/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6341420]

What was the quality of your high school's education? My English teachers never mentioned verse again after 9th grade.

[Anonymous No.6341446]

>>6341420
literature-wise, shitty
they want to imply a lot of works from our contry are GOAT when they aren't much more than "fine" (while ignoring the few goats we have and almost completely ignoring the rest of the world)

philosophy-wise, it's a nice introduction

[Anonymous No.6341451]

>>6341420

9th grade was interesting, I took some time on my own to read all of the Inferno because we only covered part of 2 cantos in class.

10th grade exposed me to some decent stuff, but the teachers were disgusting relativists (it was Honors English / AP World History combined class)

11th grade was a waste after the first few months. At first we studied Poe in more depth, Thoreau, Emerson, etc. and by the end we were reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close / some book about why fast food is bad / The Jungle -- utter shit

12th grade started shit with Barbara Kingsolver / Joseph Conrad, but got better with Invisible Man, Catch 22, Shakespeare, and a SHITLOAD of TS Eliot. AP Lit got me back into poetry again

[Anonymous No.6341455]

Pretty good actually. Mostly read British and American fiction. Decent focus on fairly recent poets as well, Ezra Pound, EE Cummings, TS Eliot, etc

[Anonymous No.6341462]

>>6341420
my high school was an utter joke

small catholic high school. teachers were really awful. for some reason my state make private school teachers have teaching licenses, so a lot of them really didn't even have a clue how to teach. a lot of them were real idiots who didn't know anything more about their subject than what was in the textbook

[Anonymous No.6341517]

I live in a third world country called Lithuania. We study only about our literature (which is terrible (mostly agriculture shit and culture that is behind the world at that time)). Kafka, Camus and maybe one or two other names thrown in but that's all.

[Anonymous No.6341547]

>>6341517
I'm american, but took a class on Lithuanian literature in college. Most of it was boring shit about being a peasant. The rest of it was about hating Russians.

[Anonymous No.6341589]

9th grade - A Separate Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, The Odyssey, and Alas, Babylon

10th - Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, shoes

11th - Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye

12th - Frankenstein, Brave New World, bunch of poetry

High school was fine. Texas doesn't give a shit about literature. Took on-level classes after freshman year so I missed out on a lot.

[Anonymous No.6341646]

>What was the quality of your high school's education?

Very nice. Freshman year we studied Ionesco, Julliet, Romanticism (with Hugo as centerpiece, we studied Les Miserables and Ruy Blas) and used it as an occasion to look at Romantic paintings (I remember having to comment on Gericault and Blake) and to discuss Byron, Goethe, Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Stendhal, some realism (Maupassant, Zola), La Fontaine, dandyism (dat Barbey d'Aurevilly), and a bunch of stuff that I can't clearly remember, but that was mostly interesting.

Sophomore year was 17th century moralists and classicism (Racine, Corneille, Molière, La Bruyère, Pascal, La Fontaine again) with some venturing into 18th century (a bit of Montesquieu and Voltaire), as well as some Montaigne and some Kafka, romantic poetry (Baudelaire, Hugo again, Rimbaud), and two others themes I don' remember (there were mainly four themes I think).

Junior year (last year of HS in my country) was philosophy, as we already had taken the definitive test for literature. I remember having to write commentaries on Machiavel, Nietzsche, Bergson, and discussing among others Kant, Freud, Mill, Leibniz, Pascal (again), Aristotle's syllogistic. Wasn't listening too much in that class.


Now that I write it out I'm surprised there weren't more foreign authors. But again, my memories are very muddy, and we were in scientific section and as such considered literature plebs, so our curriculum wasn't as comprehensive as that of the guys in literary section.

[Anonymous No.6341658]

>>6341589

>Texas doesn't give a shit about literature

Can confirm this as a current Texan.

9th: House on Mango Street, Romeo & Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, some short stories

10th: Animal Farm, The Iliad, loads of persuasive essays

11th: Moby Dick, and some YA shit

12th: How to Read Literature Like a Professor, other "self-improvement" books

The school library was absolutely atrocious. The only philosophy book was The Writings of Confucius, no classics, politics/economics unheard of, and the selves were mainly stocked with YA shit.

