Post #1861081

The other day I was trying to remember what English Lit I read in high school in the US, and something occurred to me for the first time: ALL of it was American. Well, okay, I admit we read one Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and one Dickens, Great Expectations. But everything else. We read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, The Bluest Eye, Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, Invisible Man, Catch-22, Walden, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Red Badge of Courage. Even the short stories we were assigned were American: The Lottery, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Fall of the House of Usher, Barn Burning, Sonny's Blues, Everything That Rises Must Converge, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. What little poetry we did also: Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson. None of this occurred to me at the time or for many years, but in retrospect it seems like to such a totally bizarre way to teach English literature, Do people from other English-speaking countries experience the same thing? Do Australians, for example, read Australian literature to the exclusion of everything else? #Books #Literature #Education