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Originally Posted by Fbone
Can anyone provide a few examples of "modern books teens can relate to" that should be taught in English lit?
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My 17yo daughter is currently studying at an International Baccalaureate school, which is in my experience roughly equivalent to US AP classes. This is an English Language program within a pretty well respected Swedish upper high school with rigorous entrance requirements. Worth noting her class is "Literature in English" not "English Literature" - the "cultural heritage" is pretty much irrelevant when English isn't your first language.
What they're studying right now is a huge hit: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. It's a graphic novel, about an adolescent girl during the Iraqi revolution. In a class full of kids whose parents fled exactly that revolution or later ones, or the Iran/Iraq war, or Kosovo, or.... well a lot of the kids in her class are second generation immigrants of refugees. And yes, I definitely consider this literature, right up there with Art Speigelmann's Maus - it's just in a different format. And like Maus, it's pretty tough reading.
So far this year she's also studied and liked:
- Animal Farm - they loved that, but were studying it at the same time as their history class was doing the Bolshevik revolution, so they really got a handle on the background, better than I ever did at high school.
- Romeo & Juliet (they went to see the play performed, before reading it in class, and they watched several of the movies too, and while not a giant hit, it's not hated either.) Some other Shakespeare, mostly random sonnets.
- Tristan & Iseult (this was fun, they were allowed to pick their own version of the story to study)
- A lot of short stories, many of them not originally written in English. Things that were big winners were: Rómulo Gallegos (Peace in the Mountains), Chekhov (the story "Sleepy" was a big winner with the kids, who related to being that tired given the amount of homework the IB gives them), "Att döda ett barn" and "En hjältes död" (To kill a child and A heroes death by Stig Dagerman and Per Lagerkvist respectively, Swedish authors). I just noticed all four of these stories are about death, whatever that says about 17yo's these days.
And she's studied and hated:
- To Kill a Mockingbird (great disdain also from the friends she had around here for study group, but some of her class liked it well enough - noticeably the boys, go figure.) This is a book I've always considered, along with The Great Gatsby, to be quintessentially American, so no wonder it didn't work so well here.
Really, only Persepolis out of those is something I wouldn't have studied at school or at least in college, but that's only because it wasn't written yet.