You Don’t Have to Read These Books in High School.

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The Great Gatsby is overrated. Good book! Great book! It’s just not the best book , especially not the best book, to teach teens about the power of literature and the essence of America. If that were the case, teens would not welcome the glamor the book is trying to destroy. But he got stuck in the school literary canon, along with Catcher in the Rye, On Mice and Men . And at this point it seems that the main reason every high school student is taught this is because all the teachers have taught it and no one bothered to check if it is still the best choice.

My own high school stuck to the classics, making conservative choices that I had to supplement in my spare time. This is fine. But given the little structure for finding the great books of my era, or even the less musty books of the recent past, I’ve been digging around grabbing my mother’s copies of Grisham and Crichton, spending too much time on Palahniuk – everything I’ve grown. out, and I don’t regret it, but I don’t particularly value it. I found many good books, often by accident, but I didn’t have a particular mental model of how they all fit together in the literary world today. It took me years to get a vague understanding of the last (or two) generations of literature so that I could productively find my way as an adult reader. If I could go back, I would give myself – and my classmates – a bigger head start by replacing some of the old standby books with books that better unleash the full potential of literature.

Much depends on taste, and it should be so. The very concept of “canon” is less essential for our culture, especially when we see how many people were excluded from this canon, and how many were prematurely pushed into it. More and more good writers are now publishing more good books, and they are not respected by our obsession with the narrow set of “timeless” stories that actually show their age.

What should go

The abandonment of the current canon gives place to new and noteworthy works. Bildungsroman’s ability to “Be a Wallflower ” has earned enough respect to join some of the must-read reading lists; how about adding Rainbow Rowell Fan or other books that appeal to today’s teenage experiences of constant online communication, helicopter parents, and everyday life within a neoliberal empire? Is this era and its literature less deserving of our attention than the growing up of boomers? Or is the canon actually a reason for laziness in the design of our curriculum?

This is not a blow to the books themselves. Well, it’s frustrating if you think the entire high school canon is the greatest book possible – in which case it’s odd that you want them to be forced upon teenagers rather than voluntarily introduced when they’re ready.

Is the Catcher really best perceived as a teenager? Not! This is best experienced when an adult takes stock of Kutcher’s hindsight view of the adolescent mindset that the book was intended to be. The teenager cannot fully appreciate the distance between the author and the main character. (Some can! And more power for them and for all the books they choose to read in their free time.) Nothing needs to be done from classics like Catcher suggests that it might be time to appreciate it in adulthood rather than at adolescence. in 2018. If you support the canon because today’s teachers and schools cannot be trusted to choose the right books, then why would you trust them to teach these works in light of social progress and our changing view of history?

Some of the current canons can simply be read voluntarily, like almost any book . But some of the work is still really useful as a general guideline. There’s a great place for them: college, first year, as part of their core curriculum. Stories like ” Anna Karenina” or ” Madame Bovary” won’t hit the mark until you have more life experiences, but at least you start to understand in college.

We also do not suggest exaggerating. Some young artists should join the curriculum, but also contemporary adult fiction. Jonathan Safran Foer ” Everything Is Lit” teaches voice better than “A Clockwork Orange” ; Things Falling Down by Chinua Achebe is a much better history lesson than Heart of Darkness ; frankly, anyone who wants to read The Lord of the Rings will do it on their own, while The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin is a more significant contribution to broadening the horizons of a growing mind and a wonderful missing link between Harry Potter and many others. ” … adults ”fantasy. (It’s the same with Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy, but again, her perspective on college and after school is best appreciated during or after your own.)

What should be left

What would we remove from the current canon? The older the book, the better. We will not abandon Shakespeare, who is still important for understanding much of the subsequent English literature. In addition, it passes an important test: it is very interesting, even if you miss the bottom layer or three meanings. Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet are interesting to read and stage. The Scarlet Letter is downright fake. Anything old with a sense of humor – like Silas Marner – helps teenagers understand that old doesn’t necessarily mean irrelevant. One Hundred Years of Solitude and House of Spirits are miracles enough to overshadow any gaps in a teen’s judgment. Although I didn’t study Lord of the Flies in high school, I’m very glad I got my first reading before I even became an adult. And almost every time a marginal author has managed to break into the canon, he deserves to stay where he is. If Steinbeck and Fitzgerald stay, then Pet, Anne Frank, Bell, Frederick Douglas and Jane Austen will remain. I am confused by the number of adult white men I meet who only read other white men, and I believe this habit originates in high school.

It’s not about building a new canon. The point is to destabilize the idea of ​​a canon that has supported too many mediocre artists and excluded too many brilliant ones, which fuels a monolithic idea of ​​America that does not resemble the actual past or present of the country. This is not only to re-center marginalized groups (in fact, my personal suggestions are unfortunately distorted as I am still recovering from my poor education), but also to encourage the idiosyncrasy of different readers with different but overlapping literary backgrounds that will encourage more people to remain readers throughout adulthood as they treat literature like an endless buffet rather than a fixed price . (This buffet includes a large dessert comic section that should not be seen as a novelty, but as a complete piece of literature, especially useful for marginalized authors and stories.) This is not a new idea; the canon has always been fluid. But it could be less viscous.

