A book or poem that gave cultural insight...?

[Blackcurrant]

Does literature offer a means to understanding other cultures? Foreign mindsets?

Which literary work (novel, poem, memoir, literary non-fiction) has given you insight into another mind, time or culture? Or your own culture and time?

How?

Share your personal views and experiences here.

Edited September 8, 2013 by Blackcurrant

[MainRostand]

I think in a certain way it does, because most authors write books that have a social connotation deeply rooted on the lifestyle and context that the text was written in. Of course works that are extremely fictional or dystopic can exaggerate or simply invalidate this portrayel of foreign mindsets or cultures. But despite this, it does help you have an "international mind". That is why I like reading and studying pieces of literature: there is so much in just a little piece of text. I am guessing that people that have had the oportunity to read good literature and even write a little bit will understand this better.

[Blackcurrant]

" Papillon" by Henri Charriėre. I read my mother's copy in the French original, when I must have been fifteen. Prison culture was a whole new world of terrifying possibilities. I was unaware that things could be hidden in parts of the body that never see the light of day. It was not only the prison culture that was alien, but the the language itself. The French slang. This would be my introduction to a prison counterculture, with its eye-poppingly visceral lingo - world's away from the colourless banalities of middle-class French, appropriate to the polite conversations around the dinner table, ordering a coffee, shopping and sightseeing.

*********

Just a little aside ...

I have been instilled with the idea that literature expands the mind. It also makes you a more tolerant, sensitive, rounded human. This belief is pretty much taken for granted. But is it true? My own experience leads me to think that cultural understanding deriving from literary texts is much more limited than is usually imagined.

My own reading of literature, at IB and elsewhere confirms possibilities for "empathy", to some extent, but I am less sanguine about the claims made for literature's role for international mindedness and cultural understanding. The potential is there, but often unrealized. And it is not inherent to the literary work.

I think a more sober assessment of literature as a means to "understanding" others is required.

Take, for example one reading of Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"... This story details the destruction of the main character, Okonkwo (tribal leader), whose value-system and position in society is thoroughly undermined by the arrival of Christian missionaries. In the end, he kills himself. Reader reactions to his fate vary, as can be expected, with such a complex man; but one fairly common reading, usually unspoken, pegs Okonkwo as a sexist, narrow-minded, He- man, who deserves his fate. His one great fault, apart from these, is that he is a strict observer of tradition - a tradition that keeps him and his tribe in the stone age. Progress, after all, is inevitable and dinosaurs like him must go. The tragedy is that he and his ilk ever existed.

I suspect readings like this are more widely shared than at first sight, because they are unspoken in class and only really pop up online,with its assurance of relative anonymity. They are rarely worth uttering out loud in the classroom: they smack of the politically- incorrect ....and no one likes to be thought a prig. So best to kept under wraps. Too bad for teachers who like discussion.

Another popular reading of the same novel rehashes the evils of western imperialism and its nefarious effects on Africa. Okonkwo and his tribe are just one, vivid, example of what can happen: the extinction of a distinct culture and its ways, in the wake of the European invasion. We know this refrain well. Europeans are villains, Africans victims. It is the well-rehearsed cultural discourse of guilt and blame. It is not an act of insight nor an indication of cultural enlightenment. Nor is it a good example of careful reading. Achebe does not encourage such a conclusion.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own reading of course, and esp. the first point of view mentioned above would make a perfect point of debate in any classroom. But it does show (in one instance, for example) the limits of reading literature for cultural understanding or open-mindedness. I think, more often than not, the reading we do serves to reinforce our cherished beliefs and habitual thinking. We read into a work or character what we already know best.

I may be unconvinced of the claims made for the benefits of reading literature, but that does imply i am fully convinced of my own words here.

It would be interesting to have descriptions of cultural understanding that have occurred from encountering a literary work. What does it look/sound like? How does it feel? What is gained?

How can we experience something we do not recognize?

Edited August 27, 2013 by Blackcurrant

[Sandwich]

Not a very deep response, but I didn't know of the Scandinavian obsession with drinking coffee until I read the Stig Larsson books. True story.

[Captain Jeeves]

I very much think that literature causes one to be more open-minded, if not more internationally-minded. If I tried to explain all the reasons why I think that, however, we'd be here for days.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini was… shocking, numbing, exhilarating, painful. It is a collection of words that cannot be put into words. I can't even decide if I liked it or not because there were times where I hated myself for even reading the words and yet if I hadn't read it, I somehow would be less of a person than I am now.

Books. They're like drugs.

