/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1940870]

>sign up for a college intro lit class
>read a ton of classics like Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Austen, Melville, Cervantes, etc. in preparations of the class
>hope to be discussing classic literature
>get the list of books to go buy
>mfw

I am seriously disappointed. Coraline. I am reading Coraline for my College lit class. None of the 8 novels we are reading I have ever heard of (except Coraline).

In retrospect, I thought college english would be something it (not at the beginning, anyway), is not.
Should I even take the class?

[Sunhawk !nZQ2xl.g.6 No.1940889]

People are complaining about that English classes a lot on here lately. They can't be that bad.

[Anonymous No.1940886]

What are the other books?

[Anonymous No.1940894]

In my first Introductory course we read awesome shit like Gawain, Beowulf, Utopia, Richard III, Dr. Faustus, and Twelfth Night.

Sucks for you, bro.

[Brownbear !Wfn4kkpLag!!fEGZw8wphGR No.1940893]

>>1940870
>>1940870

have you read Coraline before?
or are you just judging something before you've read it?

[Anonymous No.1940896]

>>1940893

>implying you can't judge something without reading it

[Anonymous No.1940902]

>>1940886

Persepolis: Story of a Childhood by Satrapi
Assasination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
How to Breathe Underwater by Orringer
What Narcissism Means to Me by Hoagland
Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Diaz
Coraline by Gaiman
Lizzie Borden in Love by Baggott
Glass Menagerie by Williams.

[Anonymous No.1940905]

>>1940902

Persepolis is aight.

But yeah, dump the class.

[Anonymous No.1940906]

OP, only take the intro course if you feel like you need an introduction to interpreting texts. If you feel that your reading is proficient enough, skip the intro course and take another course that comports with your interests.

[Anonymous No.1940911]

>coraline
>persepolis

Just watch the movies. Seriously.

[Anonymous No.1940918]

>>1940902
Don't take this class. Can't you take any non-intro ones?

[Anonymous No.1940936]

>read a ton of stuff that college lit students should be reading anyway
>complain when introduced to new things

Would you rather pay $50,000 to be told to read things you've already read?

[Anonymous No.1940939]

>>1940936

This Anon actually makes a good point.

You already know to read the good stuff, your classes should push your horizons.

[Anonymous No.1940942]

>>1940918
As a freshman, no. I am taking this class plus a rhetorical writing class first semester. Planning on, during first semester, officially changing my major to English; then I can take non-intro courses.

My reading skills are: I can read fast, but I don't get much from books other than entertainment and momentary existential bits of thought. Im hoping to learn how to appreciate literature, respond to it, and process it differently than I am now so when I take my upper level courses I will know more.

[Anonymous No.1940947]

>>1940936
Thanks a lot, anon. A different way of looking at it.

[Anonymous No.1940962]

>>1940942

>Im hoping to learn how to appreciate literature, respond to it, and process it differently than I am now so when I take my upper level courses I will know more.

Stick with the introductory course, in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.1940974]

>>1940896
>implying you can judge things without enough info

[Anonymous No.1940984]

thanks guys.

[Anonymous No.1940983]

>20th century english (english language, not exclusively from England) literature class
>get ready for some Faulkner, Pound, Woolf, Beckett, Hemingway, Nabokov and Ginsberg
>see the list
>shakespeare, canterbury tales, poe, dickinson, fenimore cooper, fucking BEOWULF
>see the title of the class again
>20th century
>mfw

[Anonymous No.1940987]

>>1940974

Info does not necessarily mean first hand experience.

[Anonymous No.1941014]

>>1940983
Are you sure it wasn't up to the 20th century?

OP: Can you switch to any other sections? I would say you definitely need the Intro level course, but generally these are taught by adjuncts with pretty lenient standards. Pushing your horizons might be good, but this class sounds a bit too much like that prof's ~favorite books~ and not like it was structured to provide a balanced introductory course.

[Anonymous No.1941129]

Why are you an English major? Do you hate yourself or something?

[Anonymous No.1941217]

When I was in highschool there was an english teacher who based the whole class around reading Harry Potter even though it was supposed to be a literature class.

[Anonymous No.1941436]

>>1941217

[Anonymous No.1941441]

>>1941014
>Can you switch to any other sections? I would say you definitely need the Intro level course, but generally these are taught by adjuncts with pretty lenient standards.
I would be surprised if it wasn't their first semester teaching too, with that curriculum. Yeesh.

