h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I did my A-levels in 1989 and we studied The Tempest and Macbeth, plus a couple of Tennessee Williams plays, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and a couple of Thomas Hardy novels too. Funnily enough, Macbeth had cropped up for my O-levels too, and I even dipped into it at degree level.

Which texts did you study / suffer when you were at school?

We did 20th century literature for my CSE English Lit at school. We looked at some war poetry (Siegfried Sassoon?) and the play we studied was 'Billy Liar'. The books we studied were 'Kes', 'There is a Happy Land', 'Animal Farm' and (my favourite) 'To Kill a Mocking Bird'.

With the exception of 'To Kill a Mocking Bird', the whole course was desperately boring.

I've never studied Shakespeare and I feel rather deprived by this.

Liz
~

in school we covered hardy, dickens, shakespeare and jane austin i liked the plots iwas good at figuretive speech i later became a linguist english is a universal language i love the sounds and accents

I used to hate english at school and I never read any of the books if I could possibly avoid it. However my greatest achievement at O-Level was when I still managed to get a C grade having answered only 2 questions when I should have done 4.

Interestingly enough I now read voraciously and have read all the books that I should have when I was at school!

Of course I was referring to English Literature O-Level. I managed a slightly better pass in English Language but somehow that didn't feel like quite as much of an achievement...

I can't remember whether we studied any of Shakespeare's plays at high school (this was in Sydney, Australia, circa early 1990s)... I recall lots of Sonnets, but the only plays I remember were Faust and Death of a Salesman -- I'm sure there were more!
I loved every second of my English studies; even when it was a teacher I loathed, I forgave them because they were letting me read, and when it was a good one (and there were some, fortunately in the senior years, when we needed all the support we could get), it was just heaven.
Sydney Uni in the mid-1990s was a hotbed of debate about doing away with the 'canon' (i.e. Shakespeare) in favour of more 'minority' and current texts. I could never see why we couldn't have both, and judging by my reaction to Liz never having studied the Bard, I think I must be getting more conservative in my old age! OK, it's really old, and OK, he couldn't do humour (although he tried), but the works are the foundation of so much that's been written since that I don't think they can be ignored.

For O-level we had: Midsummer Night's Dream, Silas Marner by George Elliot and the War, Town and Machinery poems from Rhyme & Reason.

Loved the play, adored Silas Marner (and still do) and now I'm older and less wound up about having to read poetry, I really enjoy looking over some of the poems (especially the War ones) now I have finally got my hands on the copy of the book.

There was also the option of Brighton Rock, but our teachers didn't give us the choice - we just ignored it. I read it anyway, and thought it fantastic but didn't trust my interpretation or knowledge of it to answer any exam questions.

I had wanted to do A-level English lit (lang wasn't an option back in '82) but wasn't able to.

Then much much later, in around 1993/4 I was working in Düsseldorf. My commute from home was 40 minutes each way in the tram. So I read and read and read and read. Then I thought that if I was reading so much, I might as well do it in a constructive way. I took English Lit A-level more than 10 years after I left school.

The books were: Shakey - The (sodding) Tempest and King (bloody) Lear
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Selected Poems - Ted (bleedin') Hughes
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - Edward Albee
The Bostonians - Henry James.

That seems like a short list and I'm wondering if I have forgotten one or two?
Ah yes, lovely Chaucer: the General Prologue and the Knights Tale and .. The Franklin's tale. Fab stuff, Chaucer.

Anyway, I only managed to skim through the Bostonians and Tender is the Night, but I still answered questions, and came away with a B. I'm more pleased with that result than with any of my other O and A levels.

I'd love to do it again, but I think I should pick another subject.