... known to generations of critics as “Shakespeare’s worst play,” although this is unfair. It’s a pretty bad play if you compare it to Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi, but it starts to look like a very good one if your touchstone is The Spanish Tragedy or The Jew of Malta – in other words, stuff people were actually writing in the early 1590s, and not a gold standard that wouldn’t exist for another ten years. It’s good theater: brutally funny, energetic, mesmerizing.
It is also a play that acknowledges that people get a charge out of watching violence and mutilation and broken social taboos, as long as it happens in the safe space of the theater. (I read it for the first time as a college freshman, in the fall of ‘94 when everyone was watching bootleg copies of Pulp Fiction in the dorms at night, and I think it probably resonated more then than it did for two centuries previously: instinctively, we got the concept of violence as spectacle, revenge as art.)
What I love about this play: First off, it’s got the single best stage direction in Shakespeare: Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand. Eat your heart out, bear.
You can see Shakespeare learning the art of the Big Marlovian Line and making it his own: “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.” “Rome is but a wilderness of tigers / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine.” “When will this fearful slumber have an end?”
It also has Aaron, one of the most badass villains ever. (I think I have mentioned before that I would LOVE to see him played by Samuel L. Jackson.) He’s got some great zingers: “Thou hast undone our mother.” “Villain, I have done thy mother.” “Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?” “Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.” This much is also reminiscent of Marlowe, but once Aaron’s baby son enters the picture, Shakespeare tries out something more complicated and distinctly Shakespearean. Rome eats its young; we’ve already seen Titus kill not only Tamora’s son, but also his own, all in the name of Roman virtue. It’s Aaron, the barbarian, who has real human affection for his child and does everything he can to ensure the baby’s survival: “This before all the world do I prefer ... I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, / And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat, / And cabin in a cave, and bring you up / To be a warrior and command a camp.” There aren’t really any good guys in this play; Romans and Goths and Moors all do unspeakable things to each other, and sometimes to their own families; but to the extent that anyone has any moral claims at all, they’re evenly balanced.
Favorite memory: Freshman Intro to Shakespeare. Classroom performance. Chewable blood pills. Need I say more?
Friday, April 2, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Shakesblogging: The Comedy of Errors
All right. I need to do something to get myself back in the habit of writing regularly, so I thought I'd do a full month's worth of Shakespeare posts for National Poetry Month. (I figure there are about thirty plays that I have something interesting to say about, and this will give me a few passes on the ones I don't.)
Starting a few hours early because of SAA; I'm not sure how much time I'll have over the next few days.
Day One: The Comedy of Errors
What I love about this play: Errors hasn’t got the depth or the lyricism of Shakespeare’s later comedies, and the beating-up-Dromio schtick (which is more or less lifted straight from Plautus) gets really old really fast. But the part that’s not in Plautus, and that takes my breath away, is the backstory / reunion plot with Aegeon and Aemilia. From the very first lines (“Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall / And by the doom of death end woes and all”) it’s evident that even in comedy, Shakespeare likes to play for really high stakes. Even in the most wildly farcical moments, the audience knows there’s a grieving father whose life and happiness are on the line, and the last scene is honestly moving. (Antipholus of Syracuse, too, ends up seriously doubting his sanity -- a nice reminder that actually being inside a farce is uncomfortable and a bit menacing, no matter how enjoyable waching it from the outside may be.)
I also love the way you can trace the outlines of Twelfth Night and the late romances, even in this very early play: tempest, shipwreck, loss, recovery.
Another nice moment is Dromio’s final line: “We came into the world like brother and brother; / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.” One of the things I love about Shakespearean comedy is the breaking down of hierarchies – of gender, age, social rank – in favor of a sort of festive equality. And yes, the endings often seem to restore the normal social order, but I like to think that they also loosen up that order and render it a little more accommodating.
Favorite memory: Watching this at the Globe on my first evening in London last summer. There were two sets of matching balloons representing the two sets of brothers, and when Aegeon told the story of his oldest son’s loss, he released one pair. I remember watching them drift away over the wooden O, getting smaller and smaller in a vast blue sky, and maybe it was jet lag but I came very near to crying.
Starting a few hours early because of SAA; I'm not sure how much time I'll have over the next few days.
