An audience poll in three parts!

[theweaselking]

1) In order to be considered educated in modern English literature (paper, so no movies or TV), one must (at a a bare minimum) be familiar with:

[Insert your answer here]


Me, I'm thinking:

Brave New World
1984
Animal Farm
Heart Of Darkness
Hamlet[1]
Romeo And Juliet[1]
The Bible[1][2]
A Tale Of Two Cities

Basically, a reference or allusion to the major points of any of those should be caught by anyone.

What else should be on that list?


2) I'm also thinking of an "honorable mentions" list, with stuff like The Lord Of The Rings, Treasure Island, The Lottery, Lord Of The Flies, I Am Legend, Ender's Game[3], Catcher In The Rye, Atlas Shrugged[3] - stuff where people CAN still be considered well-read without having read them, but they may be missing out. What should be on that?


3) It is not a coincidence that "grade school curriculum" heavily overlaps my essentials list, I think. Is this confirmation bias, or an indication that the Essential Reading list for schoolchildren actually starts with some really good choices?



[1]: gets "Modern English" cred by proxy and influence
[2]: No, seriously, INFLUENCE. But annotated, so people should know The Empty Tomb and The Brutal Torture Of Innocent Job By The Allegedly Benevolent Overlord[4], but who gives a shit about Zachariah? Point is, you need the highlights becuse they show up, a LOT, in other places.
[3]: Being able to recognise popular crap as CRAP, and dissect the failures of logic, worldbuilding, and persuasion is an important skill that more people should have.
[4]: The Book Of Job is a demonstration that not only CAN Satan win, but that he wins any time he feels like putting any effort in, because God is a gullible chump. But this is a diversion.

Comments

[mckenzee.livejournal.com]

So we stick with the King James Version for literary heritage and we leave Beowulf behind with Canterbury Tales as pre-modern.

Just clarifying the rules, as I'm enjoying the game. It kills me to leave out 19th-c. Russia and Kafka.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a ton of "THIS IS NECESSARY CLASSICS" that I'm all "wait, translation, FUCK!" for this one.

The Bible gets a pass based on the almost-modern English translations being clearly English, and also brainmeltingly influential in a way that no nonfiction has ever been.

[mckenzee.livejournal.com]

and this is where I give a shout out for Young's Literal Translation of 1898. It is a literal translation of the Hebrew and Greek, including keeping the original verb tenses, so most of the Old Testament is in present tense.

"and God saith, 'Let light be;' and light is."

[jerril]

Hmm, that sounds pretty interesting. I should see if I can track it down.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I was wondering whether "modern English literature" was supposed to mean "modern literature that is in English" or "literature that is written in modern English". Because the KJV and Shakespeare are Modern English (you can call it "Early Modern English" if you want to distinguish it from later Modern English that lost most of its thees and thous, but it's still Modern English). Beowulf is Old English (closer to German than to anything most current English-speakers will recognize as English) and Chaucer is Middle English (late Middle, I think), recognizably Englishish but considered a distinct language. (Not all ME is as easy for moderns to read as Chaucer is. For example, the start of an English song: "Edi be þu, heven queene, folkes froovre and engles blis, maid unwemmed, moder cleene, swich in world non oðer is." -- I think I'm missing some umlauts, but that's pretty close; I'm working from memory.)

Anyhow, linguistically, Shakespeare counts as modern -- just not "late modern".

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" would be disqualified for being Middle English, like Chaucer.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare can require an interpreter, if not a translator. Therefore, he is not 100% modern English in the way that Orwell or Conrad or Poe are. Still, I'm happy to accept him as Close Enough Dammit.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Rudyard Kipling and Uncle Remus can require interpreters too, and they're centuries later than Shakespeare. A reader and writer from the same half-century can wind up needing an interpreter (or at least extensive footnotes) if their dialects are dissimilar enough and the writer is working deep in the idioms of a culture unfamiliar to the reader.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Speaking of interpretation required: A Clockwork Orange?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also: Yeah, sure, "Late modern". What is more important than the category is the necessity: What lit is NECESSARY lit?