Disputing the Canon Essay -- The Loss of the Creature Walker Percy Ess

Disputing the CanonI was in the best of settings when I realized that Shakespeare was indeed great. My freshman year in high school, I had English partitioning with an esteemed teacher, Mr. Brozahailed as the Paul D. Schreiber High School Shakespeare aficionado, put uper of Schreibers Annual Shakespeare Day, and, perhaps most heart-warming of all, a self-proclaimed Shakespeare lover whose posters of The Bard could be found as wallpaper in his small office. How lucky I thought I was. Indeed, if I wanted to appreciate Hamlet, I was in the right hands. barely how misled I actually wasat least, in Walker Percys eyes. In his essay, The Loss of the Creature, Percy recalls a scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter the girlfriend hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry active the scratches, and most of all worry ab off whether they are getting it, whethe r they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush? (521) Percy here contrasts two different approaches to viewing artthe girl who informally and spontaneously encounters the work of art, out of context, as opposed to the unhappy souls inside who formally prepare themselves for a kind of pre-packaged listening experience. Percy wonders which is bettera question meant for the readers pondering. provided his essay offers his answer we can only truly see or hear a piece of art by the decay of those facilities which were designed to suspensor the sightseer (514). Perhaps Percy is rightit might have been better if my experience with Hamlet had been an accide... ...uch great heights to which I may leap, so many undiscovered territories awaiting my arrival.Works CitedBloom, Harold. The Western Canon. Harcourt, 1994.Borges, Jorge Luis Joyce, James Shakespeare, William. Columbia En cyclopedia. 6th ed. 2000.Gould, Stephen Jay. Womens Brains. Encounters Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York McGraw-Hill, 2000. 305-10.Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and another(prenominal) Writings. Ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. New York Cambridge UP, 1999.Percy, Walker. The Loss of the Creature. Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. BostonBedford, 1996.Winterson, Jeanette. The Semiotics of Sex. Encounters Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York McGraw-Hill, 2000. 642-51.