Day One: The Comedy of Errors
What I love about this play: Errors hasn’t got the depth or the lyricism of Shakespeare’s later comedies, and the beating-up-Dromio schtick (which is more or less lifted straight from Plautus) gets really old really fast. But the part that’s not in Plautus, and that takes my breath away, is the backstory / reunion plot with Aegeon and Aemilia. From the very first lines (“Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall / And by the doom of death end woes and all”) it’s evident that even in comedy, Shakespeare likes to play for really high stakes. Even in the most wildly farcical moments, the audience knows there’s a grieving father whose life and happiness are on the line, and the last scene is honestly moving. (Antipholus of Syracuse, too, ends up seriously doubting his sanity -- a nice reminder that actually being inside a farce is uncomfortable and a bit menacing, no matter how enjoyable waching it from the outside may be.)
I also love the way you can trace the outlines of Twelfth Night and the late romances, even in this very early play: tempest, shipwreck, loss, recovery.
Another nice moment is Dromio’s final line: “We came into the world like brother and brother; / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.” One of the things I love about Shakespearean comedy is the breaking down of hierarchies – of gender, age, social rank – in favor of a sort of festive equality. And yes, the endings often seem to restore the normal social order, but I like to think that they also loosen up that order and render it a little more accommodating.
Favorite memory: Watching this at the Globe on my first evening in London last summer. There were two sets of matching balloons representing the two sets of brothers, and when Aegeon told the story of his oldest son’s loss, he released one pair. I remember watching them drift away over the wooden O, getting smaller and smaller in a vast blue sky, and maybe it was jet lag but I came very near to crying.
Monday, March 29, 2010
five things I did not know about teaching Basic Comp
1) Junior- and senior-level education majors will try to register for it. Seriously. They're looking for an English course, any English course, to count toward the required language arts concentration, and either they do not know that "basic" is a euphemism for "remedial," or they're looking for the path of least resistance and don't care. (This is a problem, since the course doesn't actually count toward the concentration or toward the credit hours they need for graduation. You have to keep checking the class rolls and e-mail them when they pop up.)
2) The number of students enrolled can be anywhere from 4 (in the spring) to 40 (in the fall). I suspect that spring-semester and fall-semester classes require completely different strategies.
3) There are people -- native speakers of English -- who do not understand about parts of speech. As in, they'll write about "the advertise" or, conversely, "to advertisement a product." I don't know how to help this student. I don't know whether this phenomenon is a sign of a learning disability, but at any rate, it is far, far outside of the limited training in comp that I got as a grad student. (The official party line in my grad program was that native speakers almost never make grammatical errors, which is the sort of claim that makes me wonder whether any of the composition theorists have ever actually taught a class.)
4) My Basic students seem to be taking the class far more seriously than regular freshman comp students, and putting in more effort; they're needier, and they require more help, but they also do what they can to help themselves, including -- amazingly -- asking questions! (I suspect that insecurity and self-doubt are powerful motivators, provided they exist in just the right proportions and don't overwhelm the student's capacity for rational thought. Hell, that's what drove most of us through grad school, isn't it?)
5) A single bright, engaged student can set the tone for the entire class, particularly if it's an older, returning student who is a former addict and now wants to be a substance abuse counselor. I am in awe.
2) The number of students enrolled can be anywhere from 4 (in the spring) to 40 (in the fall). I suspect that spring-semester and fall-semester classes require completely different strategies.
3) There are people -- native speakers of English -- who do not understand about parts of speech. As in, they'll write about "the advertise" or, conversely, "to advertisement a product." I don't know how to help this student. I don't know whether this phenomenon is a sign of a learning disability, but at any rate, it is far, far outside of the limited training in comp that I got as a grad student. (The official party line in my grad program was that native speakers almost never make grammatical errors, which is the sort of claim that makes me wonder whether any of the composition theorists have ever actually taught a class.)
4) My Basic students seem to be taking the class far more seriously than regular freshman comp students, and putting in more effort; they're needier, and they require more help, but they also do what they can to help themselves, including -- amazingly -- asking questions! (I suspect that insecurity and self-doubt are powerful motivators, provided they exist in just the right proportions and don't overwhelm the student's capacity for rational thought. Hell, that's what drove most of us through grad school, isn't it?)
