Honestly, this post (and most of this thread) made me run for my Norton anthologies.
Muffinthraka said:
I have a degree in English lit; nevertheless I hated some of the stuff I had to read (one year I ended up with Wuthering Heights, John Donne and (nnnoooooooo!!!) Waiting for Godot).
As a fellow lit major, I have to ask. How can you hate John Donne? He's hilarious! Poems like "The Flea" and "The Sun Rising" (ha! the pun!) are dirty, dirty, dirty metaphors for sex. I suppose if one has a problem with old poems being all about sex (and in the case of the flea trying to convince the woman to sleep with him) then it could be a chore, but in the cases of Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's poems, they were often written to someone, sometimes with the intent of insulting them.
Waiting for Godot is so funny and so depressing. But the point of it is to be pointless and that's what makes it so great.
Muffinthraka said:
I failed the year and repeated it at a different college (this time I got Enduring Love, The 3 Victorian Poets and... a play, I forget which one).
The three Victorian poets? Which three? The big three? Which big three? Tennyson? Browning (Elizabeth or Robert)? W.H Auden? Arnold? Yeats? T.S Eliot? Lawrence? Coleridge? Kipling? Keats? Blake? (Though some of these are the Romantics, but reading them is almost essential to understanding the Victorians.) Swineburne?
For the plays did you read Bernard Shaw? Oscar Wilde? Clearly it wasn't Beckett.
I think of the Romantics and the Victorians together because they were thrown at me in one big clump over the course of a very educational semester: English Literature After 1800, a comprehensive look at most of the writers from 1785 to the twentieth century and after. This is one of the pillars of my college's English curriculum, the others being English Literature Before 1800 from Beowulf to Milton, and American Literature. It's a lot of reading, but so very worth it. But if I got three to five hours of reading as homework for my English classes, I considered myself lucky. In our lower division Shakespeare class covered a different play every two weeks over the course of a four month semester. In upper division we basically do a four hundred page novel a week in classes like the Victorian Novel.
Muffinthraka said:
So it really depends what you get given to read (it get's worse at uni, you get a reading list several pages long.
BTW I'm an avid reader (I've just finished "The Girl who kicked the Hornets' Nest").
It's college, long reading lists are to be expected. The thing I love about literature is that different works build off each other. It's fun and interesting to see the effect that Marlowe had on Shakespeare and Shakespeare had on everyone else. Especially Ben Johnson, whose plays were more violent and bloody than Shakespeare's ever were (and Shakespeare had cannibalism!). When put into a historical context, literature becomes a fascinating venue into the minds and culture of those long dead. In many ways, it allows us to experience the world as they perceived it and the way it was used to challenge political norms, societal norms, gender roles, dictators, tyrants, or on the other hand support them.
Some poetry I love just for the lyric nature of the lines but I can understand how hard it is for High School students to crack open a work that is between a hundred to 2,500 years old. Stories that old should be presented with historical context, if only so that the students can get the jokes. The problem for most students is that they, with the exception of Shakespeare who has something for everyone, aren't the target audience for the works they're reading. And unfortunately, it's one of those cases where Muhammad must go to the mountain. To adjust to the jokes and the subtext for those stories not written in the twentieth century takes time, Shakespeare is like reading a foreign language, and it's time that High School English classes don't have time to give. They often have a lot to cover and they don't have the luxury of breaking it up by time period the way that college does. But lots of literature is by no means stuffy or pretentious (unless we're talking about T.S Eliot, in which case HELL YES! Sanskrit, Greek, Italian, German, Latin, French, obscure literary references, and originally published with no footnotes? Fuck you too. I understand why C.S Lewis hated your guts.)
That said, is
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest any good?
), Romeo and Juliet, Beowulf, Macbeth, Something by a black guy who taught himself to read, I forget his name, really boring read.... Never had to read Grapes of Wrath, or Catcher in the Rye or anything like that. Btu these are the only ones I remember...
