The answer to this, no matter how prescriptive, can only be disguised autobiography. In one of the o

The answer to this, no matter how prescriptive, can only be disguised autobiography. In one of the only “scientifically” useful things I ever posted to this website in 10 years, I recalled to the best of my ability what I was actually assigned to read in high-school English in a massive suburban public high school in the mid-to-late 1990s. I thought posting actual information would be better than the crude generalizations people (including me) usually make on this subjects. I was 17 between 11th and 12th grades, so you can see from the list what I read in school: 20th-century American literature at the end of 11th grade and a very selective world-literature curriculum in 12th grade consisting mainly of Sophocles, Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.Extracurricularly, I think of the summer between 11th and 12th grade—so the summer of my 17th year—as one of the most important in my reading life. This was where I made the final break with childish things. I had read comic books and genre fiction (not always but often very good: Ray Bradbury, Alan Moore) and a smattering of popular realism (Johns Steinbeck and Irving for preference) until then. But in that late spring and early summer, partially in school but mostly out of it, that I read not only Hemingway and Fitzgerald but also Melville (“Bartleby,” Billy Budd), Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury), Morrison (Beloved, Paradise), Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Satanic Verses), and DeLillo (Underworld). These novels—along with the poetry I enjoyed (Keats, Eliot) and the monumental example set by Shakespeare (above all Hamlet and Lear)—ruined me forever for both fantasy and realism in their popular forms. I made instead a compact with the broad modernist tradition, which I can explain using that ever-“problematic” form/content distinction. Literature’s proper content is experience, life, history, reality, “a shout in the street,” not a wholly fantasized invention, not some other world that you “build”; form is your true arena of invention, the place you transfigure the real with your own sensibility and give the audience something new. This is what I learned on that magical, torrid, stormy summer; as I’ve recalled elsewhere, a storm put the power out for three days in July, so for three sweaty days in July I read Underworld by candlelight. In this period I also began reading literary criticism seriously. The Western Canon was useful encouragement—I don’t buy Bloom’s theory overall, but he was always good to me as a rhapsode—and, more importantly, Sexual Personae, though I might have discovered that one at the beginning of my 18th year, I don’t quite remember the winter month. If the modernists from Melville to DeLillo shaped my commitments and concerns as a writer, I would say Paglia in concert with Morrison determined my social and political sensibility. They assured that I would never properly be right-wing or left-wing: the one side consisting of metaphysicians who would bar whole categories of person from the universe, the other side cultists of the demiurge who believe there is no limit whatsoever to reason’s design on nature and the spirit. Now would I recommend that course of reading to a 17-year-old? Not any one book in particular, though in my years teaching in an English department, often to high-school students taking college courses, I introduced Shakespeare, Melville, Morrison, and DeLillo to many a 17-year-old (see my syllabi here and my online lectures here). More important is the level of reading; I hate when teachers patronize students, giving out what are essentially children’s books, or, worse, crude political polemics, in the first year of college. The replies to the Tweet are dire in this regard—so many recommendations of the wretched Vonnegut. I couldn’t stand him as a teen and only forced my way through one of his books a few years ago so I could cogently explain why I hated it. His homespun nihilism and smug pseudo-naive prose make me vomit. I didn’t care for Salinger or Kerouac as a kid either. I came to appreciate them later but suspect at this late date they require a historical sensibility to enjoy. The world might be too different now for their styles to register to youth as immediate critique or relevant vitalism. For that kind of thing, I imagine today’s teens rely on online schizoposts. I like those too; just make sure you get to Hamlet eventually; hell, he schizoposts four or five times in that play. -- source link

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