In this context, here is one highly personal, definitely not canonical, suggestion for how we could change the school curriculum.

Ditch

  • The Great Gatsby
  • On the way
  • About Mice and People (replace with In Dubious Battle )
  • Pilgrim’s journey
  • James Fenimore Cooper, and also an essay by Twain on James Fenimore Cooper that was performatively liked by people who like the word defenestration.
  • Brave New World (Save 1984)
  • Death of the seller
  • Heart of darkness , I mean, lord, that’s not good
  • Challenge and Metamorphosis (replace with Village Teacher and Great Wall of China)
  • Siddhartha
  • The Divine Comedy
  • Any Ibsen, DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace (leave this for college)
  • Any Camus or other mid-century existentialism (save it for your first broken and lonely year of adulthood)
  • Any Philip Roth (save that in case you’re a married college professor who attacks your students)
  • All, except for one story by O. Henry (“The Gift of the Magi”), because we already understood it.
  • All but one Sherlock Holmes story (whichever has the most cocaine in it), because they’re not literary or funny
  • Everything by Edgar Allan Poe, except for The Perverted Imp, The Crow, and that essay in which he shits about the process of writing The Crow.
  • Any Beckett, unless you add Stoppard to take the edge off
  • Anna Karenina
  • Brothers Karamazov
  • The middle part of ” Gulliver’s Travels” that no one remembers
  • Candide tbh
  • Ani Ayn Rand
  • War of the Worlds
  • Animal Farm if you’re not ready to add some Das Kapital chapters

Keep

  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Scarlet Letter
  • A tree grows in Brooklyn
  • Beloved
  • The Chosen One
  • Cap
  • Invisible Man
  • lost heaven
  • Coleridge, Wordsworth et al. why not
  • Any Twain
  • Any Wilde
  • Any Moliere
  • Any Austin
  • Ani Marquez
  • Any Shakespeare other than comedies
  • All Greek things, of course, are good, maybe try military music instead of the Iliad.
  • Everything is crumbling
  • The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Beowulf and read Heaney’s translation aloud.
  • One – one – Vonnegut’s book, and leave a stack of your others on the teacher’s desk.

Add

(We apologize for anything that is already the standard among the best curriculum. They prove that I am right.)

Novels and memoirs

Stories and Poetry

  • Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths (typical college assignment). In particular, “The Babylonian Library”, “Three Versions of Judas”, “Garden of Forking Paths” and “Tlen, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius”. Also get a copy of “Aleph” to replace Twain’s aforementioned murder of James Fenimore Cooper.
  • Homeland Homeland Homelandsexuals Patricia Lockwood to show that poetry is really good
  • Nobody owns here more than you , Miranda Julie
  • Especially Disgusting: 272 Views of Law & Order by Carmen Maria Machado, a short story included in her 2017 compilation Her Body and Other Parties , and an introduction to Lovecraft’s “weird fiction” that conquers all.
  • The Hunchback’s Tale from A Thousand and One Nights , a story cycle with three levels of stories embedded in it, one of which I suspect inspired the Atlanta hairdresser episode .

Theatre

  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia by Tom Stoppard satisfying continuation of the study of Hamlet and Byron. The first is a good way to immerse yourself in surrealism, the second is to humanize the literary giants.
  • Mr. Burns, Anne Washburn’s Post-Electric Play that plays the Phone game with the episode The Simpsons to dramatize the evolution of myth and literature.
  • Angels in Tony Kushner’s America , although it’s kind of a door stopper
  • Gloria Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Media, the 21st Century Workplace and the Way People Get and Maintain Fame Now
  • Taylor Mack ‘s Heer , a provocative yet kind family drama about gender, the American empire and the lies we tell the underclass.
  • Familiar Danae Gurira, a relaxing family comedy, sorry many have been filmed in Playwrights Horizons over the past few seasons, but this theater is killing her right now

Comics

  • Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, your healing textbook for evaluating comics as an art and literary form in its own right, with its own methods and capabilities.
  • Jimmy Corrigan: “The Smartest Child on Earth ” by Chris Ware, the Ulysses from the comics, which uses many of the techniques described in Understanding Comics to tell across generations the story of the roles that society places on men and boys.
  • Persepolis by Marjan Satrapi, a conventional introduction to the graphic novel and part of the canon for young adults
  • Palestine Joe Sacco
  • Fun house: the family tragicomic Alison Bechdel
  • Saga Vol. 1 Brian K. Vaughan
  • “Mouse ” by Art Spiegelman, ” Breaking Bad” comics in the sense that recommending it is a cliché, but only because it’s flawlessly good.

This is not a “new canon” or curriculum, but a set of options that can significantly improve the understanding and appreciation of literature by a high school student. I have leaned towards works that comment on the present or demonstrate literary principles in a more relevant and comprehensive way than some of the older backups. High school students should read whatever they want in their free time, including everything in the Tumbling section. Corrections and completely different lists are welcome, and that is, in fact, the whole point.

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