning for a cab. When I have to listen to one of those annoying taped messages, I end up pressing 2 for Spanish. I never properly learned Spanish, but at least I can tell which vowel is which.]

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

I second that!

[selkie3.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never read Virginia Woolf other than what was required in high school :)! Though I have been meaning to read Orlando for ages... I don't think it is a US/UK issue, rather an issue of what literature is popular today.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

"required in high school"
That's a clever idea. Knew you're a thinking person - nothing like high-school requirements to thoroughly destroy your enjoyment of anything.
I learned most of my English privately, not at school, and never had to read a line in English I didn't choose to. Also, buying books in English used to be very expensive, so I read the few I had over and over again.

But would Gone With The Wind be popular? Or the other two programs with people above age 7?

[knitty-woman.livejournal.com]

There are a few quotes from GWTW that are famous, largely because of the movie rather than the book. As for The Muppet Show, the people most likely to recognize the quotes are in their 40s and 50s, since the show aired in the early evenings in the 1970s.

[selkie3.livejournal.com]

Most I believe will be familiar with Gone With The Wind, but more so with the movie than the book format. And even then, mainly to cultural/pop references to the movie rather than actually having seen it.

Personally I haven't seen the Muppet Show, and I've only seen the Disney version of The Little Mermaid a few times. That movie gave me fish nightmares as a child :).

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I'm laughing at the fish nightmares. And I feel very old because I never got a chance to see The Little Mermaid as a child.

[knitty-woman.livejournal.com]

I rarely recognize quotes unless they are insanely famous. And in any case, the author should allude to the original author in some fashion. "Orlando" isn't one of Woolf's more widely read works in the US - "Room of One's Own," "Mrs. Dalloway," and "To the Lighthouse" are more familiar, and to a much smaller audience. In fairness, Shakespeare is recognized (and oft misquoted) by many in the US.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I love all Woolf's books you quoted (I love almost everything she wrote, and A Room of One's Own systematically brings me to tears at the end) but I would have thought Orlando is so much lighter. It's so fun and gender queer and everything.

And I tend to recognize sentences of authors I really like, or at least their style. My record was recognizing a citation from a book of Rilke (in an Italian translation, on the radio) after reading a different book by Rilke in German. (Rilke's prose is really very, very weird - and the citation was a blatant example).

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

I've never read Virginia Woolf and I read Gone With the Wind when I was nine. But I have read classics lie Persuasion by Jane Austen, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Who Has Seen The Wind? by W.O. Mitchell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Also, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. Anything Shakespeare I'd probably recognize. But no Woolf or Charlotte or Emilie Bronte. So is it cultural? I don't don't know. I've read Ukrainian literature (in Ukrainian) and other foreign literature (translated to English. I've never been good with foreign languages though I did take a little German in university).

Edited because I hit the return button by mistake:-o

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

Oh, and my daughter saw my list and accused me of watching the movies and not reading the books but it's untrue! I have read the books, always before the movies, which I then found disappointing in comparison.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I think your daughter and my daughter would have fun together. They seem to have the same deep-seated respect bordering on fear towards their mothers, lol.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

Wow. Ukrainian. I can't read any Eastern European language at all. I can barely put together some version of good morning and thank you in Slovenian.

And I like your reading list. I'll skip GWTW (when Italians want to fill guilty we read about concentration camps not slavery - to each his own) but I might give Who Has Seen The Wind? by W.O. Mitchell, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood a try.

[pgrabia.livejournal.com]

Those are two of my favorite Canadian authors.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I definitely do not read enough Canadian authors. Or Australian (at least I did read a lot by Katharine Mansfield).

[alternatealto.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, in the general U.S. culture almost any quote from a television show or movie is more likely to be recognized than a quote from a book, unless the book is extremely famous or (as others have mentioned) is routinely assigned in schools.

Most people would recognize quotes like "Call me Ishmael", or "It is a fact universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife", because both Moby Dick and Pride and Prejudice are very often used as assigned reading at the high school level.