Actually though OP you really seem like a pretentious douche in the way you're reacting to this. Every group of freshman soon-to-be English majors has a dickhead who thinks he's smarter than everyone else there because he's read some big name "classic" authors and was the smartest dude in his high school. don't become that dude. everybody else in the English program likes to read too and they got the same test scores you did to get into the university. Oh! And even though the grad student who's gonna be teaching you might not be especially good at teaching yet, please do not delude yourself into believing you're intellectually superior to her.

[Anonymous No.1941448]

I read this my first year of undergrad.

I guffaw'd

[Anonymous No.1941452]

>>1940902
Stick in the class OP. I just graduated with an English degree and I never heard of 90% of the books I was supposed to read until I read them, and some of them became my favorite novels of all time.

[Anonymous No.1941613]

>>1941436
There was a creative writing teacher who was obsessed with Twilight also, she would read parts of the book aloud in class for "inspiration". She also showed obvious bias towards this group of girls who were in the class who liked Twilight.

I'm not sure if the Harry Potter thing was completely true, since I didn't take the class, although I know they did read at least the first 3 books because some christian girl in one of my classes was upset because her parents didn't want her to read Harry Potter and she was worried she would fail the class, and someone else had told me that they had deadlines for each book to be completed and the class was supposed to be at the third book at that time.

[Anonymous No.1941980]

>>1940902
>Assasination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

yeah, that section is probably bullshit literature apologetics for anti-intellectuals.

[Anonymous No.1941985]

A lot of snobbery in this thread.

Coraline's actually a very good book. Makes me laugh when there are anons that will defend Harry Potter(children's/adolescent literature), but then shit on Gaiman's work.

If I was your teacher, I would have gone with The Graveyard Book instead, but hey, not my course.

[Anonymous No.1942005]

>>1941441
>I would be surprised if it wasn't their first semester teaching too, with that curriculum. Yeesh.

Yeah, this either has to be a great teacher who knows exactly what they're going to do with this course or a naive first-year grad student who forgot what their classmates were like as a freshman.

[Anonymous No.1942008]

A couple of these points have been mentioned, but it is important to restate them.

Firstly, you are taking an introduction class. Do you think that the professors want another bunch of children interpreting classic texts, who have no real clue on what they are doing? You are subsequently going to parrot off whatever essay or article you read on the topic. It's boring for them to read and mark, the discussions will be fruitless, and you will wont learn.

Secondly, by reading simpler texts you are going to be able to hone your techniques. Sure, you may have read a lot of the classics, but I doubt you know what is going on with them technically. Appreciate your texts and learn from them - don't be a pretentious douche.

And really, the classics are done to death. I think that there shouldn't be any classes at all which consider them. If you want to jerk off to the great authors, there is already SO MUCH material on them available to you. Reading new and aspiring authors, no matter how "bad" they are (as if you have the authority to judge them), is essential to the development of literature as a field.

[Anonymous No.1942013]

This thread reminds me, I was talking to this girl at my college once and she was taking Intro to Lit. She had apparently been assigned Watchmen for the course and she commented how it was interesting but she was up to the part where Dr. Manhattan was on Mars and she had a hard time relating to him because he's blue and she doesn't know anyone who's blue. Something to keep in mind if any of you ever teach a course.

[Anonymous No.1942029]

>>1942013

if someone said that to me I'd turn 360 degrees and walk away

[Anonymous No.1942035]

>>1942029

Well yeah, I opted to not reveal I had read the book.

[Anonymous No.1942047]

>>1942008
This is a good post that sums up my feelings about snobbery towards YA or contemporary fiction in general and classicsturbation pretty well.

>>1942013
I feel like the problem here is that teaching Watchmen in an entry-level English course is like teaching The Jungle in the same course. Watchmen would offer more to people interested in comics, just like The Jungle has more historical than literary relevancy. I've been told by people that I can't appreciate it as well because I didn't grow up with super hero comics. Maybe that's true, since I didn't feel like I got as much out of it as its rabid fanbase. I feel like it's a bad choice to introduce to people who have never read more serious comics, especially to try to introduce it to them as a facet of literature (which is like saying sculpture is a facet of painting, but that's another digression.)