[Blackcurrant]

The Stranger by Albert Camus must offer perhaps the most baffling confrontation with another human mind (or lack of?). The shock of recognizing a different logic at work when Meursault asks (innocently? naively? forthrightly?) what difference it makes whether one shoots one bullet ....or three, into a body? For the police, lawyers, j udge, legal system, all that represents order, it means something. The body is already dead, yet society insists on making the difference and assigning a reason -- where none may be had. Reasons are made up after the event.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Blackcurrant

[Sandwich]

Has anybody ever read the Jean Auel books the Clan of the Cave Bear? It's all set in a time when humans and Neanderthals were co-existing and is basically the story of a human girl who is taken in by a clan of Neanderthals and all about the massive culture clash between them. It's kinda fascinating to read - it's pretty well researched although obviously there's a healthy dash of fiction because we really don't know enough, but the way they lived, hunted, their customs, their religions, their way of communicating... IMO it's absolutely fascinating. I loved reading them. The first one is the best, because subsequent novels reveal that Auel loves nothing more than graphically writing about sex and eventually it consumes 40-50% of the books, I swear to god, but otherwise it's fascinating.

Dunno if it qualifies exactly, but I love reading about how people lived in other times. Even if in this case perhaps some of it is slightly imagined. Auel has great descriptions of how they survive though! Like their tools - flint knapping and so on - and how they cooked, cured the hides, made medicines, clothing etc.

Early mankind is a really unexplored area, I never really wondered much about how they got on until I read those novels.

[Blackcurrant]

I loved clan of the cave bear. And "Shardik," though that was about a bear (can that count as cultural insight, I wonder-if I recall right the bear's thought process is conveyed in this novel)

The world of Clan of the Cave Bear was thoroughly researched by Auel, who went to great lengths to learn about our ancestors and about the other species that walked the Earth with us. She also had access to and spent much time in the company of renowned archaeologists and specialists ( Jean Clottes, for example) who taught her the practical knowledge for survival in the last major ice-age phase. Her book is a real experience of the past --of a far distant place and time.

The only trouble I had with the books that came after Clan of the Cave Bear (and increasingly as the series built up) is with the behaviour and aspect of the main characters. As one reviewer on Amazon aptly points out, they resemble altogether a young Barb and Ken couple. To my mind, they also talk and think too much like us moderns. I cannot believe for one minute what the young guides (archaeological/palaeo students) breezily inform tourists in the caves in S. France that our ancestors "were just like us." Not a bit of it. Physiologically, yes -- but I bet one would be hard put to understand our ancestors even (let's imagine) without the obvious language barrier. Think of the simple differences between one generation of modern humans --then multiply that by a factor of 20-30. That is not to say that we could not recognize and share some very basic things, but to try to understand something of that mind is another thing entirely. I like seeing the world with different eyes. This is why I like Golding's novel "The Inheritors" rather more than Auel's later works, though they still offer much pleasure.

William Golding manages convey a very different mind at work in his novel "The Inheritors", though perhaps because of this (it can be difficult to grasp) Golding's book may not appeal to so many as Auel's series. Through Lok, who happens to be a neandertal, we have some chance of apprehending the world on other terms, quite remote from our own. Though here, too, Golding has his critics (justified, I think) who point out that he haspainted an overly rosy picture of neandertals as flower-children, totally at harmony with mother nature --though who can say if this is not close to what may have been? Our species, on the other hand, can hardly be seen as ever "in harmony" with nature, in any respect, even from the earliest times. We have always changed, shaped and made nature conform to us, regardless of the impact.

Anyway, for a bit of cultural shock, Golding may be the better man, though undoubtedly Auel's books will appeal to more readers.

Have you read the latest addition to the series, Sandwich? How does it compare, do you think, to the preceding ones?

Edited September 2, 2013 by Blackcurrant

[eros]

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje gave me (and my literature class) cultural insight into 1920s/1930s/1970s Sri Lanka or as it was known at that time, Ceylon. Its written through the use of magic realism and holy moly that book is beautiful!!!!! But it was a nightmare to learn for my English IOCs (glad thats over and done with)

[Zarathustra]

Yukio Mishima's "The Temple of the golden Pavillion".
Perhaps this book per sé does not provide great insight in Japanese culture, but its background sprouts "Japan" from every pore.
Even most importantly, it made me reflect on the fact that Mishima's ritual suicide was not caused by purely political and ideological reasons, but perhaps his obsession with beauty and fear of aging played a bigger role than foreign observers envisioned.

For poems, I think that Majakovskij's "To the beloved Himself the Author dedicates these Lines" is an interesting link between Majakovskij's tempestuous life and "good" socialism/communism, which predated (by a year or so lol) the revolutions in Russia.

Edited February 11, 2014 by Zarathustra

[wmichelle]

Read 'A Doll's House' by Henrik Ibsen

He broke several literary conventions of his time and that lead to a greater social change.

[emantse]

We were reading poems in preparation for our final eng lit commentaries (which are thankfully over) and the poems from Langston Hughes are just so rich in imagery, symbolism and allusions that speak not only about the heritage of African Americans and their cultural identity, but also the identity of people in general and the universality of humanity. (which in a sense provides insight to all cultures)