Don't forget The Unconsoled by Ishiguro!
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Don't forget The Unconsoled by Ishiguro!
Do such classes exist, outside of the imagination? The last four years of "High School" includes childish imaginations and young adults. It would be necessary for such pupils to study more than literature. It is daft to give such minds a diet of heavy depressing classics with which they have few points of reference. That's a good way to turn them off. By the age of seventeen, eighteen there are more of them able to survive being depressed. But even then not,definitely not, Bloody Ulysses. Tennyson's idle king yes but not Joyce's priapic satyr.
Wishful thinking but The Possessed/ Devils/ Demons by Dostoevsky for high school seniors.
I think we still need the classics but how about interspersing them with something a little more frivolous or modern and seeing if they can relate them to each other. For example try them with Midsummer Nights Dream followed by Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett or Don Quixote then Going Bovine by Libba Bray. Maybe mixing it up in this way could get more high schoolers interested in reading the original classics and understanding how literature works.
This is in itself a childish resolution. If, in your predicament, children should be spared of reading depressing classics, because they risk getting depressed, then what's the point of reading depressing classics when they can live through a depression, and thus limiting the potential of a book? Then we should, perhaps, give them Cioran's aphorisms.Quote:
Originally Posted by ennison
May I put in a word for The Time Machine and Mary Barton.
I have no idea which classics are usually read in an English or North American classrom. I think one idea is to make a list with older and more recent titles and let the children vote the books they want to read. It depends very much on the class. A friend read Wuthering Heights with his class and they loved it without knowing anything about England and its moors.
Ulisses definitively not but maybe some of Joyce´s short stories could be in the list.
Meanwhile out of the ivory towers and in the real world children are children. There are hundreds of texts written by good writers for children. Teachers of literature soon learn to be practical. (They won't be long teaching if they don't) Good language teachers have always used the light and entertaining to engage young minds and develop language skills. Sometimes these texts have no great "literary" merit but they have enormous language merit. A sprinkling of the Godots and Goldings and Salingers can come later for the more mature developed reader. (We all know the Lennon/Salinger intersection). Wallace who I thing was teaching young adults eschewed the use of heavy duty literature and used instead texts like Carrie and The Silence of the Lambs. He was far from the first to realise this was a useful approach. It also gives the lie to snobby Bloom's idea that Wallace couldn't think. Wallace was capable of thinking practically and of doing something.