Good morning, ILB. This term, your GCSE set text will be _______________: A classroom classics poll

In the spirit of my junior high self, I'm voting for the shortest one.

didnt read any of these at school (not that i read all of our set texts but none of these were there iirc)

have only read wh

Oh wait, I think Of Mice and Men is marginally shorter than Animal Farm.

Wuthering Heights by far my fave of these. Dig Hard Times but it's hardly his best, Jane Eyre is the other stand-out killer here, Catcher in the Rye feels like a one joke science thesis to me now, the rest are, well, they exist. for a drug fiend Huxley did a terrible job of making me think Soma was supposed to be bad. fuck Steinbeck with a sharp stick altho i guess OMaM is his best. Golding might be alright if school hadn't killed him for me.

MIA: To kill a Mockingbird

main gcse literature set text was great expectations, of which i read about 80 pages iirc

yeah To Kill a Mockingbird belongs here, also some 50s/60s Brit kitchen sink stuff, possibly There is a Happy Land

Dickens' "focused" stuff is his weakest imo

SHIT. Mockingbird. I knew I'd missed something.

Yeah, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, that would make sense in the set.

or A Kestrel for a Knave

i mean whatever, i'm still gonna vote for crazy Emily Bronte

Have read the first six but not the chicks or, um, Dicks. They're all pretty terrific, except Brave New World could be quietly put to sleep some time ago but even it has some good ideas. I think 1984's probably the best.

frankenstein was also a gcse set text (and a set text regla no doubt)

actually read that one cuz i wanted the a* in eng lang

basically everything we studied post-18th c was either horrible or made horrible by the teaching, the postwar stuff was just unremitting trash

the prosody in most of these is so fuckin pedestrian

Wuthering Heights would be worth voting just for how much it made every single guy in my lit class foam angrily at the mouth.

I've often wondered why The Great Gatsby hasn't made it into this canon.

my A-level english teacher turned us on to Kathy Acker he is one of my life heroes tbh

For myself, Brontes top of the pile, Charlotte ahead of Emily for me atm.

Love Dickens, actively dislike Hard Times.

Orwell, Steinbeck, Golding - never want to read books by these ppl again. (Huxley too maybe? But I'll prob end up reading the early novels at some point, I'm curious about 20s brit modernism, before the 30s generation kicks in)

shit i actually studied at A-level: Joseph Andrews, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Rape of the Lock, Larkin. best syllabus ever.

will support michael gove's education reforms up to and including the reintroduction of caning and workhouses so long as vathek is included at gcse by a new unified exam board

the Brontes are so out of place in this shitpile u can only assume they've locked into some "token woman" action

token woman who didnt write near exclusively about the provincial landed gentry

Hard Times is the only one here I don't think I did read in grade school. Read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities instead, iirc.

the Earnshaws are provincial and landed iirc

also make 15 year-olds read Middlemarch imo

yeah but heathcliff &c

suggested GCSE reading list

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Gulliver's Travels
Slaughterhouse Five
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Crow
selected Borges short stories
Pale Fire
Invisible Man
Donne

sorry Borges can't count, translation
throw some Poe in there or somethink

i mean i'd make the fuckers read Houellebecq but i guess the lit ought to be originally in english

true and weird anecdote -- i remember a kid in another class saying how they were studying 'of mice and men' and not having heard of it and from the pronunciation i assumed it was 'of meissen men' as in pertaining to the awkward chinoiserie figures on the eponymous porcelain until i later saw a copy of the book

In 8th grade, I'm pretty sure the 10 or 12 gory pages made me like The Jungle better than anything else on the syllabus.

The only one of these I think anyone in my high school had on their reading list was Lord of the Flies (I read it, I enjoyed it). A couple of the classes may have done Jane Eyre. Funnily enough I was pretty annoyed at the time that I wasn't getting to read any 'classroom classics' so I actually read a bunch of them in my own time. Yeah, I didn't have much of a social life in high school.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles was the one I remember being the biggest chore.

xps

new syllabus is thin on women, maybe get The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish in.

