I’m deliberately using opposite extremes, but it makes heuristic sense as an explanation of a continuum (actually, that’s still a simplification: many continuums of multiple cognitive requirements).

Well, that’s where I’m suspicious, as I indicated in my last comment.

I know nothing about the NSW curriculum, and thank you for for the info, but if students were doing Patrick White instead of, say, Thomas Hardy (who I read in Senior), why is it necessarily the case that the same brainstretching and consciousness of temporality doesn’t occur? Hardy’s texts are to put it bluntly more straightforward to read even though they’re older, and it actually doesn’t take a lot of historical acuity to understand them. In a way, I suspect Frank Hardy would be harder to read in this sense than rural novels – because his urban Australia really is stranger than the typical 19th century novel – which (and here’s the problem with the high/low distinction again) in any case we all have a template for reading derived from costume drama – cf. a lot of the recent debate about contemporary appreciation of Austen.

I also think, as usual, this comment over-estimates how far you actually can stretch a high school mind. I used to get the English prize every year (Oh noes! I sound like JG!) and I was well taught from what in the mid 80s was a pretty traditional curriculum. I don’t think I really understood anything much about motivations, mores, practices, et, in Elizabethan England until much later in life. I was translating Shakespeare into a modernist frame, if you like.

I think it would be an exceptional, really rare English teacher who could teach even bright students the way you’d like.

In any case, usually calls for teaching the canon are dehistoricising and decontextualising. There’s a big difference between Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare and a formalist Shakespeare who speaks to eternal verities or “pathos” or whatever.

In NSW, the highest level of Year 12 English is Extension 2, which takes up four units (or up to 40% of your total study in all subjects). You can get do all four units without doing a single canonical or pre-20th century.

What’s scarier is that you can also get a 3 year degree in English literature without doing any. You just pick the “hollywood or bust!” units.

I don’t buy the snobby distinction between high and low culture. However, some texts just require more brainsmarts than others. Shakespeare, Camus and Joyce pose complex reflexive questions, demand abstract reasoning, juggle concepts, play complex language games AND/OR require historical insight to an extent that Big Brother doesn’t. I’m deliberately using opposite extremes, but it makes heuristic sense as an explanation of a continuum (actually, that’s still a simplification: many continuums of multiple cognitive requirements).

Why do current reading lists have such a fixation with the present? We already have the cultural coding to understand most Western contemporary popular texts, at least on the basic level. But for texts from another historical period, we need to learn a whole new conceptual scheme. This is hard work, but it helps stretch the imagination and promotes a critical, reflexive attitude conscious of it’s own temporality.

BTW – Bourdieu found that tastes correlate with socio-economic positions, and that cultural production is wound up with power. However, he did NOT think all texts are equally good or challenging.

I defy you to find somebody asserting this:
“these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.â€?

See my point about hyperbole.

Of course, JG’s comments are valuable in one way because the absurdity of the false dichotomy really does show through because it’s so exaggerated.

Ie – if the kiddies aren’t learning Plato, they must be learning how to wash plates.

I defy you to find somebody asserting this:
“these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.â€?

Even better, how Wagner’s early operas, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and/or Mozart’s treatment of these issues might help us understand Princess Diana’s celluloid mythography.

For that matter, what’s the relevance of any of this to Diana? Just that there is pathos? Though I don’t know what’s meant by “Mozart’s treatment of these issues”. What issues? Issues raised by Plato? Which ones? Please cite or explain.

Diana as postmodern Antigone

Have you read or seen Antigone? Where’s the parallel?

over the influence on The New Testament of pathos in fifth century Athenian tragedy

What influence?

I am sure Andreas Huyssens – Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia Univeristy – 1984 article “Mapping the post-modernâ€? in that rag – New German Critique – to which only illiterates and philistines contribute, will be crushed that he “knows nothing of Barthes!â€? Given Professor Huyssens’ fluency in six languages – including French – should I forward him your contact details so you might give him a tutorial?

I note your previous comment that to recite a list of qualifications and titles is an argument from authority and no reliable indicator of the strength of an argument, with which I (but not you, it seems) agree.