By the time I was in hs the turn to young adult and popular stuff was already underway, and yet still we read a lot of classics: Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Melville etc. I did take a 101 AP lit course, but didn’t score high enough on the exam for the college credit (I was sort of temperamentally unsuited for literary criticism at that point in my life – I thought it was overly formal and structural and ruined the beauty of its subject of analysis. I have a memory of writing a sonnet protesting sonnet form as part of an assignment) so I wound up taking English 101 again in sophomore(?) year of undergrad. The high school level syllabus was definitely more traditionalist, although still looking back the college syllabus was structured rather differently than I think it would be today (DFW and Hemingway! Morrison maybe the only female author!)
Interesting. We didn't get Dante and barely any Melville. I don't think there was any YA except that things like Stevenson and Dickens and Twain were considered akin to YA earlier in the century. And Harper Lee, I guess.
Yeah, it wasn’t moby dick or anything, but we read Bartlby in that AP 101. I had a world literature course that was basically Gilgamesh, Odyssey, inferno. Really more like “epic poems of the world” than world literature, but I wasn’t complaining! The VA was mostly stuff like The Outsiders & miscellaneous 1980s teen stuff. I got assigned Robert Cormier once, although I can’t remember if that was middle or high school anymore.
Bloom is being very mischievous there, but also characteristically astute (as you shrewdly point out). One might have thought this would be the esoteric Balzac of Seraphita (still unread by me, I hasten to confess). But apparently not...
By the time I was in hs the turn to young adult and popular stuff was already underway, and yet still we read a lot of classics: Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Melville etc. I did take a 101 AP lit course, but didn’t score high enough on the exam for the college credit (I was sort of temperamentally unsuited for literary criticism at that point in my life – I thought it was overly formal and structural and ruined the beauty of its subject of analysis. I have a memory of writing a sonnet protesting sonnet form as part of an assignment) so I wound up taking English 101 again in sophomore(?) year of undergrad. The high school level syllabus was definitely more traditionalist, although still looking back the college syllabus was structured rather differently than I think it would be today (DFW and Hemingway! Morrison maybe the only female author!)
Interesting. We didn't get Dante and barely any Melville. I don't think there was any YA except that things like Stevenson and Dickens and Twain were considered akin to YA earlier in the century. And Harper Lee, I guess.
Yeah, it wasn’t moby dick or anything, but we read Bartlby in that AP 101. I had a world literature course that was basically Gilgamesh, Odyssey, inferno. Really more like “epic poems of the world” than world literature, but I wasn’t complaining! The VA was mostly stuff like The Outsiders & miscellaneous 1980s teen stuff. I got assigned Robert Cormier once, although I can’t remember if that was middle or high school anymore.
Bloom is being very mischievous there, but also characteristically astute (as you shrewdly point out). One might have thought this would be the esoteric Balzac of Seraphita (still unread by me, I hasten to confess). But apparently not...
Interestingly, I don't even think Yeats's Balzac in that moment in A Vision is the Balzac of Seraphita but the Balzac of the Human Comedy.
Yes, definitely.
Reason not the need, John.
Indeed. She called spirits from the vasty deep and they came—who am I to complain?