If Woolf, on the other hand, is assigned at all it is far more likely to be at the university level, and then only in courses taken by people focusing on British literature, or twentieth-century literature, or women writers, or some other course usually taken by students who plan to make English lit. a major part of their curriculum. People taking only the general literature requirements are less likely to encounter her writing, and thus less likely to recognize a quote from it.

And, of course, a lot depends on when you went to college and what your literature professors' favorite line of country was. I had a strong focus in English literature, but it was thirty years ago at a small and extremely conservative college -- with the result that we read almost entirely in the works of dead white men, except for Austen and Bronte (who were safely back in the far 19th century when women knew their place). Flannery O'Connor was the sole twentieth-century exception, and that was because she was a strong exponent of the school's approved religious thought (white conservative evangelical Christianity).

Hence, although I'm fairly well-read, I'm likely to miss even direct quotes from anybody writing later than about 1950, or who wasn't white or male. I suspect that I'm not the only one this has happened to, even without a strong religious component to the school.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this expanded and well meditated version of something Selkie had noticed.

Interestingly, the part of my reading that I did as school requirement is very very small. We usually weren't made to read whole books, but only short excerpts. Maybe it wasn't a bad idea.

So which books I read were pretty much my choice. I also tend to read British and dead authors because I find them easier than American contemporary.

And your white male remark is very much to the point. Around age twenty-five (I'm about your age BTW) I started making a conscious effort to read women writers. Black US writers are more difficult, because sometimes the language is so different (the dialogue in The Color Purple was often very hard for me).

And I'm impressed at you going to a conservative college. I somehow can't imagine this was your choice (although maybe it was - so many years ago) but I know in the US people's choice of what and where they study are often influenced by money reasons.

I keep forgetting how privileged I am - I got to learn English from a native speaker, and I could have studied everything I wanted, anywhere I wanted in Italy (it was so much cheaper then). As luck would have it, I got a wonderful education totally for free, in a very progressive big university.

[alternatealto.livejournal.com]

Oh, the college was my own choice -- I was timid about leaving home, the college was small and only thirty-five miles from my hometown, and it had a good reputation. It was also, although very conservative, not as conservative then as it became in later years.

And I don't complain about the education I got there. The professors were there primarily because they wanted to teach, not because they wanted to get published, and teaching was what they spent their time doing. In four years, I never had a class taught by a Teaching Assistant (I didn't know there were such things until I'd graduated and gone on to a larger university for my Master's degree). The professors were all intelligent people who liked to engage the students in dialogue and the classes were small (tiny by modern standards: thirty was considered a very large class size) so everyone got a lot of individual attention.

The college did a lot towards teaching me to think. Unfortunately, from their perspective at least, the end result of my thinking was that I had no desire to be conservative, evangelical, or even Christian. I can't do anything about being white.

Your own background sounds fascinating to me. I'm sure if I heard you speak English, there would naturally be an Italian accent, but I bet I'd detect a British accent as well since I imagine you probably learned from a British native speaker, rather than an American one. If you heard me speak, I'd sound more or less like every U.S. newscaster there is, since I grew up in the north midwestern part of the country and the accent there is the one usually regarded as the "standard" U.S. broadcasting accent.

It's not only you who finds contemporary Black U.S. writers difficult to read. I have had no luck at all reading them -- and I hasten to say that the fault is with me, and not with the writers!

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

"I was timid about leaving home"
I went to the best university I could get in Italy, and it turned out to be for free and 50 miles from home, so I still got to go home every weekend. I'm not sure what I would have done had it been really far.

"The professors were there primarily because they wanted to teach, not because they wanted to get published."
That's such a funny thought. In my experience, the professors who were doing research were also by far the best teachers, because they were full of enthusiasm. But then, I never attended courses in the humanities, just mathematics and physics.

And I know what you mean by small classes and individual attention. I had it, and it was wonderful. From the second year on, class size was twenty or lower. In one occasion, two. Five to ten happened often. And everybody knew each other. That's a part of my job I like to this day, I also get to know my students well (class size is 5 to 15).

