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/lit/ - Literature

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21340967 No.21340967 [Reply] [Original]

What author do high schools make all students read in your country?
>USA
>Shakespeare (I assume this is also true in every other anglophone country)

>> No.21341186

Poland:
>Shakespeare's Macbeth
>Camus' Plague
>Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
>Conrad's Heart of Darkness
>Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Rex

>Prus' Doll
>Wyspiański's Wedding
>Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke
>Fredro's Revenge (might've been middle school material)
>9001 different works of Mickiewicz

>Fragments of Dante's Comedy
>Fragments of Ecclesiastes
>Fragments of Song of Roland
>Fragmentary poetry of Baczyński, Szymborska, and probably a few more poets I can't seem to remember right now
I enjoyed practically all of them, except for Mickiewicz and Fredro. Mickiewicz in particular still makes me seethe to this day
Not /lit/, but we also did literary analysis of The Seventh Seal by Bergman. Good shit

>> No.21341195

USA
>Holocaust boohooing
>Slavery boohooing
>Latinx immigrant shlock
>The Catcher in the Rye
>The Great Gatsby
>To Kill a Mockingbird
>Excruciatingly painful forays into Shakespeare

>> No.21341344

USA
They made us watch GAY PORN and SHIT IN KITTY LITTER and use PRONOUNS SHIT that's why I SHOT UP THE SHOOL

>> No.21341413

do schools in europe really get their students to read long-form fiction? there was never any sort of assigned reading here, just the teacher reading out loud

>> No.21341419

>>21340967
USA here, what I can remember of my high school reading list (not in order) was like this:
>Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare
>various works by Edgar Allan Poe
>essays from Thoreau and Emerson
>Songs of Innocence and Experience by Blake
>lots of e e cummings
>The Awakening and some other short stories by Kate Chopin
>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
>The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
>Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
>Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
>Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
>To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
>Araby by James Joyce
>An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
>The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry
>Frederick Douglass's Narrative
>Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
>Some Sophocles and Aristophones

>> No.21341472

>>21341419
They made you read Bartleby and not Moby Dick?...

>> No.21341474

>>21341195
Don't forget dystopian scifi. I had to read 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451. They are all pretty good, but damn reading all of them within a 2 year span is retarded.

>> No.21341490

>>21341472
Yeh.
Is that unusual?

>> No.21341515

>>21341474
dang we didn’t read any of these. Just the giver in middle school

>> No.21341540

>>21341472
Not who you’re asking but I didn’t read Moby Dick until college and I’m a burger.
I think the interracial gay scenes were too much for high schoolers

>> No.21341545

>>21341195
>Latinx
kys

>> No.21341611

>>21340967
This is just specific to the school I went to in Canada.

Grade 9
>Romeo and Juliet
>Assorted books by Canadian authors (they were mostly bad and should not have been considered literature).

Grade 10
>The Taming of the Shrew
>The Book Thief
>The Hate U Give (#blm i guess)

Grade 11
>Macbeth
>Animal Farm
>Life of Pi (Other classes had The Kite Runner or The Great Gatsby)

Grade 12
>Hamlet
>Frankenstein (There were other options such as 1984, Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, Pride and Prejudice and others)

>> No.21341618

>>21341611
Also add The Handmaid's Tale to Grade 12

>> No.21341622

>>21340967
>France
>Molière (one play every year)

>> No.21341659

>>21341540
Nothing would be too much for high schoolers if high schoolers were taught English properly in the United States. Adults in the United States are intellectually impoverished by an education system which is condescending towards its students, underestimating their intellectual capabilities, and so a self-fulfilling prophecy is formed where the students actually do show a lack of intellectual capabilities. This is shocking considering the number of highly influential education reformers from North America whose ideas have been ignored, yet thrive across the pond. (Dewey, Koch, etc.)

>> No.21341732

>>21341472
One is a short story, the other is a dense novel where barely anything happens. For bored schoolkids, the former is the better option.

>>21341622
Nice, which ones have you read? Do you have any recs?