5) A single bright, engaged student can set the tone for the entire class, particularly if it's an older, returning student who is a former addict and now wants to be a substance abuse counselor. I am in awe.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
AWOL
Hi, everyone. :: slinks back in guiltily :: Sorry about the blogging hiatus. You can put it down to a combination of being distracted by personal / family stuff, and mid-spring semester slump. (I've always had a hard time with spring semester. It feels like this low, low ebbtide in the year, with all the short days and the greyness and the cold, and the shininess of the new classes wears off much faster than it does in the fall. The students are worn out, I'm worn out, and the nine weeks between the beginning of the semester and spring break feel like a long, long slog. There are many things I love about the eccentricity of the academic calendar, but this is not one of them.)
So, anyway:
-- Courseblogging stuff: Thanks to everyone who posted comments on my last post! I think I figured out a reasonable amount of stuff to do with Long Victorian Novels, or at least this particular novel. Here's how it broke down.
- First couple of days: some collateral readings from the "Woman Question" and "Industrialization" sections of the Norton. (Might do more of this next time around -- this is a novel about, among other things, education, and I'm thinking it might be interesting to read some selections from "The Idea of a University" alongside it, and I can see some connections to "Dover Beach" if I squint.)
- Third day: close reading of selected passages. (This did not go over particularly well, but I think it's necessary prep for the short paper that ties in with this novel. I'm still casting around for good ways to get students to focus on language, especially with fiction; mostly, they seem to want to skip straight to plot and character.)
- Fourth and fifth days: Some excerpts from the magazine in which the novel was originally serialized and the author's correspondence with the editor (Day 4), and some selected passages from critical articles about the novel, which pairs of students had to support or refute with evidence from the text (Day 5). They did pretty well with this stuff, and I think it was a nice opportunity to introduce some of the things that professional critics think about.
- Sixth day: Clips from the miniseries. (Oh, all right, you can tell I'm getting tired when my lesson plan consists of YouTube.)
And here we have two weeks of classes fitted.
-- A real live Shakespeare play on our campus! Yay! The theater department did a fantastic job, I thought, and I'm hoping there will be more (although our student demographics make all but a few Shakespeare plays tough to cast, since there simply aren't enough men). I don't know how many of my Shakespeare students made it to a performance, but one of my favorite freshmen from the survey class liked it so much that she went back twice :)
-- Advising season is upon us, and it's coming home to me that I really have no clue what I'm doing. I'm not sure how to get some of these students into my office at all, much less tell them in a nonjudgmental way to get their act together, much less give advice on how to do this. (One of my advisees is in my Shakespeare class. She doesn't turn in papers, she doesn't participate, and she hasn't written five out of six in-class responses. And yet, she keeps coming to class, as if merely being present in the room will magically cause her to pass. And this is the one I know how to find.)
-- Anybody else planning to be at SAA next month? Should we have a meet-up?
So, anyway:
-- Courseblogging stuff: Thanks to everyone who posted comments on my last post! I think I figured out a reasonable amount of stuff to do with Long Victorian Novels, or at least this particular novel. Here's how it broke down.
- First couple of days: some collateral readings from the "Woman Question" and "Industrialization" sections of the Norton. (Might do more of this next time around -- this is a novel about, among other things, education, and I'm thinking it might be interesting to read some selections from "The Idea of a University" alongside it, and I can see some connections to "Dover Beach" if I squint.)
- Third day: close reading of selected passages. (This did not go over particularly well, but I think it's necessary prep for the short paper that ties in with this novel. I'm still casting around for good ways to get students to focus on language, especially with fiction; mostly, they seem to want to skip straight to plot and character.)
- Fourth and fifth days: Some excerpts from the magazine in which the novel was originally serialized and the author's correspondence with the editor (Day 4), and some selected passages from critical articles about the novel, which pairs of students had to support or refute with evidence from the text (Day 5). They did pretty well with this stuff, and I think it was a nice opportunity to introduce some of the things that professional critics think about.
- Sixth day: Clips from the miniseries. (Oh, all right, you can tell I'm getting tired when my lesson plan consists of YouTube.)
And here we have two weeks of classes fitted.
