I haven’t read everything by Alan Moore but From Hell is my favorite. It’s the very opposite of sensationalism. It’s anti-sensationalism. Let’s look at this tragic little corner of Victorian England where The Ripper’s murders were the hot gossip at a time when a certain forgotten subset of women was enduring casual violence and dehumanization on a daily basis and nobody cared. Not light reading, certainly, but I thought it was wrenching genius, and kind of a beautiful love letter to women. His attempt to ground and humanize sex workers in London was illustrated by his dedication of the book to the women - first and last names - who were killed.
I loved it. I am not claiming it’s good for high school reading, though.
That’s completely fair, and what I was trying to get at in another thread. Hawthorne, Thoreau, Faulkner, Williams, and all the literary greats are boring as hell. Even as an adult, I mostly don’t enjoy most of that stuff.
It takes getting out of that mentality that “literature” is somehow superior to other sorts of writing. There’s nothing wrong with a good thriller, fantasy novel, or even romance novel, if it’s well written. There’s nothing special about Faulkner (to use one author I detested in high school) as far as teaching English goes. In fact, he’s awful enough that he probably repels as many people from reading as he entices in. English teachers could get as much mileage or more out of a half dozen other more contemporary writers who write stuff normal (i.e. not literary types) people actually read.
Earlier I was thinking along the lines of “Most people aren’t going to college, and even those who do, aren’t likely to be Literature majors, so why are we torturing so many people with these boring and dense books that only Lit majors enjoy? Maybe we’re better off just skipping it and concentrating on stuff that people need to know, and specifically what each person is likely to know?” It wasn’t some sort of classist/racist/intellectualist thing, it was more taking pragmatism to an extreme.
Do you also think they should stop teaching about classical music and only teach about country/hip-hop? No Picasso or Renoir in art classes, only comic book drawings? Skip all that science and history and math and awareness of culture that they’ll never need and you can push them out to working their trade by 8th grade, maybe even 6th! Print the right emojis on their tools and you won’t even need to bother teaching them to read!
Do you also think they should stop teaching about classical music and only teach about country/hip-hop? No Picasso or Renoir in art classes, only comic book drawings?
Excellent points. My own schooling, back in the 70s (well, up until the 11th grade), focused on the Pantheon of Greats without trying to connect it to the stuff kids were reading and listening to on their own, and I think that was a mistake. The best way to kill a 15-year-old’s enthusiasm for a creative work is to put it on a marble pedestal, assign it to him, and remind him that nothing he ever creates on his own will ever be as good or important.
This is exactly what my Advanced English teacher did with Thomas Hardy. She loved Hardy and by god she was going to ram his greatness down our throats. Thus guaranteeing I never read another Hardy novel in my life (although his poetry is decent).
Of course the problem there isn’t the material, it’s the approach to it. As per that one scene from Dead Poets Society, simply telling kids that Shakespeare is great doesn’t teach them anything. Helping them discover that greatness is what you’re supposed to be doing.
Does this proposal involve cutting all poetry from the curriculum? If not, which non-boring poets would you propose as alternatives to Williams (assuming you meant William Carlos)?
More relevant to most people are his multi-volume Cartoon History of the Universe (well, you’d expect that to take more than one volume) and his Cartoon History of the United States. Good luck getting either of these into any US school. The history of the universe has plenty that’s risque and edgy, but it’s the only place that I’ve seen a lot of Chinese, Indian 9as in subcontinent of…) and African history covered in surprising depth. It’d be a hell of an addition to the school library.
Boring is in the eye of the beholder, of course. If a teenager can’t find anything interestng in “A Rose for Emily” or “Young Goodman Brown” or the better bits of Walden, that’s on them, or on their teacher, not the authors.
I’m not saying a thriller or romance can’t have depth, but they usually don’t have much, especially when compared to what you sneeringly refer to as “literature.” As far as teaching English goes, you want works that you can really get your teeth into, not works that have nothing going on below the surface.
But yeah, why should kids eat vegetables when popcorn and Twinkies are so much more enjoyable?
I didn’t say to get rid of all of it, but rather that there’s nothing special about a lot of the works we were taught as far as teaching the hows and whys of writing, literary analysis, and all the other stuff English class is supposed to teach. And in my view merely exposing them to the great literature isn’t nearly as important as the rest; if you get them interested in reading, they’re going to find their way there regardless of what they’re taught in class. And if they’re not, no amount of tormenting them with Tennessee Williams or Thomas Hardy is going to do any good.
