RatCreature (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratcreature) wrote2002-09-16 06:06 pm
ratcreature) wrote2002-09-16 06:06 pm
Entry tags:
blog repost: once again I struggled with posting comments in a LJ and lost
I really need to work on this tendency of mine to write very long replies (or rather to write more than 4300 characters) in LJs, which I then cannot post.
Anyway, there was a post in Jacquez's LJ about reading teenagers should have done before finishing high school. And a list in the post, with the question what you think about the list, and what you have read from it.
Anyway, my reply was supposed to be:
I have problems with these kind of lists. I'm not against saying such and such are good books to read, or important books, but this assumption of "you have to read such and such books specifically or you are not a fully rounded, educated human being" is not something I share. And that sentiment seems to me at the core of the "By The End of High School" phrasing.
Also all through high school I have been frustrated with this kind of thinking by teachers. You could propose books that might be read in class and most students never bothered to suggest anything, but I continously lobbied for books written by women, both in English and in German class, and always got turned down because they were never quite "significant" enough to be read in class. No matter how well known, there would be always male authors that had priority based on some imaginary list of importance it seemed. I even suggested authors I had no real interest in reading (like Jane Austen), because I thought they might have made it into their elusive canon. To Jane Austen they said "too difficult", but they had no problem to read some Shakespeare in English class with us. The best I've gotten out of it was being able to do voluntary reports about books that were then counted for my grades as participation in class.
Also personally I rarely enjoy stuff written before roughly 1850, though I like some a lot, just like I prefer modern art to older, so with a few exceptions my attempts to read it are doomed.
From your list I have read only a few, though most of these indeed while being in high school:
1984, George Orwell
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Holy Bible, (the Luther version though and not all of it)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
MacBeth, William Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennesee Williams
So I guess I've just outed myself as not literary knowledgable. *g*
Though sometimes I've read things by authors you have on that list, just not specifically the works you mention, e.g. by Dickens, Hemingway, and Twain. Also I've read a couple of other "important" books while I was in high school, that were on the "important reading" lists here (I mean authors who were prominently featured in the required reading and/or for whom you got the impression instilled that you must have read them, or are ignorant otherwise), but who don't appear on your list. I had a thing for existentialism, so I read Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus beyond what was required for class, also I read a lot of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Max Frisch, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I've read some Goethe, Schiller, and Heine (those were mostly assigned reading for class, but they were okay). I liked Georg Büchner's play that was assigned reading a lot, so I read more by him (not that he has written that much, after all he died 23 years old, also fits well with the banned book theme, btw). I liked Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll (and read them beyond what was assigned). I didn't care that much for the Henrik Ibsen plays, though strangely enough we read two of them during my high school time, which was more than we read by Schiller, so either both teachers had strange preferences, or the guy is significant in some way I don't remember.
Since I'm not in favor of such lists, I wouldn't say any of the ones I mentioned were essential for an US-American teenager to know by the end of high school. However, some are rather specific to German situations so I guess writers like Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll are much less significant for American teenagers than for German ones (if they are significant at all, which I'm not sure about), also I think while Büchner was really ground-breaking for drama his stories are better appreciated if one knows German 19th century background. But I think if you want some "canonized world literature knowledge" for high school students there should be some Kafka in it, and something by Goethe, and I'm really biased towards a Satre play and maybe "La Peste" by Camus, but then somehow the last two authors appealed a lot to my personal teenage angst, so maybe that's why I think teenagers would enjoy reading them.
Anyway, there was a post in Jacquez's LJ about reading teenagers should have done before finishing high school. And a list in the post, with the question what you think about the list, and what you have read from it.
Anyway, my reply was supposed to be:
I have problems with these kind of lists. I'm not against saying such and such are good books to read, or important books, but this assumption of "you have to read such and such books specifically or you are not a fully rounded, educated human being" is not something I share. And that sentiment seems to me at the core of the "By The End of High School" phrasing.
Also all through high school I have been frustrated with this kind of thinking by teachers. You could propose books that might be read in class and most students never bothered to suggest anything, but I continously lobbied for books written by women, both in English and in German class, and always got turned down because they were never quite "significant" enough to be read in class. No matter how well known, there would be always male authors that had priority based on some imaginary list of importance it seemed. I even suggested authors I had no real interest in reading (like Jane Austen), because I thought they might have made it into their elusive canon. To Jane Austen they said "too difficult", but they had no problem to read some Shakespeare in English class with us. The best I've gotten out of it was being able to do voluntary reports about books that were then counted for my grades as participation in class.
Also personally I rarely enjoy stuff written before roughly 1850, though I like some a lot, just like I prefer modern art to older, so with a few exceptions my attempts to read it are doomed.
From your list I have read only a few, though most of these indeed while being in high school:
1984, George Orwell
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Holy Bible, (the Luther version though and not all of it)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
MacBeth, William Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennesee Williams
So I guess I've just outed myself as not literary knowledgable. *g*
Though sometimes I've read things by authors you have on that list, just not specifically the works you mention, e.g. by Dickens, Hemingway, and Twain. Also I've read a couple of other "important" books while I was in high school, that were on the "important reading" lists here (I mean authors who were prominently featured in the required reading and/or for whom you got the impression instilled that you must have read them, or are ignorant otherwise), but who don't appear on your list. I had a thing for existentialism, so I read Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus beyond what was required for class, also I read a lot of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Max Frisch, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I've read some Goethe, Schiller, and Heine (those were mostly assigned reading for class, but they were okay). I liked Georg Büchner's play that was assigned reading a lot, so I read more by him (not that he has written that much, after all he died 23 years old, also fits well with the banned book theme, btw). I liked Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll (and read them beyond what was assigned). I didn't care that much for the Henrik Ibsen plays, though strangely enough we read two of them during my high school time, which was more than we read by Schiller, so either both teachers had strange preferences, or the guy is significant in some way I don't remember.
Since I'm not in favor of such lists, I wouldn't say any of the ones I mentioned were essential for an US-American teenager to know by the end of high school. However, some are rather specific to German situations so I guess writers like Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll are much less significant for American teenagers than for German ones (if they are significant at all, which I'm not sure about), also I think while Büchner was really ground-breaking for drama his stories are better appreciated if one knows German 19th century background. But I think if you want some "canonized world literature knowledge" for high school students there should be some Kafka in it, and something by Goethe, and I'm really biased towards a Satre play and maybe "La Peste" by Camus, but then somehow the last two authors appealed a lot to my personal teenage angst, so maybe that's why I think teenagers would enjoy reading them.