>> No.21341748

>>21340967
Lol the USA hardly makes the classses read shit because they can’t. Maybe if you’re in AP but I guarantee most normal classes aren’t reading Shakespeare.

>> No.21341758

UAE:
none.

>> No.21341788

>>21341748
Can't or won't

>> No.21341942

>>21341419
Sounds like you went to a pretty good high school. Wouldn’t expect to see the Greek playwrights on this list.

My high school list would include
:

Beloved
Macbeth
Light in August
Going after cacciato
Tale of two cities
On the quay at Smyrna
In cold blood

To kill a mockingbird was middle school reading for me

>> No.21341951

>>21341748
Maybe you went to a crap school system. Where are you from?

>> No.21342114

>>21340967
>Brazil
>crap
>crap
>crap
>crap
>crap
>Iracema, by José de Alencar (crap too)

>> No.21342625

Argentina

Mostly argentine authors nobody knows about.

The only real books I remember are Frankenstein and Hamlet. The latter is a bit surprising, considering the level of culture people here have (none). Nonetheless I do see people reading on trains, but they usually read trashy "spiritual" books on random garbage In my experience. You won't find anyone reading any known literary work.

>> No.21342641

>>21340967
Scotchland
Virtually no Scotch literature despite having a Scotch school system of our own

>> No.21342642

>>21342625
No Borges?

>> No.21342649

Croatia here
>around 1/4 of Homer, selected chapters
>Aeschylus - Prometheus
>Sophocles - Antigone, Oedipus the King
>Euripides - Electra
>parts of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Song of Songs, Judith, Iob, Gospel of John)
>Aeneid books 2 and 4
>Plautus - Aulularia
>Tristan and Isolde
>most of Dante's Inferno
>Shakespeare - Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet
>a solid chunk of Don Quijote
>Calderon - Life is a Dream
>Corneille - Cid
>Racine - Phaedra
>Moliere - The Miser
>Voltaire - Candide
>Goldoni - Mirandolina
>Goethe - Werther
>Schiller - The Robbers
>Poe - Black Cat
>Pushkin - Eugene Onegin
>Lermontov - Hero of Our Time
>Balzac - Old Goriot
>Flaubert - Madame Bovary
>Gogol - The Overcoat
>Turgenev - Sportsman's Sketches (selections)
>Dostoyevsky - C&P
>Zola - Therese Raquin
>Proust - Combray
>Kafka - Metamorphosis, The Process
>Pirandello - Six Characters in Search of an Author
>Camus - The Stranger
>Hemingway - Old Man and the Sea
>Brecht - Mother Courage
>Ionesco - Bald Soprano, Chairs
>Beckett - Godot
>Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Surprisingly many plays, now that I look at the list, but it makes sense - they're shorter than novels, while still giving a good insight into the style of the period and the author. Also we read about as many Croatian texts that I didn't list, which somewhat fixed the imbalance with more novels and epics. And lots of selected passages from other texts and a lot of poetry.
The prof was damn ambitious. I don't think this amount of texts is assigned here usually, and now they seem to be reducing and modernising the mandatory readings.
Unsurprisingly, this doesn't create a hyper-literate or literary society. People here read no more than anywhere else in the west.

>> No.21342666
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21342666

>>21342641
I was educated in scotland too. We were forced to read george mackay brown, burns, robert louis stevenson, pic related and a really good book about burke and hare that i cannot remember the title of. We read macbeth too.
This was in the 90's

>> No.21342669

>>21340967
In high school, between 2009 to 2012, I remember
>Lady with the dog by Chekov
>Romeo and Juliet
>MacBeth
>1984
>Animal Farm
>Broken Heart at Wounded Knee
>Invisible Man
>Metamorphosis
1984 actually got all of the guys in the class, even the idiots, interested in the story. I honestly think Moby Dick would've been a good option for the guys as well, better than something like Broken Heart. One of my english teacher was a black nationalist, his whole class decked out with black historical figures. So we were made to read Broken Heart and Invisible Man.

