At the very academically intense Catholic boys' prep school that I attended from 1972 to 1976, I was assigned the entirety of James Joyce's "Dubliners" in my freshman English class. It staggered me and remains a benchmark in my reading life. If there is a better book of short stories in the English language, I certainly don't know about it.
Naturally, Joyce had an intensely difficult time getting the book published.
Do books like this get assigned anymore? There was nothing especially unusual about it at my school. We also read the whole of both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" that year, and many Shakespeare plays all four years. Just tons of great world literature in general. It was assumed that we needed all these under our belts for the colleges we would be attending. There was absolutely no sense that any of these texts were beyond our adolescent reach.
Now those texts are assumed to be beyond the reach of a lot of college students. I wouldn't be surprised if Shakespeare was too tough for a lot of them.
Of that list, HEART OF DARKNESS was the one only we were assigned. I read THE ODYSSEY too, plus DUBLINERS (in an advanced English class) as well as PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN and (hated it) DEATH IN VENICE. Besides SILAS MARNER, I wasn't too fond of GIANTS IN THE EARTH. We read THE SUN ALSO RISES and DAVID COPPERFIELD and GREAT EXPECTATIONS and ARROWSMITH.
When I was in HS, we were assigned only 1 of those; many of them are "too new" for someone who was in HS in the early 1960s. We did, however, get Silas Marner, Great Expectations, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Scarlet Letter, and (to segue from books to plays) "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth," and "Romeo and Juliet"--but no other plays at all. Lots of poetry (Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, Dickinson, and some others...
My twins (seniors in high school now) are reading for AP English: Silas Marner*, Pride & Prejudice, Frankenstein, Oedipus, and the four "great" Shakespeare tragedies. Other works--essays, poems--are sprinkled throughout. In their junior year, one of the books they could choose to read was THE FOUNTAINHEAD. I forbade that--more on aesthetic than philosophical grounds.
*Why, oh why, does SILAS MARNER keep getting assigned when Eliot wrote the beautiful MIDDLEMARCH? Length, I guess.
I loved THE FOUNTAINHEAD when I was about the age of those twins, Deb. I'm amazed that SILAS MARNER is still on the reading list. MIDDLEMARCH is what? 800 pages? I read it in grad school, and it was very long.
I was a lazy underachiever in HS and, as Don Coffin said, most of those listed, were "too new" to be assigned in those olden days. Even if they had been, I would have no doubt given them the Cliff Notes treatment 8-) I was too busy reading SF&F. I was fortunate enough to have an English Lit. teacher in my senior year who saw through my facile Cliff Notes book reviews and test essay questions and took the time and effort to threaten to find some way to flunk me unless I could satisfy her that I had fully read at least one of the assigned "classics". So I forced myself to actually read "Crime and Punishment". After ~20 pages I was hooked. Thank you, Mrs. Moore!!!
Hm. I could've been assigned a number of those (we all could've been assigned THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD but Hurston was only "rediscovered" in the '70s), but I, too, only recall HEART OF DARKNESS from this list. My New Hampshire public and Hawaii prep schools had us do a number of good books and not any miserable ones I recall (though I would've blown off any real slogs I might've encountered, also being not the most compliant of students)...the one I liked even better than ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST and THE GREAT GATSBY and the Conrad was the Fitts and Fitzgerald translation of THE OEDIPUS CYCLE. Tended to overhadow the likes of ALL MY SONS by Arthur Miller, and even Billy S. The best outside of an English or the one theater class (as part of the English department at Punahou) was assigned in 7th grade US history in Londonderry, APRIL MORNING by Howard Fast. That does remind me of the closest to a bad slog, THE GOOD EARTH in Asian history in Honolulu (I barely missed being assigned A SEPARATE PEACE in 7th, which I'd tried to read earlier but found it unengaging--I wasn't Too crazy for CATCHER IN THE RYE, either, when that rolled in). The best stories read out of a textbook we were using but weren't assigned I've enthused about on my blog, a Scott, Foresman English text in 7th grade, as well, with Clifford Simak's "Desertion" and Alan Nourse's "Brightside Crossing" and some contemporary mimetic stories I liked but don't remember as clearly, and one of William Campbell Gault's YA sports novels in the back...I'd read his adult sports fiction earlier in anthologies aimed at younger readers (in class, we'd read the Bradbury story and a handful of others before our teacher went on pregnancy leave and a sub came in for the rest of the year, with some disruption of the assignments). But I read a fair amount of random English and lit textbooks for fun in those years...at least the more adventurous ones from the 1950s onward.
I'm also reminded of a rather dull educational film we were shown in 8th grade in English, a mid '60s film we were viewing in 1978, which was enlivened for me and I suspect me alone when in one scene the protagonist was shown "enjoying some leisure time reading" which turned out to be a then-recent issue of FANTASTIC.
