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09/16/2002: 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.
Posted by RatC @ 06:06 PM CET
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Replies: 4 comments
Well, I'm not saying people have to have read them, but that they should - and, yes, it's a pretty American list. I mean, I feel you can't really understand America unless you've read at least some Twain, not least because it gives you some view of the river they call "The Father of All Waters".
How does one understand the Depression without Steinbeck? So much of America's cultural knowledge of it comes from him. One of the most popular movies recently was O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which requires a background of both Homer and Steinbeck to really appreciate, and probably some other writers as well - it's the Depression, it's racism, it's the long journey home, it's seeing the Lotus Eaters baptized in a river.
I think that reading lists - good ones - give some kind of broad view of the culture for which they are designed. How do you understand idiomatic English without Hamlet? Well, the answer is: you really don't. Too much English idiom flows like the Mississippi out of Shakespeare.
I tried to make a list populated by authors who had something interesting to say about the world we live in, who are multiracial and male and female, who have relevance to a kind of...educated cultural backbone.
Posted by laura jv @ 09/16/2002 06:38 PM CET
Hmmm.... well, she got the idea from me, and I was basically saying that I think they are all books that High School Students should "have" to read.
Your comments are noted however.
Yes, there is a lack of female authors, but this is mostly due to the fact that tpatriarchal society didn't really allow females to be successful til quite recently. For the same reason there is a lack of African American material.
Also, It was in fact very american-centric. That was the idea I was shooting for, and you're right I should have said that. again, duly noted.
You mentioned Jane Austen and Kafka for instance. And while I certainly don't think high school students should be barred from reading anything they damn well please, I agree with your teachers. They just aren't accessible enough to force highschool students to read. Perhaps literature majors in college, but not high school students.
I made the comments in the first place because I had become astounded by how many people I know who never read Gatsby. Unlike Red's list, which she she seems to have chosen based on content, more than anything else, Yes, my list was quite diverse (proven by the fact that I haven't run into anyone who has stated theyve read even 75% of them), but I chose mine based on canonical represenstation of a form. Forms that High school students should thouroughly understand in order to be culturally aware. My list was actually a bit impractical. There would be legal ramifications of trying to teach the bible in public school (though a teacher of mine actually through caution to the wind and did it anyway -- its a very important and oft referenced book), and most teachers would be afraid to teach Omaha. But this was my ideal of what I think could make you well rounded. This is why I left off an overabundance of Shakespeare or other sci-fi than Neuromancer (unless you count Watchmen, which is something altogether different in my mind). That's why I added non-fiction like Have a Nice Day, Night and Unerstanding Comics.
I strayed away from things that weren't so much apart of American culture (other than a few true classics, te Shakespeare and Oedipus for example) because I was writing for an american audience (more or less) and I felt that someone might be truly a student of culture and go beyond my list, but i really do think that most high school students would be well served to get through... well at least 40 of the 50 books on my list. (And I have yet to talk to anyone who has)
Posted by Mav @ 09/16/2002 07:11 PM CET
Anyone who has read a couple of Regency romances can read Austen. Any 9 year old can read a Regency romance. Therefore, all high school students should read two Regency romances and at least one Austen. ;->
(I'm a friend of Mav's who had to smack his anti-Austen stance)
Posted by jenn @ 09/17/2002 12:21 AM CET
Well, we had to read Kafka in high school, I think it is required somewhere in the official guidelines for schools in this state. They just said no to Jane Austen.
About the bible thing: here (it differs between the states in Germany) you have religion classes in public school anyway, unless your parents request otherwise. I had them through all of elementary school and the first two years in high school. Later on you can have religion as an alternative to philosophy class.
And in philosophy we talked about religious stuff anyway, like the unit where we read Buddhist and Hindu philosophy texts. And references to the bible were pointed out and discussed both in philosophy and in German classes, really anywhere where there would be reading of texts. Like we discussed the concept of sin, etc.
In case you wonder who gets to teach these things in public schools, I think mostly it goes back to the 30-year war and whether your area was proclaimed catholic or protestant, so that decides which church has the right to educate the teachers, and teach theology at the universities of that area. But I'm not sure. Anyway it has nothing to to with the religions the students in the class actually have, it's just that they have the right not to come.
The concept of separation of church and state never took fully hold here. I mean the state collects a church tax for the major churches depending on which faith (if any) you identify with and the tax depends on your income (with unique strange logic that probably only lawyers understand the highest court here says that it is legal that you have to declare your faith on your tax forms, even though you have a constitutional right to not give information about your faith). I think it is a tad intrusive that you have to tell the tax office, and also those in one of the official churches for whom taxes are collected don't even get to decide themselves what amount of money is collected from them.
Posted by RatC @ 09/17/2002 12:35 AM CET