>> No.21342675

>>21342666
>burns
Only one I ever read. Basically any Scottish books not approved by the English tastes will not be taught. And I doubt the situation will ever change unless Scotland leaves the UK.
>macbeth
That's English and the story isn't accurate exactly

>> No.21342681

>>21340967
They obviously don’t read Shakespeare in urban schools because it’s a pathetic farce to think those animals would be able to comprehend it at all.

We read Mark Twain with the n word included. It was pretty rad

>> No.21342697

>>21342675
stop being so melodramatic and self-pitying

I mentioned macbeth in a separate sentence. I thought that would be sufficient to demarcate it from my list of scottish literature. I mentioned it because its "the scottish play", and its not supposed to be accurate its a theatrical play.
fuxxache

>>>/r/scotland

>> No.21342721

>>21342697
Not my problem.

>> No.21342736

>>21341186
>>Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Is this considered English literature or Polish over there? Him being a native Pole and all

>> No.21342772

>>21340967
Brazil
>The Iliad and Odyssey
>Lusíadas
>Dom Casmurro
>Capitães da Areia
>The Sorrows of Young Werther
>O Primo Basílio
>1984
>The Stranger by Camus
Keep in mind this was a private school

>> No.21342804

>>21342721
apparently you do have problems and whine about it

>> No.21342819

>>21342669
You mean bury my heart at wounded knee? That’s nonfiction tho

>> No.21342822

>>21342649
Very impressive Croatia!

>> No.21342862

Rhode Island

Freshman-year Language and Literature
>Eleanor & Park (a generic but cute romance YA)
>Lord of the Flies
>various excerpts, notably from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Romeo & Juliet, The Odyssey, and some forgettable postmodern poetry

Sophomore-year American Studies
>Unbroken
>In The Heart of the Sea**
>Huck Finn
>The Great Gatsby
>On The Road*
>excerpts from The Things They Carried
>Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Junior-year British Literature
>Haroun and the Sea of Stories
>Brave New World*
>A Christmas Carol
>A Modest Proposal
>excerpts from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
>excerpts from The Canterbury Tales
>excerpts from Beowulf

Senior-year World Literature
>The Kite Runner
>Things Fall Apart
>Siddhartha
>Night
>Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery*
>The Hate U Give

*you could choose various books for this assignment, I chose this one

**supposedly all schools are federally mandated to make kids read either Moby Dick or a Moby Dick-equivalent. This was an equivalent, it's a dry book about whaling in Nantucket

>> No.21342886

>>21342819
kek, yeah that's it. Just took OP as meaning any book we were forced to read to get through english class.

>> No.21342904

Several USA posters but no mention of Mark Twain?

>> No.21342918

>>21340967
Flanders, high tier "Catholic" school (in Belgium there are 3 types of schools, private (best), Catholic (variable quality) and public (worst)):

Dutch readings:
Excerpts from Karel ende Elegast, Van den vos Reynaerde, Walewein, Beatrijs, poems by Hendrik van Veldeke and anonymous medieval ballads and poems
Poetry by P.C. Hooft, Vondel, Paaltjens, Gezelle, Kloos, Gorter, Van Ostaijen, Marsman, Achterberg, Komrij, Campert, De Coninck, T'Hooft
Some prose excerpts by Streuvels, Buysse, L.P. Boon, some guys I forget, some boring essays by Dutch journalists who my teacher insisted were super famous and translated essays/short stories idk by who (maybe Flannery O'Connor was one author?)
Foreign literature was rarely mentioned, only one teacher had heard of Schopenhauer, but he still didn't know who Pushkin was
Some horrible postmodernist crime novel that was mandatory reading, otherwise we were free to pick novels (I picked a Haruki Murakami novel, The Great Gatsby, Fathers and Sons and The Magic Mountain in successive years)
/tv/: Citizen Kane, Central do Brasil, The Godfather
We did not read Anne Frank's diary at any point although I know other schools where it's mandatory
No mandatory Bible readings either

