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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]English major here:  I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts. [/quote]

The Scarlet Letter is an overwrought and depressing story that relies on a visceral caring about social norms that have less power now.  I agree that the current curriculum default is to assign identity politics literature.  However,  replacing long dreadful works with shorter dreadful works isn't going to fix things.  Vanity Fair or Pride and Prejudice would be better choices.

My personal wish is to add more autobiography (including from diverse authors).  I think real people do a better job of conveying their perspectives and struggles than fiction.  It helps so much with the authenticity question.  The difficulty of comprehending the writing would naturally vary based on the vintage of the material.

I also think getting kids interested in reading the type of writing found in the New Yorker would be useful.  My own kid picked up a lot about voice and style from reading it during high school.  The articles in the New Yorker are at a level that's reasonable for college grads who don't go into academia.

I've read a lot of the most acclaimed classic novels and liked very few of them. I'm not fond of depressing subject matter.  A lot of them are dramatically tragic. I don't mind that they are long.  They just aren't enjoyable enough.

I obviously can't defend my reading skills very well over the internet, but I had a 780V, am a PBK, and took a writing-intensive senior English seminar as a junior in college.  I'm sure I would have at least made it into the top bracket of that Kansas reading study.

The way back from today's low baseline is to find content that stretches kids' reading capabilities while also being interesting to them.  That just might involve permanently deprioritizing James Fenimore Cooper and others of that ilk.  Most of the faces on a set of "Authors" playing cards.  Times change.

Some things I would keep:

Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare
Anne Bradstreet
Colonial political writing
Vanity Fair
Moby Dick
Walden
Things Fall Apart
1984
A work by Jane Austen
A Chekhov play
Writing by Frederick Douglass
My Indian Boyhood by Luther Standing Bear
Textual analysis of fairytales

Of Dickens, I'd do Great Expectations if I had to.  Certainly not Bleak House.  I read most of Dickens' famous works voluntarily in high school (received a giant volume from a best friend as a birthday present in 1985).  Bleak House was assigned in college honors freshman composition.  I remember thinking there were good reasons it was less frequently assigned.[/quote]

You speak very confidently for someone who didn’t major in English. Sorry, but your intensive writing class doesn’t qualify you to offer your absurd opinions on literature. And this statement absolutely disqualifies you, “I've read a lot of the most acclaimed classic novels and liked very few of them. I'm not fond of [b]depressing subject matter[/b].  [b]A lot of them are dramatically tragic. I don't mind that they are long.  They just aren't enjoyable enough.
[/b]

You just told us you have literally no understanding of the books you read or why they are important. [/quote] There is a big difference between the importance of a work and it's enjoyment. Or do you read the Bible and the Constitution for fun?[/quote]

Oh hi, it's me, the castigated PP who doesn't like depressing classic books.  I am well-educated and can definitely understand why certain novels are considered great and how the authors and works influenced other authors/thinkers/their era. I can listen to professors geek out about the beauty of the linguistic flourishes on display and yet I remain unmoved.  I simply do not enjoy most tragedies and overwrought prose. Especially not 400-ish pages of a plot I don't like, important to the history of fiction though it might be. A lot of the classics read like upper middle class television shows for the people of a long ago time.  Similar to how I feel about White Lotus, Breaking Bad, or Sex and the City, I don't find anything intriguing about the plot and characters of Middlemarch.  I just had to read it for a senior English seminar. So I dutifully did.

I would actually be interested in studying the Bible and the Constitution more.  I've done some Magna Carta tourism recently as well.

To get the full benefit of an English major, one should enjoy the works that are required.  Perhaps it's a good idea to make sure that majors (which I was not) have read some of each category of whatever passes for canon.  But don't expect continued hero worship for all vaguely famous long novels written in Europe between 1700-1900.  I'd rather read Margery Kempe's diary than stuff like Wuthering Heights.

My biggest positive connection to the era of serialized novels was participating in the reading of a modern fanfiction that released chapters once a day for a year, with the author sometimes writing and releasing the chapter the same day (no stockpiled buffer of chapters).  That was an interesting experience/piece of literary performance art.  People on here would scoff at the quality of the fanfiction work but it definitely made a bigger and more relevant impact on my thinking about the power of literature than trudging through The Scarlet Letter in 11th grade.

To each their own.  Just watch the count of BAs in the discipline.  And don't blame it all on woke departments overthrowing the canon.[/quote]

It's honestly hard for me to imagine not connecting to Middlemarch. Throughout my life I have felt an insanely strong connection to both Dorthea and Rosemund. But even if those novels didn't connect, there surely has to be something that's earlier than the 20th century from some culture that you care about or found enjoyable. If you don't like overwrought tragedies I'm guessing it wasn't the Greeks, though. Or any epic. What about something like the Letters of Seneca. Or you mentioned the Bible, which is definitely ancient lit.[/quote]

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