At 11:14 AM 9/13/99 -0400, Stephen Adams:
>But of course, the entire high modernist phenomenon is affected.  This
>generation of students sees _Ulysses_ as "not worth all the trouble" (much
>less, God knows, _Finnegans Wake_), and this attitude spills over into all
>the others, including Eliot, Faulkner (who horrified my last year's
>undergraduates with his difficulty), etc etc.  I suspect Virginia Woolf's
>stock has dropped, with reinstatement of writers like Rebecca West or
>Antonia White . . . .
 
I haven't found this to be the case at all. While Pound is definitely a
tough sell, I taught Absalom, Absalom!, and sections of Ulysses this year,
and found that students loved them. In fact, even as the students talked
about the difficulty of Faulkner, they gushed about what an amazing writer
he is. I also taught "Prufrock" to intro non-majors and they enjoyed that.
I even had students respond positively to Kathy Acker's Great Expectations,
and Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, neither of which is easy.
 
And this morning I just had a student who's auditing ask for a copy of my
dissertation on Pound. Difficulty is alive and well.
 
Bill Freind