French:
total joke class, we read 1 poem by Baudelaire, 1 by Victor Hugo, assigned novels were a thriller by Guillaume Musso and some trashy detective novel
teacher in senior year was the only competent one and liked me so he lent me his Gallimard edition of Du côté de chez Swann which I spilled my coffee on, a francophone girl in my class read a bunch of Maupassant
English:
joke class
can't remember a single required reading from this
German:
we literally played football instead of going to class, teacher passed even those who didn't turn in anything

Latin:
Phaedrus' fables, Caesar, Ovid's Metamorphoses (textbook had an extremely lewd poem from Amores that we skipped), letters of Pliny the younger, Virgil (Aeneid and Eclogues), Catullus, Horace, Cicero, Seneca (idk which texts exactly as I quit Latin to focus on math)
Greek:
Lucian, Xenophon's Anabasis, Herodotus, Homer, lyric anthology (all major fragments of Sappho, also Archilochus, Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Anacreon, Alcman, additional poet of choice for which I picked Solon, megabased classmate picked Semonides of Amorgos' Types of Women which you should go read right now)
Plato (Republic, Gorgias and Phaedrus), Lysias, Sophocles' Antigone

this sounds super impressive but in reality these were all small excerpts from the whole work and we mostly didn't even read the whole thing translated (except the lyric poetry part where we actually went quite hard and read like 30-40 complete poems over 2 months)

Overall rating: good for premodern stuff and poetry, they went too easy on us with longer texts
Modern foreign languages remain a joke (despite half the country being francophone, none of our French teachers were native speakers)
Still satisfied because the STEM was also very good

>> No.21342919

>>21342904
>Mark Twain
Uh, yikes. That's a little too problematic. I think the kids should read "The House on Mango Street" instead.

>> No.21342940

>>21341186
Hello, I hate Bolesław Prus.

>> No.21342958

>>21342904
Start by reading the thread.

>> No.21343607

>>21342918
>The Magic Mountain
In English or German?

>> No.21343856

>>21342642
I do recall reading a short history of his at school. But no novel comes to mind.

>> No.21344290

>Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
>Temple of the Sun by Bunin
>Russia: National Question by Putin
>Being Strong: The National Security Garanties for Russia by Putin
>The Foundations of Geopolitics: The >Geopolitical Future of Russia by Dugin
>On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians by Putin
>Putin vs Putin by Dugin
Guess my country

>> No.21344530

>>21341186
Noce

>> No.21344941

>>21343607
in English, I tried in German but it was too hard back then
now my German would be good enough though (I read German novels fairly often), it's pretty easy to self learn coming from Dutch

>> No.21344988

>>21340967
>Germany
French:
I only had it up to and including the 10th grade and only read the little lord there.
English:
Can't remember all of it but have read Romeo and Juliet, Fahrenheit 451 and a raisin in the sun as far as I know.
German:
I can't remember everything either, but I definitely have had read:
>Perfume - Patrick Süskind
> Tschick - Wolfgang Herrndorf
> Faust 1 - Goethe
> The Trial - Franz Kafka
> Mario and the Magician - Thomas Mann
> Andorra - Max Frisch
> Mother Courage and Her Children - Bertolt Brecht

>> No.21345001

>>21341186
What's the problem with Mickiewicz?

>> No.21345270

>>21344290
No Gogol? No checkov? No dosto? No Tolstoy? A disgrace!

>> No.21345271

>>21343856
He never wrote novels so short story makes sense. I wonder which they chose

>> No.21345273

>>21344988
How can they make you read perfume? What a bizarre story to make school kids read. Germany really is worse than Weimar

>> No.21345558

Chile

>greek epics
>south american literature, especially gabriel garcia marquez and julio cortazar
>shakespeare
>things straight out of the entry level classics chart, like animal farm (not that I'm complaning)

If anything I think it was pretty good

>> No.21346230

>>21340967
france
>moliere, especially les fourberies de scapin in my experience but any play of his really
>zola, way too much zola
>victor hugo
>either verlaine rimbaud or baudelaire

>> No.21346242

>>21340967
I read the communist manifesto in 12th grade

>> No.21346383

USA
The ones that left the greatest impressions on me were:
Faulkner, Hemingway, Poe, Plato, Machiavelli, Melville, Descartes, Goethe, and Woolf.

