Literature selections for Gileskirk Modernity

Last year I taught a 9th-12th-grade literature class for our homeschool co-op. The selections were based primarily on the literature assignments in George Grant’s Gileskirk curriculum for Modernity, but I made a few changes.

In the first semester, I added Jane Eyre because I thought it would be a disgrace to graduate from high school without reading it. I replaced Hard Times with Great Expectations, which is a much better Dickens novel. I also added Shelf Life, a wonderful book about books.

In the second semester, I added Hemingway and Faulkner because they are 2 of the 3 giants of 20th-century American literature (Fitzgerald is the other). I also added some Fitzgerald short stories. I added Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings because it’s one of my favorite books, as well as some Welty stories and essays. 

I reduced the Flannery O’Connor assignment to only two stories (wish I’d had time for more), and reduced the Lord of the Rings assignment to just The Fellowship of the Ring, not because Tolkien isn’t important and wonderful, but because most of my students had already read the entire trilogy voluntarily, and I wanted to make room to introduce them to new authors.

This was the first time I had read Sir Walter Scott (love The Antiquary!) or John Buchan (Greenmantle turned out to be a favorite with the class). 

Despite my best efforts, most of the students hated The Great Gatsby because they couldn’t see past the depressing story to the beauty of Fitzgerald’s writing. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a book on Fitzgerald, so this was particularly distressing to me.)  However, a couple of students really “got” Fitzgerald, which was a delight.

Several students fell in love with Eudora Welty’s writing, and the O’Connor stories sparked the most discussion (even drawing in a couple of students who had not uttered a word in class throughout the rest of the school year).

I devised some interesting writing assignments for the class, but I’ll post those another time.

Here’s the reading list: 

First semester:

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Antiquary by Sir Walter Scott

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Portable Romantic Poets, ed. Auden & Pearson

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Shelf Life by George and Karen Grant            

Second semester:

Greenmantle by John Buchan

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“May Day” by Fitzgerald (optional due to language)

“Winter Dreams” by Fitzgerald

“Big Two-Hearted River” by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

Nobel Prize speech by William Faulkner

“Barn Burning” by Faulkner

“Spotted Horses” by Faulkner

“The Old People” by Faulkner

“A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty

One Writer’s Beginnings by Welty

Selections from The Eye of the Story by Welty

“Everything that Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by O’Connor

The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton

This was a challenging class, since it covered both English and American literature from Jane Austen all the way to the late 20th century. That’s not the way I’d ideally set it up, as a standalone literature class but I did it that way to conform to the Modernity time frame of Gileskirk.

Happy reading!

Mary Jo Tate