Uk exam boards to drop To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by Mike L

* But we did do T. S. Eliot in American literature, which surprised me at the time.

Indeed. Eliot was a through Englishman

[corroonb]

I think very few people would understand the English in English literature to refer to the political entity of England rather than the language of English. Gove is unsurprisingly one of those very few. He has meddled with other curricula (history) in order to inflict his particular ideology on children, vacuous and simplistic though it may be.

[Lemurion]

Eliot was born and raised in the United States, and so could justifiably be claimed by either.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by corroonb

How can one study TS Eliot as an American poet?

'cause he was born there

[shalym]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I live in America, so I can assure you we call the literature written in English "English Literature" and make no distinction of whether it is written by an American, Brit, Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, etc. We note who wrote it and which country they call or called home, but we call it all "English Literature." One can certainly take an "American English Literature" class in college, just as one can take "Middle English Literature" class or "French Literature" or whatever. However, our degrees in "English Literature" contain a required mix of literature written in English from all over the world throughout the history of the English language. To say English literature in England should only contain works by British authors seems rather arrogant to me, but then I'm just a child of the colonies.

Hmmm...I know that I definitely took 2 different classes, one called "English Literature" and one called "American Literature". English Lit went all the way back to Beowulf and up to the twentieth century, and American Literature started with "The Scarlet Letter" and went up through the two books that are the subject of this thread and, I believe, ended with Vonnegut.

There was another class called "World Literature", but I didn't take that one, so I can't attest to what was in it. I guess my little school in Connecticut was just "rather arrogant".

Shari

[meeera]

We took "English Literature" here, and it was simply literature written in English. Anything from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, India, South Africa, and any work translated into English language, was fair game, though unsurprisingly there tended to be a focus on Australian and some UK works.

[Jessica Lares]

You don't take a secondary school literature class just to read, you learn about the different styles of writing, when they were most prominent, what the culture was like at that moment, and how it's supposed to be interpreted.

In high school they just call it English Literature I think? (It's been awhile!) In college, they specify.

Both To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men are pretty straightforward (I read them both in middle school even). After all, they are written by authors who are from the same time period that most of us are from (well, Harper Lee is still with us anyway), and use the English that we're all familiar with minus things here and there.

And both have story lines that could easily be something that could be happening here and now.

And what I'm getting from the article is that what they have found is that these books don't have a way of telling whether a student actually understands what they're reading, besides just knowing it word by word. Whether you're smart or not, you can clearly get what's going on, and it's very easy to understand the discrimination/racism in both.

There's also the problem that there's lots and lots of material you can read instead of touching these books. You can read a quick SparkNotes guide and know everything and get an idea of what will most likely be asked in these exams.

Shakespeare and Dickens aren't impossible. They're just challenging. And if you aren't being challenged by your coursework, then it's not doing you any good.

Exams need to be true to what is expected of students at that grade level, and the students who are behind NEED to get help to get at that level. Because when they get into the real world, it's going to get even harder for them.

[Lemurion]

In my high school, the course was just called "Literature 12," no modifier, but that was over 30 years ago in Canada.

In college and university they had specific courses based on nationality. Personally, I'd expect an "English" literature course in England to focus primarily if not exclusively on British if not specifically English writers.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Eliot was born and raised in the United States, and so could justifiably be claimed by either.

Eliot reads the Wasteland.
Check out the accent.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The GCSE exam is the basic grounding in the subject area - things which every schoolchild is expected to be taught. It seems to me that the main focus of an English literature course taught to English schoolchildren should be to introduce them to the literary and cultural heritage which has helped to shape the society in which they are living. Although books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Of Mice and Men" are without question important literary works, they really don't form a part of British cultural or literary history - they are American works and important to American history and culture, not Britain's. It's right and proper that the syllabus should concentrate on literary works which have shaped or which reflect British society, just as I would expect a literature course taught to American schoolchildren to concentrate on those works which are culturally important to the US.

I don't necessarily disagree, though I don't necessarily agree either. I've only been making the point that the English Literature course in question most assuredly refers to the language and not the country.

On the broader question of whether it is OK or even propitious to focus more narrowly on British works, that I'm not sure of. I am not against having a certain amount of focus on local (i.e. national) literature in schools, as long as it is balanced at some point with world literature as well. While I think To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men and are excellent books for children from any country studying English literature to read, I do think the UK has an extremely strong literary tradition and there could easily be a very good general introductory English-language literature course that happened to only use books from the UK, though it would be quite exclusionary since there is so much excellent English literature from elsewhere as well. I suppose it does strike me as regressive to specifically target the course to make it more local when it already had a good established syllabus, but I can't argue diminished quality because there are plenty of British books that can fill the gaps quite nicely.

[HarryLime]

From a Scottish perspective... The oldest English Literature department in the world is at Edinburgh University and offers first year undergraduates Scottish Literature 1 and English Literature 1 courses. The University of Glasgow has a Scottish Literature department... I think the distinction in courses is useful as the history and traditions of the Scottish, English, and American novels are different.

I didn't do English Literature but I also believe the term is applied to Literature in English.

The question here is does the English Education Minister have the right to focus on the cultural history of England or Britain rather than including former colonies and the rest of the world. Not only does he legally have the right, there is some logic in it. Particularly when the English population is more diverse than ever before and some individuals and subgroups within England are not well integrated .... e.g. don't speak English or believe in bringing Jihad to the West.

He hasn't said there will be no foreign works just more British. There has to be some split so were there too few or too many English novels before?

In the end only a handful of books are covered when at school so a narrower focus may yield a more coherent result. Instead of focusing on the negative, which books are being added?

Oh and I love the "Great American Novel" and Zola as much as my beloved literature in Scots.

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Eliot was born and raised in the United States, and so could justifiably be claimed by either.

Yes, that's exactly what my American Lit teacher told us.

Mike

[tubemonkey]

Until 1914, TS was a Yank. After that, he was a Brit

[Pulpmeister]

Let's not confuse ethnicity with nationality...

James Joyce, for instance, was born in the UK, when Ireland (and Dublin) was part of the UK; and he opted to remain British all his life, retaining his British nationality and passport. He could, of course, have chosen to take Irish citizenship later, but never did.

But of course James Joyce is an Irish author whose work is part of English literature. (I pass over the question of whether Finnegans Wake is written in English...)

As to the merits of the initial decision, I think it depends on what titles are replacing the two American titles. I must say in my distant youth, English literature studies consisted of British authors, and, as I recall, one token Australian author (of "literary fiction", now largely forgotten.) No Americans; and no Canadians, no South Africans, nor authors from elsewhere in the British Commonwealth.

[HarryT]

The newly published list is as follows:

Shakespeare plays:

Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest

19th Century novel:

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Sign of Four

Post-1914 drama and prose

JB Priestley - An Inspector Calls
Alan Bennett - The History Boys
Willy Russell - Blood Brothers
Dennis Kelly - DNA
Shelagh Delaney - A Taste of Honey
Simon Stephens - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (drama adaptation)
William Golding - The Lord of the Flies
George Orwell - Animal Farm
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Meera Syal - Anita and Me
Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English

This is a list of what has to be studied. Each school is free to add additional works from any country or author that they wish; nothing is "banned".

See:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-27610829

The news article also notes:

The new requirements also specify that pupils study "whole texts in detail" because of concerns that novels were being studied in disconnected chunks, chasing marks rather than the comprehension of a full work.

which is good (IMHO).