Quoting from the unpopular opinions thread:
Assigning classic works of literature at the high school level is a waste of time. Such a low % of the students are going to get anything out of them, much less enjoy them.
Through my time in high school, I was one of a few students to complete the assigned readings, skimping only on Catch 22 (with no regrets). The books we were assigned reflected America's most ambitious literature - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, etc. But even back then, diving into America's artsier, more academic readings didn't translate well to the adolescent mind, not as well as it had during previous decades due to the primary medium of cultural entertainment shifting from books to film sometime during the 70s and 80s. By the 90s and into the 2000s, our minds were trained to prefer the screen over the page. Fast forward to now, to our time of YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, and I can't imagine today's teenagers possessing the focus and patience to sink their minds into something like Jane Eyre, in a classroom setting no less. Too much of an unhurried
slow burn, as the kids might say.
Ha! I love all the classics listed above. I loved Great Gatsby so much I went out and bought everything Fitzgerald ever wrote. To this day he remains my favorite author.
Touching on my high school years again, up until my 11th grade American Literature class, I'd only read Mass Market Fiction: page-turning mysteries, legal thrillers, horror, and especially Michael Crichton's and Tom Clancy's techno-thrillers. It wasn't until I was assigned to read
The Great Gatsby that my reading faith shifted to mostly Literary tastes. Reading
Gatsby, I was struck, chapter by chapter, by how language could rise to higher aims of Art through creative use of context, subtext, themes, symbols, and characterization. Like you, I've since read (most of) Fitzgerald.
Piggybacking on brad and SF's earlier comments about War and Peace....
Most "classic" works I've ever read (or was required to read) sucked...Most of that stuff tho, just makes me think it's for pompous people who want to get together at aristocratic parties, sip tea with their pinky fingers out, jerk each other off about the fancy schools they attended and pretend to be cultured and deep and thoughtful and better than the plebes. Give me Harry Potter any day over that stuff.
However, for many readers, the story - or plot - is what most matters. Plot is what Mass Market fiction leverages. These days I'll only read a Mass Market novel when friends recommend specific titles. Reading Mass Market fiction, it's too obvious how the breezier writing, snappy scenes, and external characterizations of a legal thriller are written to translate to film. I say "external characterizations" because characters like Mickey Haller from Lincoln Lawyer are geared toward outward attributes such as humor, brashness, and charm. Whereas literary fiction characters serve as more inward studies of self-destruction, internal conflict, depression, and regret – qualities stewing beneath the outward expression generally celebrated for amusement in Mass Market fiction.
None of this is to say that Mass Market readers are less intelligent than readers of Literary Fiction. It is a matter of different minds being attracted to different methods of language. Sticklers for Literary Fiction are serving a more abstract mode of thinking that appreciates the capabilities of language itself. For instance, a novel like
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - trapping the reading inside its protagonist's various, alternating viewpoints over the course of an uneventful day - has no plot, and would likely not go over well with the book club next door. But to a niche of Literary purists, the inventive, non-linear and parallel narrative structure of Mrs. Dalloway impressively illuminates the protagonist's emotional inner world. And it's a more impressive study when understanding how experimental this psychological writing was for its time.
Mass Market fiction emphasizes plot and seeks to entertain to the degree it can keep up with television and/or be sold as movie rights.
Literary fiction seeks to be Art, and elevates characters over plot.