-- A real live Shakespeare play on our campus! Yay! The theater department did a fantastic job, I thought, and I'm hoping there will be more (although our student demographics make all but a few Shakespeare plays tough to cast, since there simply aren't enough men). I don't know how many of my Shakespeare students made it to a performance, but one of my favorite freshmen from the survey class liked it so much that she went back twice :)
-- Advising season is upon us, and it's coming home to me that I really have no clue what I'm doing. I'm not sure how to get some of these students into my office at all, much less tell them in a nonjudgmental way to get their act together, much less give advice on how to do this. (One of my advisees is in my Shakespeare class. She doesn't turn in papers, she doesn't participate, and she hasn't written five out of six in-class responses. And yet, she keeps coming to class, as if merely being present in the room will magically cause her to pass. And this is the one I know how to find.)
-- Anybody else planning to be at SAA next month? Should we have a meet-up?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Courseblogging: Hey, Victorianists...
How do you keep the energy level of a class from sagging when you teach those long novels? I'm a bit puzzled what to do in the classroom for the next week or so, honestly -- it feels like it takes the students far longer to read a 400-page book than I really have material to fill the class, especially since there's a limit to the number of things we can have a meaningful discussion about when they haven't yet read the entire novel.
We've already had a couple of background-and-historical-context days, and I've tried to have a central theme of sorts for each day's discussion, but I'm already feeling a bit tapped out, and we're only halfway through...
We've already had a couple of background-and-historical-context days, and I've tried to have a central theme of sorts for each day's discussion, but I'm already feeling a bit tapped out, and we're only halfway through...
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Rehearsal
The drama department at Misnomer U. is gearing up for their first Shakespeare production, or at least the first one within recent memory. I got invited to rehearsal yesterday, to stumble through a very hastily-improvised lecture about staging conditions in Shakespeare's day and answer any questions they had about the text. And my God, did they have questions, mostly about how to parse this phrase or that one (it was like a round of "Stump the English professor," with lines flying at me quickly and out of context. The sentence that finally defeated me and caused me to say something totally wrong was "When thou wakest, let love forbid / Sleep his seat on thy eyelid"). They also wanted to know whether fairies were nocturnal, whether it was appropriate for Oberon to put on a special cloak when he was meant to be invisible, and whether Snout's "By'r lakin, a parlous fear" meant that he was Irish. (I think the answers to those questions are "Sorta," "No," and "Sure, but a Resurrection Stone and an Elder Wand would probably be overkill," not necessarily in that order -- but I cannot swear to it.) I may also have referred to Theseus (the one in Greek mythology, not necessarily Shakespeare) as a "horndog" at one point. They probably won't let me speak without notes again.
I stuck around to watch the rehearsal afterward. I've always been a little in awe of actors (the same way that I'm in awe of, say, bungee jumpers, because I KNOW there's no way I could ever bring myself to do that; but also in the way that I'm in awe of Michelangelo). That awe is not diminished by watching them stumble and forget lines in their first rough run-through. They have to think about all this stuff that I never think about when I'm teaching this play (like, how do you make that four-way free-for-all in the forest both comprehensible and plausibly frenetic, and how do you restrain Hermia long enough for everyone to get their lines out and still make it look dynamic, and where is Oberon in all of this?) And it's a little amazing to think that in a matter of weeks, this will all look very slick and polished and terribly easy.
(They will do it by missing classes, of course. Theater majors always disappear for the week or so before a show, and I've been known to mutter uncharitable things about them; but I'm resolved, this time, to remember that they're doing something important and beautiful.)
I stuck around to watch the rehearsal afterward. I've always been a little in awe of actors (the same way that I'm in awe of, say, bungee jumpers, because I KNOW there's no way I could ever bring myself to do that; but also in the way that I'm in awe of Michelangelo). That awe is not diminished by watching them stumble and forget lines in their first rough run-through. They have to think about all this stuff that I never think about when I'm teaching this play (like, how do you make that four-way free-for-all in the forest both comprehensible and plausibly frenetic, and how do you restrain Hermia long enough for everyone to get their lines out and still make it look dynamic, and where is Oberon in all of this?) And it's a little amazing to think that in a matter of weeks, this will all look very slick and polished and terribly easy.
(They will do it by missing classes, of course. Theater majors always disappear for the week or so before a show, and I've been known to mutter uncharitable things about them; but I'm resolved, this time, to remember that they're doing something important and beautiful.)
