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Thread: Designing an English Curriculum?

  1. #1
    book hoarder slicedclouds's Avatar
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    Designing an English Curriculum?

    I'm a student that is self-teaching/homeschooled, I could use some suggestions regarding English.

    I'd like some English and American literature, but I don't want them to be my primary focus, I'm open to literature from all countries, but I'm heavily interested in French, German, and Russian literature.

    I want to format it so that each of the two years I have one large novel, three to four smaller novels, a play, and enough essays, short stories, and poems for one of each every week.
    Last edited by slicedclouds; 12-08-2010 at 02:29 PM.
    For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.-Friedrich Nietzsche

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    I am not excessively knowledgeable on literature outside Britain and America, but I can make some suggestions based on my own reading.
    19th Century British:
    Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
    Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
    Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
    Any Jane Austen novel
    Hard Times by Charles Dickens - seems like a good intro to him because it is short
    20th Century British:
    A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
    17th Century Spanish:
    Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
    20th Century German:
    The Reader by Bernard Schlink
    19th Century French
    Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
    The Red and the Black by Stendhal
    19th Century Russian:
    The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky or something else by him
    20th Century American:
    The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
    The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
    The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
    Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger - superior in every way to Catcher
    The Magus by John Fowles
    Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
    19th Century American:
    The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    18th Century British:
    Paradise Lost by John Milton

    Hope that helps

  3. #3
    Registered User Hyacinthine's Avatar
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    Here are some ideas. I don't know much about German literature, so I haven't listed any. Some of these are really difficult, but I've enjoyed them all and found them worth it.

    Really Long Novels:
    The Red and the Black, Stendhal (French, 1830)
    Germinal, Zola (French, 1885)
    War and Peace, Tolstoy (Russian, 1869)
    Anna Karenina, Tolstoy (Russian, 1873)
    Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky (Russian, 1866)
    Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (American, 1851)

    Long but not too long novels:
    One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian, 1967)
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (Irish, 1914)
    Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (South African, 1999)
    The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (American, 1998)

    Smaller Novels and Novellas:
    Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (American, 1911)
    Passing, Nella Larsen (American, 1929)
    The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (American, 1925)
    The Stranger, Camus (French, 1942)
    The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy (Russian, 1886)
    The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway (American, 1952)
    1984, George Orwell (English, 1949)
    Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck (American, 1937)

    I don't know much about plays, but:
    Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare is a must

    Short stories:
    First off, I'd recommend the "Best American Short Stories" series. There's a new one every year. I'd also recommended reading stuff from The New Yorker (right now they've got a story called "Escape from Spiderhead" that is amazing and that you can read online) and the Paris Review. As for older stuff that's stuck around over time...
    Anything from Dubliners by James Joyce
    Anything by Hemingway
    Anything by Chekhov
    The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

    Essays:
    Best American Essays series (including "The Best American Essays of the Century")
    A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift

    Hope I've been helpful!

  4. #4
    Registered User Hyacinthine's Avatar
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    Oh, you also wanted poems. I'm sorry, I'm not a big expert on poetry, but what I'd recommend:

    The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
    I like my body when it is with your by Ezra Pound

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    You do not learn anything by simply practicing doing something without figuring out how to improve on it. A simple reading list does not constitute an English course. It would take forever for me to make up an entire course, and even then it would be a rough draft because it is not tested. Here is a sample week.

    Week 1
    Literary Theory journal of application and opinion
    - Study the more important ones in depth
    Critical thinking and informal logic journal
    - Study the more important ones in depth
    Theories of deduction journal
    - Study the more important ones in depth
    Read and react to a behavioral economics book of your choice.
    - Make sure to take note of quotes that interest you
    Rogerian essay on behavioral economics perspectives
    Write a dystopian short story based on behavioral economics

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    It's good but you must take interest in American literature as well because it includes more enriched literature for writing an article.

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    It's good but you must take interest in American literature as well because it includes more enriched literature for writing an article.

  8. #8
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    George Orwell is good for essays, in particular Politics and the English Language.
    Long poem: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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