Actual things on my reading lists:

GCSE equivalent: The Princess Bride (no joke), Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, various short stories
A-Level equivalent: Hamlet, King Lear, Pride & Prejudice, various poetry, The Odyssey, selections from the Canterbury Tales, Beowulf.

In retrospect, being made to read the Odyssey in high school was really great, kind of wish I'd given it more of an honest go (I skimmed a lot of it). Same with Canterbury Tales.

just get rid of centralized syllabuses for subjects like english except for maybe ensuring a certain % of taught material has to be old

ime the emphasis on close-reading of shitty prose texts was stultifying as hell even prior to gcse

xxp

cd throw Middlemarch on my proposed list

shit I've just remembered having to do Silas Marner for GCSE. It put me off Eliot for a few years.

don't really love any Eliot except the last 2 - maybe 3 - but they're more than enough

We only read four or five of the CT. Wish our teach had committed to the whole thing because it seemed dope to us teens.

Oh yeah... we also read The Pigman in grade 9. Strange book. Alberta curriculum really seems to love this one, cos it still seems to be listed in the curriculum guidance notes.

reading list in school

Huck Finn
The Pearl
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hard Times
Great Expectations
The Great Gatsby
Philadelphia Here I Come

I had a challopsy English dept. head who had us read "A Druid's Tune" and "A Canticle for Liebowitz" with "Eye of the World" as a possible independent study unit. When she got Oates' "Foxfire" in the syllabus some righty Xans accused her of trying to corrupt their young'uns and the school board made her get back to basics

Oh and Jane Eyre in this poll

US question: does Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 actually deserve a place within our parallel canon (read it in middle school IIRC—also Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron", a terrifying but rather silly anti-communist dystopia)... or has it just been lazily enshrined as the 'homegrown' alternative to Orwell's & Huxley's works?

which is I guess like saying: how important is this particular strain of 'speculative fiction' or wtfever you wanna call it (sci-fi satire?)—obviously the historical moment of e.g. Orwell makes it nice when you're simultaneously trying to teach kids history of the 20th century; but something about the genre just strikes me as... quaintly artificial? idk

NEW IDEA I'm going to edit Ayn Rand (take out all the sex) and sell it for middle school classroom use

'Far From The Madding Crowd' was my GCSE set text, although I wouldn't vote for it.

Mayor of Casterbridge for me; it seemed much too ancient for us, though I'd never've touched it later so I'm glad we did it. But then we did Tess a bit afterwards and it was ripper.

i never had to read any of these books at school but they all seem ok, i probably like 'animal farm' the best, it has funnie animals

Because it is A Classic in the way that none of his essay collections really are? Also kind of mindblowing in the total confidence of setting the world and atmosphere - the first 20-30 pages are unbeatable.

i mean yes they are they are like top five essay collections in history; that's what he is, he's One Of Our Greatest Essayists. you're right tho they don't have the meme status of 1984 (prob because they are essays) (and because they aren't taught in high school). i am not knocking 1984, which i used to do (for being too didactic or whatever for the snotty nabokovian standards i was regurgitating at the time) until i realized how vividly it described things which needed to be described and which we did not then have words for, which is why we now (still and forever) use orwell's. also i like how focused it is on language as tool of control and thought-shaper. but come on, at least throw the kids "shooting an elephant". i didn't read that till college.

iirc we did:

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
To Kill a Mockingbird
Hard Times
Great Gatsby
Animal Farm

Plus a couple of Shakespeares and "Philadelphia, Here I Come!"

Ah no I'm not knocking his essays at all! I'm just saying that I'd not like to try to convince a school board to take 1984 off a list and put one of them on. Which you're right is totally a vicious circle.

re: 1984: i kind of suspect that the first 20-30 pages are much better for encountering them first at 40 or 50 years remove: that in 1948 they seemed possessed of a certain obviousness which is elided when the dystopia proposed becomes a timeless one and not one riffing on the immediate situation. the essays, on the other hand, require a reader with some kind of basic knowledge of the cultural background already, which i think is in some ways a no-no for this kind of list ... ?

Hard Times seems very popular here. We did Great Expectations.