So why NOT teach them with stuff they’ll actually be interested in? This whole ivory tower idea that literature is something special in its own right above and beyond thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, romance novels, and other contemporary books is silly and kind of patronizing. The classics WERE exactly that in their day, and if they weren’t, they’re the worst sort of literature; literature for its own sake, aimed at English teachers and other pretentious gits.
Some might say that a “pretentious git” is someone who says “You aren’t going to college, therefore there is no point in giving you a decent high school education, either. Go read an Archie comic, you wrench monkey”.
People who don’t read H.G. Wells The Time Machine are doomed to repeat it.
What is the goal of the choosing the works chosen?
To foster a love and appreciation of reading? Yes.
To challenge and develop the skills of reading including critical analysis and subtexts and learning how to communicate effectively? Yes. Not just enjoyable junk food. To some degree this is analogous to exercise - Exercise can and should be fun but also challenging. Without some stress we do not make progress. The works chosen should challenge skills and expand perspectives.
To have an overlapping cultural literacy with other educated Americans? Definitely. And despite the antipathy this gets as “woke” representation here matters. The canon should not only be the old white writers. (But some of the old white guys wrote well with ideas that should be thought about … or that inform of the time.)
Graphic novels used sparingly may possibly hit those criteria. Not sure. And still unsure that core English classes are the place for them as they are as much a visual as a written medium. (But then Shakespeare plays are as much performance as a written medium and we teach them …)
Book choices are also to show the history of writing. Which is part of why a class would assign Dracula instead of a vampire book written two years ago that copied from a book that copied from a book that copied from a book that copied from Dracula. (And a film class might show Seven Samurai instead of A Bug’s Life.)
Indeed a point that goes beyond my stating “that inform of the time” - the history informs the context; where tropes come from. And how the form has changed. Again an argument can be made here for graphic novels, sparingly, as part of demonstrating how the form evolves.
There’s even value in the occasional “boring” reading assignment, in that it forces you to put your preferences aside and adapt yourself, temporarily, to the writer’s pacing and structure.
That is a good response to, “what can graphic novels offer a literature class?” Maybe nothing, but they can transmit information clearly and concisely so for different subjects most people find dull they can be a sort of Cliff Notes for understanding.
I for one would love every graduating student to have a clear more complete picture about our history, particularly the glossed over bits, even if this education comes from pictures and word bubbles.
Without getting into massive excluded middles, I’ve had a couple kids in school music programs and they always learned some contemporary pop music in addition to the hoary hits of 1820. Every art class I took in middle/high school (and I took ‘em all) was cool with students picking comic or modern illustrative artists for the inevitable “Pick an artist and emulate their style” assignments. Actual “art history” teaching was pretty thin; most of art class was spent actually doing art.
I think the big thing about English lit teaching is that each book can easily take a couple of months for the class to read, get quizzed on each chapter, write an essay about the deep meaning, etc. You might only have time for two books in a semester in addition to other projects and assignments. Which is why everyone winds up having read from the same relatively short list of classics, especially in standard English classes – ain’t much time to mix it up. The flip side of this is that, if 75% of the class is bored by, can’t relate to and generally hates Great Expectations then you blew half the semester on a book of minimal benefit to the students regardless of how wonderful the Lit Professors think it is. So, regardless of whether or not kids should be reading graphic novels in class, I’m not sure total adherence to the sacred cows of Great Western Lit is always doing them the best service in the limited classroom time either.
Steve Gerber once said that there was no doubt in his mind that Roy Thomas’s Conan comics adaptations were superior to the Robert E. Howard source material, so maybe comics can have some sort of literary value. Low-hanging fruit, I admit. But there are a growing number of comics/graphic novels with undeniable literary merit, most of them from the 1980s Brit Pack.
Some comics adaptations of prose novels are comparable in merit to the source material. I mentioned Neil Gaiman earlier with The Graveyard Book, but Paul Auster’s City of Glass may be more on point. In both cases the same author wrote both versions. Some of the better film adaptations of excellent novels (The Pope of Greenwich Village and True Confessions come to mind) have the novelist doing double duty as the screenwriter, taking advantage of the film medium’s flexibility to show things that couldn’t be done well in the novel. Novels have the advantage of being able to depict internal monologues better; I’m kind of glad that there was never a film version of The Catcher in the Rye for this reason. But comics can show action and internal monologues as well as novels and film combined. They just usually don’t.
The implication though is that the graphic novel is less “serious” and any that are chosen shouldn’t be able to described like that. These are works with depth.
I’m not sure I’m following you. My implication? I’m pretty sure students can learn music structure and how to play the flute from a modern song as well as they can from Mozart, especially at a casual 9th grade band level.