21st Century Lit

It’s obviously a little early for this, but fun nonetheless: The Millions speculates about a 21st-century literature syllabus. They’re doing it on behalf of an American high school teacher, and although the teacher doesn’t specify that the course only deals with American literature, this is almost a completely American list.

Some examples of the choices offered at The Millions:

Garth: This is sounds like a great class. I wish I’d had you as a teacher! One of the implicit challenges of answering the question is the tension between the need to appeal to high schoolers and the search for formal innovation. These two are not mutually exclusive; I vividly remember falling in love with Infinite Jest as a high-schooler. Still, some of the aesthetic strategies that separate contemporary writers from the hoary old 1900s (which are so last century) come at the cost of emotional immediacy. some of my favorite works of 21st Century fiction – Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai; Kathryn Davis’ The Thin Place; Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance; Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno – may be a little too cerebral for high schoolers.

It’d be great if high schoolers were actually made to read this stuff.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. 20th-Century Compositions A couple weeks ago, New Yorker critic Alex Ross gave an MP3-driven tour of 20th-century composition. These are works that do "not to represent all...
2. Frat Lit Lord help us. A new word was coined in America this week: fratire. It refers to a spate of testosterone-fuelled books about belligerence and debauchery,...
3. Lit Journals The NYTBR has an article on literary journals. It’s pretty  much "gee whiz, look at all this QUIRKY stuff going on UNDER THE RADAR." Really,...
4. 14th-Century Mongolia The Guardian asks judges to recount Booker memories: Being a Booker judge was a strange, conflicted experience because I found just reading those books soul-destroying....
5. A New Lit Manifesto Maud Newton reports on a new literary manifesto by Tom Robbins in the new Harpers. It’s not available online, but Maud has graciously typed out...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.