Sunday, January 31, 2010
idle musings about high school English
Congrats to Horace for correctly identifying the poem from my last stick-figure lit post: Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
I've been enjoying Dr Crazy's and What Now's posts about the high school English curriculum. I have nothing very profound to add to the discussion, especially compared to What Now's firsthand expertise, but it's got me thinking about my own h.s. English experiences.
Three out of four of my high school English teachers were terrific. The fourth one (ninth grade) was fairly awful, for the simple reason that she didn't like books. Seriously. I swear, she described EVERYTHING we read that year as "stupid." Romeo and Juliet, for example, was "a play about two stupid kids who think they're in love when it's really just infatuation, and they die because they won't obey their parents, who know better." (Curiously, this is a moderately accurate description of Shakespeare's source, but I doubt she knew that.) Anyway, she didn't quite manage to ruin Romeo and Juliet for me, or "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (a stupid story about a stupid man who won't face up to reality), but I do think I would have fallen in love with Great Expectations much, much earlier if I had encountered it with almost any other teacher.
My intermediate-school teachers were similarly uninspiring, so I went into tenth-grade English with minimal expectations. It probably wasn't until halfway through the year that I realized I was actually kind of liking the class, and was good at it. The teacher was a middle-aged woman, no nonsense about her, not particularly funny or charismatic -- but she respected the written word, and that mattered. (She was also capable of conveying this respect for Dickens while at the same time pointing out that the female characters in A Tale of Two Cities were basically ciphers; this is probably the closest thing to a feminist perspective that I encountered during my high school years. My last two teachers were men with big voices and big personalities; they, too, were very, very good at what they did, but except for the odd Emily Dickinson poem, women writers weren't on the program. I didn't notice this absence until college.)
Anyway, here's what I remember of our reading list:
Ninth grade: Lord of the Flies, Black Boy, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," "Barn Burning," Romeo and Juliet; one independent reading book (assigned by the teacher); probably some other works I don't remember. (Looking back on this list, I think some curriculum designer may have been going for a coming-of-age theme? At any rate, it didn't translate; I don't remember our teacher drawing any connections between works in the classroom.)
Tenth grade: As You Like It, Julius Caesar, A Doll's House, A Tale of Two Cities, Cry, The Beloved Country, Night, one group project book (chosen by the group from an approved list; I still bear a grudge against my classmates for picking Silas Marner). I am positive that we must have read a number of other works, but I don't remember what they were.
Eleventh grade (American lit): "Civil Disobedience," Death of a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, Catcher in the Rye, various short stories (an awful lot of which seemed to be by Hemingway), rather a lot of poetry.
Twelfth grade (AP English lit): Huge chunks of the Bible and Edith Hamilton's Mythology (to be completed over the summer); The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, The Infernal Machine, Antigone, Candide, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Absalom, Absalom; a whole boatload of poetry and short stories (of which I think Yukio Mishima's "Patriotism" was the sole non-Western selection). Plus one longer, college-style essay on a play of the student's choosing. (I picked Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding and fell giddily in love, much to my teacher's delight as well as my own.)
Looking back over this, it seems like a wildly unbalanced list in some ways; in addition to the near-absence of female and nonwhite writers (even canonical ones), there's the peculiar fact that I went away to college with a very good grounding in Shakespeare, a decent knowledge of ancient Greek drama, and absolutely no clue about anything in between. I can't complain; college filled in most of those gaps, and there was nothing to stop my teenage-self from going on an Alice Walker kick in my spare time (which I did). There's relatively little comedy, too; if I were going to make up a reading list of my own, I'd want to throw in some Austen or Chaucer or Wilde to lighten things up.
Also: man, my AP English class was hardcore. And I loved it. In fact, I think that was the year I fell in love with about 90% of everything we read, and surprised myself by loving Faulkner. Partly, I think that was a maturity thing; partly it was the sheer force of the teacher's personality; maybe it was also the fact that we shared a weakness for darkness and blood and family curses.
And also: You know what my eleventh- and twelfth-grade teachers did that really struck a chord with me? They framed classic literature as transgressive. (Which it totally was, most of it, in its day; we got to hear all about those wild and crazy Transcendentalists.) And I already knew, from my own experience, that reading this stuff for pleasure was more than a little countercultural in my massive concrete-block suburban public high school. I learned how to tune out the mandatory pep rallies by reading Greek tragedy. It was awesome. Maybe that's the way to sell books to teenagers.