Also Loneliness..., the culture of which was very foreign and exotic. Also, A Separate Peace, which takes place at an American private school and is unread by, and unknown to, everyone except American boys attending private schools. This was when we were just getting started in literature.

Our Shakespeare was first Romeo and Juliet, and then Othello a year later. (The same year I discovered The Atrocity Exhibition, which was not on the list.)

All American students in that era read The Scarlet Letter at some point.

Never did Lord of the Flies, nor To Kill a Mockingbird. Come and get me, coppers.

There was a big biography by John Carey a couple of years ago

I know it's dumb, but this is almost enough to put me off reading any more Golding ever.

we read 'shooting an elephant' in senior year of HS, tho as i recall didn't discuss the background or relevance or even meaning of it AT ALL -- it was more like, 'why is this a well-constructed essay.'

Anyone else read Native Son in school? That was the big one for me.

I'd read Black Boy first on my own but Native Son was one of the most life-changing books I read in school

Less problematic Conrad for high schoolers would be stuff like "The Secret Sharer," "Typhoon," and "Youth" -- we did the first of those.

I don't think I read any of the poll options before college except Catcher in the Rye. iirc the standard things we all had to read included Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, Rouse's prose Iliad, some Shakespeare, and (because we were in Georgia) Flannery O'Connor.

Oh, and The Deerstalker, James Fenimore Cooper, yeah! zzzzzzzzzz

Vathek looks great.

Horrible list - rather read Orwell's essays than his dumb fiction, even if I'd be out of my depth. Goes back to 'literature when you're young' thread but again, rather read something foreign but w/risque adult themes than written in the mother tongue that just is fkn terrible: wonder what I would have made of The Decameron or a he Arabian Nights when I was younger.

Probably a separate question but I wonder how those books get to be chosen in the first place/what is the crietria and who gets to choose and how much scrutiny there is. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird and this Kitchen Sink style novel, obv Shakespeare, but I would have wanted to read Greek tragedy too and I'd like to think it would have complemented S.

Criteria is obv having a contemporary social theme, something that gives a flavour of the poetry of the language in prose (Orwell doesn't), or something young and kinda macabre - violent but not sexual (along censorship lines for films), involving children.

Good arg for Golding - might try something else by him.

jane eyre is pretty good

are there any books by female authors on the high school curriculum that don't have a really fucked up view of gender relations

now bikini kill are playing in my head, oops

when i work saturdays i feel like ilx is a huge cavernous hall filled with the traces of a long dead civilization and i am wandering around it talking to myself

that female-authors question of yours is so heavily begging for creative strikethrough.

i almost did it myself with 'in the canon' for 'on the h.s. curriculum'

if you mean 'by female authors' then i mean, well, there's a bunch in which women are basically absent, there's that

anyway: woman authors are regularly chosen to highlight ~gender issues~ in a way male authors aren't?

though i don't really remember the gender relations in female-written books we studied at school being any more fucked up than gender relations actual.

well, my high school encounters were emily bronte and the plath of 'daddy' etc. if they'd been austen and the plath of the ted-hughes-what-a-bastard poems i'd probably feel the other way about it.

i... genuinely can't remember what is fucked up about the gender relations of wuthering heights beyond standard it-sucks-to-be-a-woman-in-the-nineteenth-century?

i kind of find the fact that everyone in it is an awful human being is what creates its unique atmosphere, not so much the pressure of gender roles and prescribed relationships.

i wouldn't disagree with you about that. the brontes are just ... v interesting guides to how to tell if a boy likes you, i mean.

i guess to me that isn't "gender relations"? like, that's just... romance, the way they wrote it.

nb i studied yr austen/gaskell/brontës/plaths/etcs in a girl's school (and quite a liberal one at that), which i guess would have some kind of impact on how i think about this stuff?

yeah, by 'a fucked up view of gender relations' i meant that stuff more than i meant books in which the narrator or implied author is going 'hey, look how fucked up this is' i guess? i don't know. & i certainly don't think either of those is a barrier to actually teaching them well. i did all my 19th century lit. in a british state school tho so er.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i read all of these except the brontes and dickens (instead we read "tale of two cities" and "david copperfield")

also we read "shooting the elephant" in history class

i was never assigned lord of the flies and have never read it, and it really made me feel out of the loop in some of the english ed classes i took last year. also whenever i tell people i got a job teaching english they let me know how they feel about lord of the flies (very polarizing book, apparently) and i never know what to say. obviously the solution is to read it but i've built up an aversion at this point.

