I would add that success in a literature course (and in reading) will help lead to success in an English Composition course.

Books I have been assigned and have not read:
David Copperfield (gave up half-way through)
Great Expectations (in the middle of Chapter 7, raised my head and said, "This is just like DC!" and closed it and put it back)
Moby Dick (starts out slow, slow, slow -- twice)

Books I managed to read once:
Silas Marner (is that the one with the miser grandfather?)
Wuthering Heights (as one author friend put it: "Cathy's a wet lettuce!" It is soooo soap opera.)
The Pearl (and, having already read The Red Pony in a children's magazine [!], I have touched no Steinbeck since)
A Tale of Two Cities (every now and then, realizing I had not taken anything in for three pages and having to reread)
Of Human Bondage
Several others I cannot remember even the titles of, let alone anything about their contents.

Mind you, I have been reading ever since I learned how. My XMAS presents over a year before I was to start school included two Bobbsey Twin books. Several years ago I kept track of everything I read for a month -- it worked out to about 400 books a year. Books are longer now, so it's down some, but I read for fun -- and I do especially enjoy books that get me thinking about current affairs, but only those that do not preach and preach. The ones that do it sneakily do it best.

I'd about decided that the choice of books in literature classes was to show us what horrible taste our ancestors had.

Books I was assigned that I liked:
Tom Sawyer (so I went and found Huck Finn on my own)
Captains Courageous
Kim (not really assigned: it was in the book but Mrs. Tiderman skipped it; I'd already read it I turned in a report and got extra credit)
(Kipling is good. I was not given the Just-So Stories, or any Kipling when I was small, but I've read them all now!)

Who decides what books are literature?

Shall I tell you of my experience with Billy Budd?

I'm not so sure about the "greatest minds" part. I sometimes wonder too if our ancestors weren't hard up for good literature, if maybe life in general was much more dull, and if many educators have been in somewhat of a "That's the way we've always done it" syndrome. That would help explain the Beowulf and Shakespeare and Jane Eyre business. But personal preferences are of course a big part of what educators pick and what students like or despise. I remember groaning through days and days of a piece of "literature" called "Song Of The Scaffold." It was a story about nuns martyred in the French Revolution. The class was taught by a nun. That explains that one. It was also yet another point of comparison by which to learn about myself.

The light dawned (very brightly) as I taught this course to a wide variety of students who had been "voluntarily cornered" into taking it, regardless of their major subject areas, career goals, or interests. We did not teach it as something that they could demonstrably use in their future careers but as a history of Western thought. ("World" literature was a misnomer because the course excluded Oriental literature.) We coordinated our lit course with another requirement for all transfer students: History of Western Civilization. The assumption of that course was that the events that had shaped the world in which we live were worth knowing; the assumption of our lit course was that the ideas that helped to shape how we think today were worth knowing.

The study of literature (novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, philosophical works) in that context embraces history, sociology, government and politics, philosophy, religion or theology, and psychology. It delves beyond the surface events into the motives and the thinking behind the events. I learned from teaching that course that it is not enough to have studied what mankind has done over the centuries; one must also know what mankind has thought. It is not enough to be an acute observer of individuals on the outside; it is important to have insight into what they are like on the inside. This perspective, gained by vicarious identification with the thoughts and feelings of the authors (and even of fictional characters), leads to a much deeper understanding of ourselves and of other human beings.

After teaching that course, I never again had the slightest doubt about the value of literary study. I don't think any of my students did either. And that wasn't because I was a brilliant teacher; it was because of the "borrowed brilliance" that we derived from the authors and their works. By the way, I and most of my students (even many who first approached the course as a "dumb requirement") had a huge amount of fun doing this.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Although my post used the word "literature", I meant "classics" - close enough, although my minimalist comment probably should have been less, um, minimalist.

If OldGuy is suggesting (I hope he isn't) that Beowulf, Shakespeare and Jane Eyre are simply part of a "that's the way we've always done it syndrome", then I must disagree as forcefully as possible. Beowulf is of paramount historical importance, Jane Eyre is a novel of such brilliance it hasn't been out of print for 150 years, and Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare - universally acknowledged as the pinnacle of literary genius.

Not all literature is "classic"- a term describing works that have stood the test of time.

Finally, not reading Steinbeck is to miss a wonderfully talented writer. He is uncomplicated, lyrical, writes a prose that often reaches poetry, and engages the eternal issues of life. I think he will be read far into the future, where Hemingway, a superb popular stylist, will not.

OR, read Rich's post again, and what he has so eloquently said about "borrowed brilliance".

Life's lessons, painfully learned, often make sense only at much later times. The same is true of classic literature. We may miss much the first time around as students, but who of us hasn't said, years later, "Now I understand".

Robert Creamer, in the preface to his wonderful book "The Glory of Their Times", wrote, "If you think this is a book about baseball, you probably think "Moby Dick" is about a whale".

I like Shakespeare. I enjoy Greek dramatists, sometimes (depends on the translator), and Homer. I like Browning -- him, very definitely not her. I like Poe and Kipling and Twain and some Doyle. The rest...

