Over at Good Reports I’ve posted “The Last Canon,” which is the first essay I’ve written in years. It’s a return to a question I wrote about 25 years ago (yes, it’s been that long!): What are students who are studying English in university actually reading?
Back in 2001 I noticed that the books on the required reading lists for undergraduate courses were getting shorter. Since then we’ve been hearing a lot more about how students don’t, and in some cases can’t read as much.
This made me wonder: Just what books constitute the list of works that you would expect every student of literature will have read by the time they graduate? I’m not saying mine is a definitive list of great books, or even a list of the books that I think everyone should read, but I had fun playing with it.
Alex Good 
I checked out the reading list for 1st year students at Newcastle Uni here, in the first 3 months they will have done Beowulf, The general prologue from Canterbury Tales, Thomas More’s Utopia ( hadn’t heard of that but sounds interesting) Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser. Arenaissance play about 2 girls in love – Galatea by John Lyly and an American play Bartleby the Scrivener by Hermann Melville.
The whole curriculum for the degree course sounds fab, wish I could do it!
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That’s an eclectic mix! Mostly short stuff. I assume the next semester they move on to more modern and contemporary writing.
I never looked at first year courses because they tend to be grab-bags that you can’t compare to historical precedents.
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Yeah, the next 2 yrs are the meat and potatoes.
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I couldn’t comment on your dotnet site. I’m assuming that was deliberate on your part?
“Moby-Dick: another Great American Novel, but one that young people seem to have a hard time getting into today. I’m not sure why that is.”
Oh, that is an easy one to answer. Because it is a national geographic’esque nature documentary instead of being strictly a novel. I’m no Great White Savior of Literature and there’s a lot I haven’t read, but there is a lot I have read and I don’t consider myself a slouch in reading. But even I gave up on Moby Dick. Some day I will return and conquer it, but it will be a Project, much like I did with Don Quixote, where I took a whole year to wade through it 😀
As for all your other points, I’m afraid I have to agree with you. 25 years will see classic literature vanish completely from the zeit geist of our culture. Old guards are still holding out now, but we’re going to be gone then and no one will have replaced us.
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I still remember the first time I read Moby-Dick and finding it to be one of the most thrilling experiences I ever had as a reader. I know the interludes where he goes on about whales and the whaling industry put some people off, but I find they fit in perfectly.
Don Quixote, on the other hand, I did find to be a slog. I made it through once and I’m not sure I’ll be reading it again.
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I really enjoyed DQ, as I made reading an “experience”, ie, note taking, quotes, chapter by chapter posts. I took 6 months to go through it and I enjoyed it.
I have a feeling I’d have to do something similar to get through Moby Dick. My memories of chapter upon chapter of whale data is burned into my cortex and I get bored just remembering 😉
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I take notes on everything I read now. I was forgetting too much.
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How long do you take between finishing a book and writing up a review?
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That varies a lot. I usually try to write something up while it’s still fresh in my mind, but notes really help. When I get around to posting things is another matter.
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Gotcha.
I’m not ready to admit that I need to take notes yet. mainly because it really interrupts my flow of reading and in my reviews I usually only care about the big overall picture and not the details.
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And yes, there’s no commenting on Good Reports. There was a reason for that, years ago, and I just stuck with it.
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Considering I don’t even follow that part of your blogging empire, I’m not surprised you turned off comments. I can only imagine the potential flame wars that might have gone on 😀
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Yeah, though originally the problem wasn’t with politics. But then politics took over.
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Same thing as I’ve mentioned regarding short stories: very hard to find anything like a definitive list any more.
On the other hand, the world is so very, very different now, and definitely less monolithic. My school, UT Austin, arranges their courses into various “Areas,” which even as an undergraduate can move students toward specialization. The graduate “Students will be examined on either a fixed reading list or a reading list developed by three faculty members in collaboration with the student. The list will contain 60-80 primary and/or secondary texts.”
Areas include Medieval and Renaissance; Restoration, 18th century, Romantics; Victorian, Modernism; Contemporary and Postmodern (including graphic novels!); and so on. Of course they’ve got a Diverse and Gender Area now, too. And there’s a Single or Dual-Author Area with people like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Faulkner and O’Connor, Dante, and even Rowling and Tolkien.
UT’s pretty serious about their English Department. Not everyone will have read the same books, but that doesn’t mean they won’t know anything!
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That’s a really big school isn’t it? Was it that big when you went there?
I think some programs still read a lot. What I’ve noticed is mainly the way reading lists are shrinking. This made me wonder what works were surviving as texts you could count on everyone knowing. As you say though with the short stories, there aren’t many texts you can point to that everybody knows. For short stories I’d think *something* from Dubliners and something by Hemingway (the Moderns again) would be on the list. I would think Raymond Carver might be on a short story list. But even with all these names it would be hard to pick out individual stories that you’d be surprised an English grad didn’t know.
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It’s a state school and we’re a big state so it was always big. : -)
But I see this as less about reading per se than culture writ large. As our society fractures, it stands to reason that our “common core” will shrink and eventually disappear. As you can imagine, I am not in favor of that. So I agree with your basic premise; I just think it’s a symptom of a much larger problem.
But at the same time I can’t blame the kids for this. They’re not the ones in charge. And as UT shows, there are still opportunities out there. Unfortunately it also shows how the situation is developing into a real Tower of Babel thing, where people have lots of knowledge and little ability to communicate because there’s nothing holding it all together.
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I don’t blame the kids either. I more often feel sorry for them.
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