11 comments:
At the very academically intense Catholic boys' prep school that I attended from 1972 to 1976, I was assigned the entirety of James Joyce's "Dubliners" in my freshman English class. It staggered me and remains a benchmark in my reading life. If there is a better book of short stories in the English language, I certainly don't know about it.
Naturally, Joyce had an intensely difficult time getting the book published.
Do books like this get assigned anymore? There was nothing especially unusual about it at my school. We also read the whole of both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" that year, and many Shakespeare plays all four years. Just tons of great world literature in general. It was assumed that we needed all these under our belts for the colleges we would be attending. There was absolutely no sense that any of these texts were beyond our adolescent reach.
Now those texts are assumed to be beyond the reach of a lot of college students. I wouldn't be surprised if Shakespeare was too tough for a lot of them.
Hated SILAS MARNER intensely.
Of that list, HEART OF DARKNESS was the one only we were assigned. I read THE ODYSSEY too, plus DUBLINERS (in an advanced English class) as well as PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN and (hated it) DEATH IN VENICE. Besides SILAS MARNER, I wasn't too fond of GIANTS IN THE EARTH. We read THE SUN ALSO RISES and DAVID COPPERFIELD and GREAT EXPECTATIONS and ARROWSMITH.
Jeff
Also BRAVE NEW WORLD, ANIMAL FARM and 1984.
Jeff
When I was in HS, we were assigned only 1 of those; many of them are "too new" for someone who was in HS in the early 1960s. We did, however, get Silas Marner, Great Expectations, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Scarlet Letter, and (to segue from books to plays) "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth," and "Romeo and Juliet"--but no other plays at all. Lots of poetry (Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, Dickinson, and some others...
My twins (seniors in high school now) are reading for AP English: Silas Marner*, Pride & Prejudice, Frankenstein, Oedipus, and the four "great" Shakespeare tragedies. Other works--essays, poems--are sprinkled throughout. In their junior year, one of the books they could choose to read was THE FOUNTAINHEAD. I forbade that--more on aesthetic than philosophical grounds.
*Why, oh why, does SILAS MARNER keep getting assigned when Eliot wrote the beautiful MIDDLEMARCH? Length, I guess.
I loved THE FOUNTAINHEAD when I was about the age of those twins, Deb. I'm amazed that SILAS MARNER is still on the reading list. MIDDLEMARCH is what? 800 pages? I read it in grad school, and it was very long.
I was a lazy underachiever in HS and, as Don Coffin said, most of those listed, were "too new" to be assigned in those olden days. Even if they had been, I would have no doubt given them the Cliff Notes treatment 8-) I was too busy reading SF&F. I was fortunate enough to have an English Lit. teacher in my senior year who saw through my facile Cliff Notes book reviews and test essay questions and took the time and effort to threaten to find some way to flunk me unless I could satisfy her that I had fully read at least one of the assigned "classics". So I forced myself to actually read "Crime and Punishment". After ~20 pages I was hooked. Thank you, Mrs. Moore!!!
Hm. I could've been assigned a number of those (we all could've been assigned THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD but Hurston was only "rediscovered" in the '70s), but I, too, only recall HEART OF DARKNESS from this list. My New Hampshire public and Hawaii prep schools had us do a number of good books and not any miserable ones I recall (though I would've blown off any real slogs I might've encountered, also being not the most compliant of students)...the one I liked even better than ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST and THE GREAT GATSBY and the Conrad was the Fitts and Fitzgerald translation of THE OEDIPUS CYCLE. Tended to overhadow the likes of ALL MY SONS by Arthur Miller, and even Billy S. The best outside of an English or the one theater class (as part of the English department at Punahou) was assigned in 7th grade US history in Londonderry, APRIL MORNING by Howard Fast. That does remind me of the closest to a bad slog, THE GOOD EARTH in Asian history in Honolulu (I barely missed being assigned A SEPARATE PEACE in 7th, which I'd tried to read earlier but found it unengaging--I wasn't Too crazy for CATCHER IN THE RYE, either, when that rolled in). The best stories read out of a textbook we were using but weren't assigned I've enthused about on my blog, a Scott, Foresman English text in 7th grade, as well, with Clifford Simak's "Desertion" and Alan Nourse's "Brightside Crossing" and some contemporary mimetic stories I liked but don't remember as clearly, and one of William Campbell Gault's YA sports novels in the back...I'd read his adult sports fiction earlier in anthologies aimed at younger readers (in class, we'd read the Bradbury story and a handful of others before our teacher went on pregnancy leave and a sub came in for the rest of the year, with some disruption of the assignments). But I read a fair amount of random English and lit textbooks for fun in those years...at least the more adventurous ones from the 1950s onward.
I'm also reminded of a rather dull educational film we were shown in 8th grade in English, a mid '60s film we were viewing in 1978, which was enlivened for me and I suspect me alone when in one scene the protagonist was shown "enjoying some leisure time reading" which turned out to be a then-recent issue of FANTASTIC.
I can't remember any book assigned to the whole class, but we could pick one to read ourselves.
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