Lord Jesus save me from this hell.

[Anonymous No.6341659]

Italian schools are like miniature universities: you choose an area in which to specialize, and you spend five years studying only the subjects relevant to that field.

My thing was Classical Studies. For five years, I've studied Ancient Greek and Latin, translating and reading the Classics (and believe me, it's real shitty when you're 14), read all the great authors of Italian Literature well into the 20th century and tried to wrap my head around the major thinkers of the History of Western Philosophy. My teachers weren't always top notch, but the content, for the most part, made it worth it.

So I guess my education was pretty good.

[Anonymous No.6341664]

>>6341659
Why doesn't the U.S. have this schooling system?

[Anonymous No.6341671]

In our senior year, we studied the metaphysical poets.

[Anonymous No.6341674]

>>6341646
Forgot to mention I had a cool guy as a Latin teacher, we translated Ovid, Virgil, Apuleius, Tacitus, Augustine, some parts of the Vulgate, plus the obigatory Cicero and Seneca, as well as some cooking recipes. But that was an option, dunno if that counts.

[Anonymous No.6341686]

>>6341664
Sounds good in theory, but I don't think you know just how bad the average italian student is...

[Anonymous No.6341697]

>>6341664
To tell you the truth, I may be overselling its actual merits because I personally enjoyed my curriculum. More often than not, people realize the decision they made (or were pressured to make) when they were 14 isn't really what they want to study and so and spend the last years of high school depressed, so we have to deal with huge dropout rates.

[Anonymous No.6341707]

public school:
Freshman year- very basic garbage, orwell, huxley, some random minority authors for diversity.

Sophomore: lord of the flies, catcher in the rye, shitty minority books, and a few shakespeare plays
Moby dick as well
Junior year: one play by shakespeare, pride and prejudice, the scarlett letter, some dickens, and lots of poetry

Senior year: two shakespeare plays, heart of darkness, most of shakespeare's sonnets, the stranger, jane eyre, death of a salesman, a play by ibsen. Also lots of modern american poetry, ts eliot, robert frost, etc

Literature courses in American schools are basically shakespeare general with a survey of British and American works on the side

[Anonymous No.6341728]

>>6341446
Which country?

[Anonymous No.6341774]

>>6341664
because america prides itseld on having a "democratic" educational system meaning every one gets the same education unlike the tiered systems that european countries have

[Anonymous No.6341810]

Hey guys, I know this is a bit off topic but have you ever written an 8000 word essay before? How long did it take you? Just started on mine (it's my BA thesis) and the first draft is due on Tuesday.

[Anonymous No.6341813]

>>6341547
Interesting. Wouldn't have thought that Lithuanian literature gets studied in America sometimes. I'd suggest The White Shroud by Antanas Škėma if you are able and want to. No "peasant" shit at all since it's modern, existentialism, written in America.

[Anonymous No.6341932]

>>6341589
"Shoes" was supposed to be "snore"

[Anonymous No.6342173]

>>6341810

Longest I've written was about 4500 words, I wrote it in about 16 hours. I had been researching it/thinking about it for a few weeks up to that point though. The writing process is generally much shorter than the time you spend thinking about it

[Anonymous No.6342209]

>>6341420
My high school literature education was amazing.

In 9th and 10th grade we had this old fucking bat that had zero notion of literary analysis. She claimed she couldn't see any sexual themes in the language of Coleridge's Kublai Khan. She was however a totally stickler for grammar and structure.

11th and 12th were the shit. My teacher was like drop dead gorgeous graduate student, from a nearby state university, that was writing her own book. We had the common fare with the addition of some of the pieces from her coursework.

She introduced me to McCarthy, David Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

[Muck Bulligan !!ryE2gEjGbpu No.6342223]

>>6341451
>started shit with...Joseph Conrad
>thinking you can appreciate Eliot without appreciating Conrad
>actually being this fucking stupid