Crash Course Literature

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Is this series worth watching? I'm very new to literature in general.

John Green is a retarded cuck who makes videos for high school girls

No, start with the greeks.

What if my literary power level is that of a high school girl. Is the overview really that poor? What's wrong with it?

Do you want to increase your "literary power level"?

I watch it no shame, John Geeen is engaging enough to be good secondary noise.

All I want is for you to actually criticize the actual body of work, not appeal to the author being a moron.

Well if you are truly reading at a high-school level then check out the author's and books you read in high-school/middle-school.

Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Animal Farm by George Orwell
1984 by George Orwell
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Romeo and Juliet

Are all good places to start. I'd recommend you pick an author and then follow along with their other works if they interest you.

Unironicly this. His "criticism" of lord of the flies is enough to justify never watching him.

What was wrong with it?

everything

>John Green General

What a compelling argument. You've convinced me. Down with Green!

>this book is sexist because it has no female characters

And that reading is invalid because?
>implying Lord of Flies doesn't have interesting gender studies related ideas in it
Go to bed John

>And that reading is invalid because

the lack of a ethnic character does not make art racist or colonial, the lack of jews in a book does not make it anti semitic, the lack of gay people in any art form does not make it homophobic

>And that reading is invalid because?

If you have to ask, you don't deserve an answer.

We can now say Crash Course is perfect for you. Enjoy the series.

qed.

more like CRASH! course literature hehe

Well, I mean, his argument can't be that "no female characters, ergo sexist." obviously it's more nuanced than that. It would be more of a the lack of a feminine viewpoint on the island leads to tribalist and violent tendencies.

holy....

its alright if you want a very basic introduction to a topic, but you should use it as a jumping pad rather than the end all be all for a subject

This poster [] here, after actually watching the Crash Course video, I'm sorry. Jesus christ everything in that video that's not objective fact is fucking retarded.

>I don't like or agree with the idea, therefore I hate the book

What a fucking tool

NO ALL CRASHCOURSE BULLSHIT IS BULLSHIT FUCK THE GREEN BROTHERS

desu History isn't that bad.

Only if you're going to read the books before watching the episodes and engage critically with both. Green advances his own readings at the expense of lots of other, more widely accepted and interesting ones, so you should be willing to challenge him.

is a good example of this. Green's starting premise is
>In my opinion (and this is MY opinion), a novel of ideas is only as good or as bad as its ideas.
which disregards entire schools of literary thought, especially new criticism and deconstruction, and, worse still, ignores the aesthetic components of the text entirely. Let that sink in — the guy teaching you literature isn't going to contemplate the beauty of the prose in a work, simply because of his personal opinions on the genre said work represents. To be fair, Green acknowledges that Lord of the Flies is a well-written book, but his personal dislike of the Hobbesian themes therein dominates the conversation. It's the equivalent of a /pol/tard loathing a novel because of its relation to postmodernism/deconstructionism/marxism/etc. (albiet to a lesser degree).

Green's attempt at deconstructing the novel is also incredibly weak. He mentions that Ralph and Piggy should have succumbed to the same evil as Jack, but overlooks a quote he recited a few minutes earlier which answers this very question.

As for the feminist reading mentioned in , there is a bit more nuance to Green's argument than this, but his feminist reading has the same problem many feminist readings of a-feminist texts has: it refuses to engage with the text on its own terms. His comments about how "problematic" the discussion of "savagery" is overlook how commonplace said language was in Golding's time, and posit a normative ethical view that Golding simply couldn't have followed. When Green goes on to discuss the exclusion of women, he asks a few sharp rhetorical questions
>Would girls be too much of a civilizing factor?
>Would discovering that girls are just as evil as boys be too disturbing?
both of which are again rendered weak by Golding's own statement about the "relative triviality of gender." Taking that quote along with the context of the novel, it's fairly easy to piece together that Golding imagined things occurring along the same lines with or without female characters, and cut women out of the book to centralize it around the themes he deemed more interesting/important.

When Green finally acknowledges readings which engage with the book on its own terms, he only does so in passing, dedicating a sentence or two to each without providing much in the way of support or analysis. And he still never comments on the aesthetics of the novel, which are important, even in works where aesthetics aren't the explicit focus.

tl;dr Green is biased and can't adequately defend his theses. He's still a competent teacher, but if you want to learn seriously about literature, there's better sources.

He's also a substandard author.

It is you high schooler, read one book and you'll learn more.

No, it's inaccurate at times, but when you disregard the obvious ideology shoe-ins, it's a solid overview. Easily digestible and simplified, yes, but that's what it aims to be. Kill yourself.

this, good write up user