>> No.21346407

>>21342862
No Lovecraft?

>> No.21346409

>>21342625
Did you not read Martin Fierro?

>> No.21346483

I went to an American public school. We didn’t read in school. High school was a place where you got in fights, shot craps in the bathroom or during lunch, got high on Xanax/Percocet, or flirted with the opposite sex. Luckily, I didn’t become a full savage and still went to my local library once a week to get books.

>> No.21346623

>>21345271
Yeah, pardon my ignorance, I was never interested in argentine literature much.
I looked it up and it was ruinas circulares. Cool story.

>> No.21346631

>>21346409
Nope.

>> No.21347508

>>21341659
Hey uh I heard a theory that the counterculture in the late 60s had a part in this, because a good education in philosophy and history allows citizens to understand when their society is morally bankrupt

>> No.21348060

>>21340967
Amerishart here. These are the books I can remember from high school:

Romeo & Juliet
The Things they Carried
The House on Mango Street
In Cold Blood
Of Mice and Men
Things Fall Apart
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Tale of Two Cities
The Great Gatsby
Fahrenheit 451

I am undoubtedly forgetting some. Also, keep in mind that hardly anyone actually read these (including me). Everyone just used SparkNotes.

>> No.21348469

>>21340967
I don't even remember

>> No.21348549

All I can remember from my Australian secondary education:

Ishiguro - An artist of the floating world
Plath - Ariel and Hughes - Birthday letters
Woolf - A room of one's own
Winton - Cloudstreet
McEwan - Atonement
Lee - To kill a mockingbird
Orwell - 1984
Some aboriginal and immigrant poetry for diversity's sake.
Generally had a Shakespeare play every year, ones I can remember are Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Merchant of Venice.

>> No.21348567

>>21341186
I can see youre a 2000s zoomer

>> No.21348576

>>21344290
>Guess my country
Ukraine.

>> No.21348741

>>21348567
Que?

>> No.21348765

Burger Education Jesuit School
9th Grade
Julius Caesar
The Scarlet Letter
A Clockwork Orange
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

10th Grade (Honors English)
Romeo and Juliet
Great Expectations
The Old Man and the Sea
The Bluest Eye
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Hills Like White Elephants
The Rocking-Horse Winner

11th Grade (Honors English)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Grapes of Wrath
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The Crucible
(I am not sure if it was 10th or 11th grade but we did get an intro to Dylan Thomas’s poetry one of those years)
A Rose for Emily

12th Grade (AP English)
Macbeth
Mrs Dalloway
Call It Sleep
Native Son
The Dead
Ironweed
Leaves of Grass
Some Tennyson
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Waiting for Godot

>> No.21348784

>>21341195
are you serious or just meming

>> No.21349034

>>21345001
We have to read a ton of him disproportionally to every other author.

He also created the idea of ‘messianism’ wherein Poland is supposed to become a messiah of nations that will save Europe. This mentality exists in polish society to this day and influences our politics.

>> No.21349113

>>21348765
Very surprising list for a Jesuit school!

>> No.21349148

>>21340967
I left school in 2010 so this is what I remember doing

>Macbeth
>Hamlet
>Shakespeare's sonnets
>Frankenstein
>Dracula
>Wuthering Heights
>1984
>A Clockwork Orange
>lots of works by negroes who should still be unknown to the world
>The Kite Runner
>Of Mice and Men
>The Great Gatsby

My abiding memory of English lessons is being given a creative writing exercise by our teacher, to be written from the perspective of a slave aboard a ship en route to the New World. I was chastised before the rest of my class for having had the audacity to write a humorous piece, in which the worst part of the journey was the lack of a playtime and the short dinnertimes. Apparently, levity isn't permitted in England.

>> No.21349191

You americans seriously read Melville, Hawthorne and Faulkner in middle/high school?
Granted I'm an ESL but these readings were not easy on me in my late 20's. Can't imagine how a teenager would go about reading these.
You're very lucky regardless.