I hear that there are courses which include, or are about, science fiction. The book titles I've heard, however, are all MEGO-fodder, none of the exciting or fun real stories. I have been reading SF for fun for 50 years, and I know there are a lot of books that are well-written, with good characters, and plausible plots -- not to mention adherence to scientific laws -- that do convey messages or get the reader to think about his own attitudes and opinions. But none of them get included by the teachers. Only the books with MESSAGES of the beat-'em-over-the-head type. And the books that spend tens of thousands of words saying absolutely nothing. Why?

Have you read "The Critique of Impure Reason"? It's lovely!

I read Cannery Row as a high school freshman in a college-prep English class. My fascination with and enjoyment of Steinbeck's ability to tell a story well took me voluntarily into the pages of The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, and The Pearl. By the time I was a junior (and still with the same English teacher), it was easy to lose myself between the covers of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

Steinbeck didn't have a magic formula or a master plan. He simply wrote for his reader from his own experience and from the depths of his heart. He once said, "The formula [to produce magic in story writing] seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader."

In his novels, Steinbeck celebrated the human condition and focused on the "little people"--their struggles, their rites of passage, their revelations, their survival.

He introduced me to a part of the world that was totally foreign to me, but comforted me with the truth that we are all alike.

What's weird about that?

How do books get to be the classics that English teachers insist their hapless students read? Who decides? "Never been out of print" -- does anyone buy those to read for fun, without having been ordered to by a teacher?

By the way, what is the main point of The Scarlet Letter?

There are a fair number of people who finish school and never read a book again, having been convinced that literature is only for the intelligentsia, that reading books requires a lot of work to understand every little bit that happens or is implied, without which understanding one has not actually read. All I have is anecdotal evidence, no survey or statistics, but I've encountered a lot of people!

Why is Harry Potter so popular? They are fun, not message-driven; they don't talk down to kids, and they are not limited to the restricted vocabulary (child may not have a book that uses words he has not been taught to recognize in school). Do they have any literary value? I doubt it, but they are good reads!

Of course, many teachers of The Scarlet Letter never get beyond the surface (a serious flaw when one is teaching a work that is rife with symbolic meaning). However, if they read more of Hawthorne (in whose shorter works these themes are repeated), they would see them here – and perhaps show their students how they play out in The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps then the students could see how a tale set in Puritan times and written in the 19th century relates to them.

That semester covered a lot more -- grammar (all of which I already knew from grade school, but the public school kids did not), the first half of a general survey literature book (Adventures in [something] Literature, I think it was called), and two plays (Julius Caesar, The Miracle Worker). The 4 Novels book also included Kim, which we "did not have time for." The only enjoyable book offered, and we didn't read it!

Yes indeedy! I've bought quite a few 'classics,' and enjoyed them for the most part. It is hard to concentrate on Hawthorne and Hardy with small children, but I have time now so I plan to revisit them. I am a big fan of old literature because I love the style -- long sentences with numerous commas, dashes, and tangents, and the most archaic words! Chaucer, Barbour, Pope, Stevenson, Goethe -- and Malmesbury's English Chronicle: where else can you learn about history, religion, and linguistics in an adventure book? I also like to read relics long out of print and found only in used bookstores, the authors lost to history. The more obscure, the better.

I'll agree with what Bradd and Mudge said -- the ideas behind history can only be found in this type of resource. If you want to know what it was really like in the 17th century, read a book from the 17th century, not about the 17th century. History books are great synopses, but to really know what was going on, we have to go to the sources.

Second semester was novels. The very first day, she said, "Read Billy Budd, Foretopman and hand in three pages on it, using one of these seven topics," the topics listed on a sheet of paper she handed out. I read it. 8-* Bleah! The night before the paper was due, I sat on the edge of my bed with the book in one hand and the list of topics in the other, looking back and forth between them trying to see any connection between them. Finally, I tossed the book onto my desk and sailed the list into the wastebasket. Then I reset my alarm clock, and never woke up that early on M-W-F again. It was the last straw. (Math, physics, and chemistry classes were no better. Nor were the history profs.)

I knew nothing of Billy Budd before I opened the book, except that there were seven items in a typed list of topics, one of these topic to be chosen for the three-page paper I was to write on the book, each of the items being described in no more than five or six words. I found that book awful, disgusting, horrid -- and I could not see that any of the approved topics were in that book.

As for: "What are the criteria a book must meet to be described as a classic, a book that an English teacher may or should assign to students?" – I and others have already tried to address this question at length. (I even gave a brief analysis of what I considered to be the relevant ideas in The Scarlet Letter when you questioned what the point of that book was.) Obviously, we have not done so to your satisfaction, probably because you are convinced that all or most of the books you studied in school were "icky." I've suggested that you have been validating this opinion mostly by presenting some criticism of the way the book was taught, not of the book itself, as you just did in your last post.

Having had my share of English teachers who did not, to put it politely, do justice to the works they were teaching, I have little doubt that your criticism of the teachers is valid. However, allow me to try to turn this discussion away from a critique of the teachers to a critique of the books that are deemed classics. What qualities do you think a book should have to be deemed a classic worth studying in school? What books would you teach and how would you present them if you were in charge of the literature for English classes? Of course, if you feel that the answer to your original question is that there is no point to studying literature at all and that students can learn nothing from it, you have answered that question, and this discussion is closed.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)