wuthering heights is definitely the stunner on this list, but i will stan for catcher in the rye all day long.

i'm not sure what got people foaming at the mouth at the top of the thread but, uh, i like all these books and would have a hard time picking one

i guess i agree w/ noodle vague that "brave new world" is the one i feel like i understand least and might benefit me most from a rereading

"catcher in the rye" and "animal farm" i guess i like in the same way i like my baby blanket that's still in my parents' closet

"of mice and men" is not *that* great i guess

so "1984" vs "lord of the flies" for me

imo having children read "1984", "lord of the flies" and "animal farm" in high school is vital to ensuring the future of our glorious democratic system

all right all right i'll read lord of the flies

it has a mystical aspect that i think the other books lack

are you suggesting wuthering heights lacks a mystical aspect??? >:[

actually wtf i just forgot about IT

IT just got my vote for "lord of the flies"

if by mystical aspect you mean a talking head on a stick, then yes

*spoilers*

also make 15 year-olds read Middlemarch imo

― Tartar Mouantcheoux (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 16, 2012 8:03 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was assigned mill on the floss in 11th grade and it was one of those deeply upsetting, life-changing reads. (reception in my class split neatly along gender lines.) it was a huge relief to read middlemarch a few years later, partly because it's the best, but also because it doesn't annihilate its protagonist. i would have loved to read middlemarch instead but i think my english teacher thought if he taught middlemarch he would have had no time to teach anything else.

xp haha

but i will stan for catcher in the rye all day long.

― horseshoe, Saturday, July 28, 2012 8:22 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

surprised by this! i havent read it since i was 15, hated it then, maybe its worth another go...

I read most of these in college if not HS.

I really love Jane Eyre. Also, I really hate Eliot which makes me feel bad because so many people I love stan hard for her but my senior seminar class was entirely about her and it made me want to never read again. And die.

the confounding conversation I had with classmates when we got to Huck Finn and they proudly proclaimed Jim's depiction to be racist and I was all "actually, you all letting a dialect blind you to his intelligence, good sense, and innate heroism is what's racist"

good times

― PITILESS LIVE SHOW (DJP), Monday, July 16, 2012 1:57 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this reminds me of an insane and horrifying conversation i had with a professor whom i ta'ed for in grad school. i had chosen a zora neale hurston short story as one of four stories students could choose from in writing their final essay. we were going over our grades together and all of a sudden he was expostulating on how terrible the hurston story was (he didn't know i'd chosen it; there were two other ta's.) he was particularly disgusted by the dialect spoken by the protagonist in the story, calling it degrading and low-class and he actually said zora neale hurston could have learned a thing or two about writing black dialect from william faulkner. he is white btw.

xxp i am kind of a salinger stan. used to think catcher in the rye was the immature one but i reread it last year in an english ed class and it still hits me where i live tbh /snuggles baby blanket.

btw the dialect in the hurston story was the whole point; it was incredibly rich and poetic. but he unintentionally revealed a lot about himself during that impromptu rant.

I've never read WH and feel like maybe I should do that.

it is wonderful! but you just broke my heart with your eliot-hatred so take that recommendation with a grain of salt! (it's not like an eliot novel.) <3

would like Abbs to return to this thread and tell me about lord of the flies

I know, I'm sorry! I remembered that you love her from past threads. I mean this was a LONG time ago and I was sort of an idiot who didn't know anything back then so I might feel differently now but at the time I was so not into it. Hmmm. Maybe I'll give her another shot too.

I remember liking LoTF but little else about it. It's been even longer for that one.

you don't have to be sorry; i am a bossy schoolmarm

nah

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

these results should be the other way round really

hm i'm surprised at such a low showing for LOtF (my #1) but i'd rank 1984 my #2

you know nowadays the kids read the hunger games in school