What types of books do (only) English majors read? Not text books, I mean what types of prose and poetry are they assigned to read and analyze that a casual reader might not consider. I was originally going to major in English/literature but switched. I'm still really interested in it as a hobby though.
>>8043997
not an english major but I took a few 200 level literature courses, this is what I read:
canons and canonicity:
-eugene onegin
-hamlet
-merchant of venice
course i do not remember the name of:
borges - labyrinths
grillert - jealousy
marquez - one hundred years of solitude
shalamov - kolyma tales
>>8043997
literary theory.
get the norton anthology.
>>8043997
lots of "classics"
required reading:
Arabian Nights
Beowulf
The Wanderer
Canterbury Tales (Bonus if you do the Decameron)
sonnets from Petrarch, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, etc
poetry of the Romantics like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc
long story short, lit majors learn a lot about the various "segments" and trends that have appeared throughout literary history
>>8043997
The Faerie Queen, Edmund Spenser
>>8044141
That any good?
>>8044141
shame on you, i've read it (not completely though, large parts of the 1st and 3rd books, those books are the most popular ones, 3rd mostly because it's about a vagina knight, 1st because it's the first and likely the best... i may return to the poem some day) and im not a lit major in any way
also it's faerie queene
What types of textbooks do English majors read after freshmen year? Or is it mostly reading articles and essays from experts about the piece you're studying?
>>8044017
Shit, what did I actually read in English? I just graduated, though I was in tech writing rather than frou-frou English.
If I list only fiction...
Much Ado About Nothing
Macbeth
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
There had to be another Shakespeare or two but I can't remember them.
Norris - The Octopus
Wharton - House of Mirth
Wright - Native Son
Cahan - The Rise of David Levinsky (here's one no non-English major will have even heard of, 500 pages of oy vey)
Cather - The Professor's House
Banks - Continental Drift
Beowulf
Gawain and the Green Knight
More - Utopia
Marlowe's Faustus
Behn - Oroonoko (didn't actually read it, >pic related)
Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Huckleberry Finn
Pudd'nhead Wilson
Celebrated Jumping Frog
Another story that was basically Celebrated Jumping Frog but in a different place, don't remember what it was called.
A giant mess of excerpts and bits and pieces of British and American books, poetry, short stories, etc. I couldn't possibly name all of it.
Ones that stick out to me are Melville's Benito Cereno, Legend of Sleepy Hollow and that story where the guy gets drunk with dwarves or something. Charles Dickens.
Weirder shit:
Bits of the Communist Manifesto. Unabomber manifesto (only the parts that jive with marxism, none of his stuff about the left, mfw pic related). Caucasia by some black lady.
Edible Woman, pic related
A couple highly fictional accounts of Moorish Spain, though I don't think the authors considered them fictional. The poetry was good though.
>>8044150
if you're very interested in his opinions about courtly politics
>>8044538
Is this a list for senior year of highschool?
>>8044150
FQ is a masterpiece of poetic form and allegory, continues in English the romance tradition of Ariosto and Tasso, and is generally just great reading for those who like oldschool vocab and classical lore and want to get into the renaissance mindset. It's also the kind of thing most people today would never, ever read without a class deadline forcing them to get it done. (Although good luck finding a class on FQ at your shit tier university.) Reason being it's really long and really hard in places. However it is quite beautiful too. Source, I've read it. Here is a passage I like:
Faire knight (quoth he) Hierusalem that is,
The new Hierusalem, that God has built
For those to dwell in, that are chosen his,
His chosen people purg'd from sinfull guilt,
With pretious bloud, which cruelly was spilt
On cursed tree, of that vnspotted lam,
That for the sinnes of all the world was kilt:
Now are they Saints all in that Citie sam,
More deare vnto their God, then you[n]glings to their dam.
Till now, said then the knight, I weened well,
That great Cleopolis, where I haue beene,
In which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell,
The fairest Citie was, that might be seene;
And that bright towre all built of christall cleene,
Panthea, seemd the brightest thing, that was:
But now by proofe all otherwise I weene;
For this great Citie that does far surpas,
And this bright Angels towre quite dims that towre of glas.
>>8043997
I have a degree in English Literature from an American University. We were required to take Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer. Most people doubled up on Shakespeare to avoid either Milton or Chaucer.
The rest of our classes were whatever we wanted to study. Some things you might not have heard of: Castle of Otronto, lesser Victorian poets like Morris, mid Century short story writers like Barthelme, the full text of Gulliver's Travels (he visits four strange lands not just Lilliput, Melville's poetry.
It's a big tent and most programs allow you to design a course of study that fits your interests. Highly suggest you look into a comparative world lit course to find things you've never heard of. Melal was a revelation to me.
Don't forget Chaucer outside of CT like Troilus and Cressida.
Finna graduate with an English degree in 2 months. I'll just list the stuff that got I was taught multiple times
Lots of Shakespeare. I read and wrote papers on Hamlet 3 times in 3 different classes.