I've been enjoying Dr Crazy's and What Now's posts about the high school English curriculum. I have nothing very profound to add to the discussion, especially compared to What Now's firsthand expertise, but it's got me thinking about my own h.s. English experiences.
Three out of four of my high school English teachers were terrific. The fourth one (ninth grade) was fairly awful, for the simple reason that she didn't like books. Seriously. I swear, she described EVERYTHING we read that year as "stupid." Romeo and Juliet, for example, was "a play about two stupid kids who think they're in love when it's really just infatuation, and they die because they won't obey their parents, who know better." (Curiously, this is a moderately accurate description of Shakespeare's source, but I doubt she knew that.) Anyway, she didn't quite manage to ruin Romeo and Juliet for me, or "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (a stupid story about a stupid man who won't face up to reality), but I do think I would have fallen in love with Great Expectations much, much earlier if I had encountered it with almost any other teacher.
My intermediate-school teachers were similarly uninspiring, so I went into tenth-grade English with minimal expectations. It probably wasn't until halfway through the year that I realized I was actually kind of liking the class, and was good at it. The teacher was a middle-aged woman, no nonsense about her, not particularly funny or charismatic -- but she respected the written word, and that mattered. (She was also capable of conveying this respect for Dickens while at the same time pointing out that the female characters in A Tale of Two Cities were basically ciphers; this is probably the closest thing to a feminist perspective that I encountered during my high school years. My last two teachers were men with big voices and big personalities; they, too, were very, very good at what they did, but except for the odd Emily Dickinson poem, women writers weren't on the program. I didn't notice this absence until college.)
Anyway, here's what I remember of our reading list:
Ninth grade: Lord of the Flies, Black Boy, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," "Barn Burning," Romeo and Juliet; one independent reading book (assigned by the teacher); probably some other works I don't remember. (Looking back on this list, I think some curriculum designer may have been going for a coming-of-age theme? At any rate, it didn't translate; I don't remember our teacher drawing any connections between works in the classroom.)
Tenth grade: As You Like It, Julius Caesar, A Doll's House, A Tale of Two Cities, Cry, The Beloved Country, Night, one group project book (chosen by the group from an approved list; I still bear a grudge against my classmates for picking Silas Marner). I am positive that we must have read a number of other works, but I don't remember what they were.
Eleventh grade (American lit): "Civil Disobedience," Death of a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, Catcher in the Rye, various short stories (an awful lot of which seemed to be by Hemingway), rather a lot of poetry.
Twelfth grade (AP English lit): Huge chunks of the Bible and Edith Hamilton's Mythology (to be completed over the summer); The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, The Infernal Machine, Antigone, Candide, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Absalom, Absalom; a whole boatload of poetry and short stories (of which I think Yukio Mishima's "Patriotism" was the sole non-Western selection). Plus one longer, college-style essay on a play of the student's choosing. (I picked Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding and fell giddily in love, much to my teacher's delight as well as my own.)
Looking back over this, it seems like a wildly unbalanced list in some ways; in addition to the near-absence of female and nonwhite writers (even canonical ones), there's the peculiar fact that I went away to college with a very good grounding in Shakespeare, a decent knowledge of ancient Greek drama, and absolutely no clue about anything in between. I can't complain; college filled in most of those gaps, and there was nothing to stop my teenage-self from going on an Alice Walker kick in my spare time (which I did). There's relatively little comedy, too; if I were going to make up a reading list of my own, I'd want to throw in some Austen or Chaucer or Wilde to lighten things up.
Also: man, my AP English class was hardcore. And I loved it. In fact, I think that was the year I fell in love with about 90% of everything we read, and surprised myself by loving Faulkner. Partly, I think that was a maturity thing; partly it was the sheer force of the teacher's personality; maybe it was also the fact that we shared a weakness for darkness and blood and family curses.
And also: You know what my eleventh- and twelfth-grade teachers did that really struck a chord with me? They framed classic literature as transgressive. (Which it totally was, most of it, in its day; we got to hear all about those wild and crazy Transcendentalists.) And I already knew, from my own experience, that reading this stuff for pleasure was more than a little countercultural in my massive concrete-block suburban public high school. I learned how to tune out the mandatory pep rallies by reading Greek tragedy. It was awesome. Maybe that's the way to sell books to teenagers.
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