I must guiltily admit I learned to think (in the sense you use this word) from my husband starting at 24 - and became an atheist over 30. On the other hand, I ended up being as left wing as most of my professors were, even though we never talked politics to each other (and my husband is somewhat more conservative, though still solidly left for US standards).

If you heard me speak, you'd hear what you said, plus the influence of twenty years of talking English with a German spouse. My spoken English is clearly understandable and at the same time totally hilarious. Plus, I speak much much louder than I should. And I move my hands in a very un-British way :-).

"I hasten to say that the fault is with me, and not with the writers!"
That's the kind of thing I should learn to say, instead of assuming it's obvious. One of the great things of this community is how much and how nicely it has helped in teaching me manners and politeness. It's still a long way to go, though :-).

And though I can't help being white any more than you can, when I'm in Europe people see I come from somewhere around the Mediterranean even before I speak. Typical guesses (besides the correct one) are Spanish and Turkish.

[cuddyclothes.livejournal.com]

I agree with the others about quotes from tv shows or movies being more recognizable than literary quotes. (Shameful confession: when I saw Kenneth Branaugh's movie of "Hamlet", I thought, "Wow, who knew so many famous quotes came from this play"? Actually, we saw "Hamlet" early in the day and "Beavis And Butthead Take America" in the evening, so we could say we saw the highest and lowest culture in one day.)

I've read a lot of Virginia Woolf (for class) and never liked her. I have, however, read everything George Orwell wrote. Everything. Not kidding. Except his grocery lists. Also everything by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I can't remember any quote from any movie, ever. I also rarely see movies again, and anyway not many times. I have a bad memory for stuff I hear as opposed to read, unless it's repeated very often, like slogans or some sentences in tv series (and of course I don't recognize American commercials).
Or unless it's songs (I have no ear for music, but I usually easily learn the words in a song - if I can understand them, which in English I usually cannot).

[flywoman.livejournal.com]

I've read most of Woolf's works including Orlando, almost all for fun, but that doesn't mean that I would recognize a quotation like that one without context. Maybe if that book were a particular favorite that I had read several times, but maybe not.

I recognize quotes from movies or tv shows I've seen more easily because I replay dialogue in my head a lot (as you can probably sense from my fics).

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

I saw GWTW once, an I can't imagine doing that again. Admittedly the Italian dubbing didn't age well (it starts with Scarlett becoming Rossella and goes downhill from there).

"Maybe if that book were a particular favorite that I had read several times."
That's part of my problem, I'm a compulsive re-reader. Most of the books I like fit in that category (which means I also read very few books altogether).

[menolly-au.livejournal.com]

I must admit to having read only two 'classic' novels - Pride & Prejudice and Great Expectations (both at school) so I wouldn't know a quote from Woolf if I feel over it in a dark alley :)

I only recognised one of the Gone With the Wind quotes, and not the muppet show one and I wouldn't recognise a Little Mermaid one either if that helps :)

Generally I think in most countries around the world more people will recognise movie/tv quotes than book quotes because they tend to find their way into popular culture a lot.

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

"Generally I think in most countries around the world more people will recognise movie/tv quotes than book quotes"

You might be right. I tend to hang out with mathematics professors mostly, and it gives me a very skewed version of the world at large. There what is weird about me is that I'm totally un-musical and don't particularly like mountain hiking :-).

Your Woolf remark made me laugh so hard.

[menolly-au.livejournal.com]

It reminds me that Sick!Wilson Camp last year did a pop culture challenge, where you had to write the quote into a story, macro etc http://sick-wilson.livejournal.com/326498.html - I must admit I didn't recognise some of the references, I think you'd recognise even less? It's the same with the show - there are pop culture references in there that I just don't get...

[damigella-314.livejournal.com]

"pop culture references in there that I just don't get"

I got eight out of fifty, and the Toto/Kansas I got from I thing a Gary Larson sketch.

Funnily enough, I find that "Put a tiger in your tank" sounded better in Italian (put a tiger in your engine, plus tiger was male instead of female as it usually is).