>> No.21349260

Current Ukrainian curruculum:

9th grade:
Swift - Gulliver
Goethe
Jane Austen
S. Bronte
Schiller, Heine, Byron
Victor Hugo
Gogol
Bulgakov
Bernard Shaw
Bradbury - 451
Harper Lee - To kill a black man

>10th grade
Homer
Dante
Sheakspeare
ETA Hoffmann - Little Zaches
Walt Whitman - Leaves of grass
Stendal - Red and black
Flaubert - Madame Bovarie
Oscar Wild - Dorian Grey
Maurice Maeterlinck - The Blue Bird
Gaymen - Coraline

>11th grade
Goethe - Faust
Kafka - Methamorphosis
Camus - The Plague
Salinger
Rilque
Federico García Lorca
Orwell
Hemingway - Old man
GG Marquez
Cortazar
Zuzak - Book thief

Also there's lot of interesting stuff is designated as optional reading. My teachers would give a list of 10-15 books at the end of the year, to be read during 3 month summer break. Now I'm not sure if kids even read 15 books during the whole 11 years of school.

>> No.21349372

>Canada
>Margaret Atwood

she's alright

>> No.21349378

>>21340967
I don't think we covered any Australian literature at school because Australian writing tends to be too advanced for schoolkids.

>> No.21349477

>>21349113
>Jesuits aren't exactly like how they're portrayed on tv and /x/
Anon... Please form your own opinions before posting.

>> No.21349503

Brazil:

>Machado de Assis
>Camões
>Homer
>Aluísio Azevedo
>Quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes short stories for some reason

>> No.21349834

>>21341186
>If you don't like Fredro try reading this.
https://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Ba%C5%9B%C5%84_o_trzech_braciach_i_kr%C3%B3lewnie

>> No.21350396

>>21342736
Either English or both English and Polish, idk. I don't think it's considered just Polish

>> No.21350486

>>21341732
Hmm from what I remember:
Can be read before high school : Les Précieuses ridicules, Scapin the Schemer
Shorter high school classics: The Imaginary Invalid, Le Médecin malgré lui
Longer high school classics: Les Femmes savantes, The Miser, L'école des femmes
Studied at the end of high school : Tartuffe, Dom Juan

>> No.21350507

>>21341186
nice

>> No.21350514

USA
>holocaust books
>mice and men
>frankenstein
>heart of darkness
>old man and the sea
>great gatsby
>parts of antigone and shakespeare
>the things we carried
>Fahrenheit 451
This was the advanced/AP class. The regular classes the teacher would just plat whatever book they were supposed to be reading on tape while half the class slept through it. I’m sure I’m missing some but that’s about it.

>> No.21350520

>>21341748
My school was 99% white so we read willy shakes and a lot of other stuff. We also got away with yellowface in one if our school plays.

>> No.21350733

>>21350514
>The regular classes the teacher would just plat whatever book they were supposed to be reading on tape while half the class slept through it.
Thefuck. I'm thankful to have been deprived of such technological marvels.

>> No.21350820

Czech republic:
school chooses a long list of over 100 books and you have to pick 20
>at least 2 each of {prose, poetry, drama}
>at least 2 published before 1800
>at least 3 published 1800-1900
>at least 4 published after 1900 in a foreign language
>at least 5 published after 1900 in Czech
>at most 2 books by each author
you read these at home and then there is an oral exam

>> No.21351020

>>21350820
Here in Ukraine foreign literature and Ukrainian lit are separate subjects.
Picking sounds nice. A class can read lots of books and share the experience. Or do students pick the same shortest ones?

I remember we wrote a lot of essays/analyses, then discussed them during lessons. Is this a thing elsewhere?

>> No.21351036

>>21350820
>>21351020
If you guys ever become cultural or political leaders in your countries, don't underestimate how much you owed to the basic background knowledge such an education provides. The USA has produced generations of retards who feel helpless and scared because they don't know anything. Even just teaching kids extremely basic things like what "ancient Rome" was is neglected in the USA now.