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

[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.