Milton, but I did as this anon said >>8044901. I took one class with a professor screaming about Milton, seriously, literally yelling about how radical Milton was for 45 minutes. then he assigned 4 pages of written work due next class and I got scurred and bailed to double down on Shakespeare instead.
I was assigned Beloved multiple times
Strangely enough was assigned Watchmen, the graphic novel, multiple times as well. Both classes were more "experimental" English classes though.
was assigned The Souls of Black Folks twice as well.
I read ad
>>8044956
My Milton professor was great. It's very tempting as an undergrad to bail on courses that are outside of your comfort zone. I only wanted to read novels, but because of scheduling issues, took a bunch of poetry classes opened up a whole world for me.
>>8043997
Trying to remember everything I read in my degree in Dublin, I'll stick to novels:
Dickens' Great Expectations
Conrad's The Secret Agent
Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night
The Moonstone
Mobydick
Joyce's Portrait of the Artist
Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus
Conrad's Typhoon
Beckett's Malloy and the Unnameable
There were a lot more prescribed but these are the only ones I read to get through the course
>>8044998
My Milton professor was great. It's very tempting as an undergrad to bail on courses that are outside of your comfort zone. I only wanted to read novels, but because of scheduling issues, took a bunch of poetry classes opened up a whole world for me.
Yeah, I agree, of course It's important to step outside of your comfort zone. He was an incredible professor but I could tell instantly his class would need a minimum of eight hours of work a week just to stay afloat.
I was taking 2 other challenging/punishing courses that semester and I figured 3 courses where I feel like I'm being raped was more than I could handle. I don't regret not taking him that semester, because I would have done very poorly in either his course, and/or all three brutal courses, but I wish I had taken him some other time.
Oh well.
>>8045051
>I feel like I'm being raped
So true. Sometimes you just have to take courses that you can pass.
>>8044956
>I took one class with a professor screaming about Milton, seriously, literally yelling about how radical Milton was for 45 minutes
That'd pretty hilarious if it wasn't so sad.
>>8045014
I'm considering doing a literature degree in Dublin, what was it like?
minor in english lit
I think the reading I've enjoyed most is critical/literary theory and american literature 1820-1900
Medieval Lit Class:
Chaucer
Sir Thomas More's Utopia
Sir Thomas Mallory's Morte D'Arthur
2nd Shepherd's Play
Faerie Queen
King Lear
19th Century Brit Lit
Great Expectations
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft
William Wordsworth
etc.
American lit 1820-1900:
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature
A bunch of Poe stories
Herman Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener
Henry James - Daisy Miller
Henry James - Washington Square
Kate Chopin - The Awakening
Frank Norris - McTeague
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
American Literature 1910-Present
Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons
Ernest Hemingway short stories
Anne Sexton - Transformations
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Selections from the Malcolm X autobiography
Don Delillo - White Noise
Hunter S. Thompson - some of his articles
some Louise Erdrich
Alison Bechdel - Fun Home
Cold War American Lit:
Philip K. Dick - Time out of Joint
William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Martha Gellhorn - The Face of War
Michael Herr - Dispatches
Yusef Komunyakaa - Dien Cai Dau
Joan Didion - Democracy
William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
Genre Studies - Detective Fiction:
Edgar Allan Poe's stories
Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest
Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Gene Kerrigan - The Rage
Chester Himes - A Rage in Harlem
etc.
>>8045239
Hard to say exactly really since I haven't studied elsewhere. The teachers seem generally to be quite good, the academic culture here seems to be respectable, there's few bullshit notions or schools of thought in their approaches to work but they take it seriously. The students around me seem to be horrendously mediocre but I imagine thats practically universal.
The City itself is my home so I've a skewed love-hate perspective of it, if you have money and you like drinking culture then you'll be grand but it isn't cheap and you'll have little to do otherwise.
>>8045554
So If I were to read one or two books about critical/literary theory, what would you recommend?
>>8045239
I've visited Dublin for a week
>rainy, cold
>people are mostly OK
>main attraction is a big needle
>there's a statue of James Joyce in the center for you to pray to
>there's a statue of Oscar Wilde looking punchable as ever for you to sneer at
>bus system is antiquated as fuck, overpriced and won't give back change
>cheapest place to get drunk was the university bar (Maynooth university)
>girls are brit tier which means make up overload and shit clothes
All in all a good experience.
>>8045790
well we mostly read essays
and it depends on what field of theory you're interested in
I personally go for semiotics and deconstructionist bullshit, so Barthes and Derrida
The ones I remember most fondly were from some an elective entitled "hero's journey" or some such, we read and interpreted from things like the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, Argonautica, and there was one more that I forgot but want to remember, in the same vein as those.
Hero's name started with an S I think? I skimmed that one, still gotta go back and actually read it, I feel bad.
>>8044695
So no then.
