The 100 Most Frequently Taught Books

>>7617163
That's pretty varied, ideologically speaking.

>>7617163
>Frankenstein
sign of academics desperation to reach apathetic students
>Leviathan
One of the few works for which a cursory glance on Wikipedia is enough. I think I read it in 8 classes.
>the prince
Is it being taught as satire yet, or is that an unpopular analysis

>>7617163
>Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” ranks first, at No. 43, followed by William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” Ms. Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street,” Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”

absolutely disgusting

>>7617184
it's disgusting that women and non-white authors are taught in school. Brainwashing young people sadly

>3) The Communist Manifesto
>37) Wealth of Nations

CAPITALISTS BLOWN THE FUCK OUT, ADAM SMITH ON SUICIDE WATCH

>>7617163
>8) The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli,
Really? Damn. It's fucking interesting as all hell, but I didn't think anyone but history nuts would care enough to teach it.

>>7617197

It's obviously reverse psychology. Just like diversity and political correctness.

>>7617202
>>8) The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli,
>Really? Damn. It's fucking interesting as all hell, but I didn't think anyone but history nuts would care enough to teach it.


pleb of the century right here

>>7617206
Explain.

>>7617202
It can easily be taught in History, Literature and Political classes so it's no surprise it's so high up really.

>>7617207
you don't get why the prince is a significant text? are you retarded?

>>7617213
I do. I don't get why other people think it is. I was under the impression that /lit/ thought it was babby-tier or something, too. I kind of assumed that would be a reflection of academia.
>>7617212
History makes sense, political is cool to know, I don't get how literature classes would be interested.

>213) Mein Kampf

kek

>>7617219
>I was under the impression that /lit/ thought it was babby-tier or something, too

lit is filled with morons who listen to three videogame podcasts a day and watch japanese cartoons, you going to let them tell you what's good, lol

>>7617224
>you going to let them tell you what's good
No. I do let them tell me what other people think is good, though.

>>7617219
>I was under the impression that /lit/ thought it was babby-tier or something, too. I kind of assumed that would be a reflection of academia.

Wait, you honestly think a board on 4chan would accurately represent academic opinions? Kek, most people criticising The Prince here have probably never actually read the book.

>>7617231
half the people on 4chan never even attended university, another quarter go to community college and don't know shit, the last quarter are normies who come through to laugh at memes before fucking their gf, and like 2 percent are serious people who may or may not know something...

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>>7617163
9. Oedipus
62. Oedipus the King
129. Oedipus Rex

>>7617231
>>7617219
>>7617213
/lit/ here, I haven't studied it but I read it because it was around on my ebook reader. I do think it's nothing much out of context, and there is nothing else that would explain its notoriety because, a bit like with "the art of war", there's nothing in there that doesn't simply make sense to us cynical fucks. Which is why it would clearly have to've been a very different time indeed for it to have been meant as satire.

>>7617197
fucking lmao

>>7617184
>>7617194
Beloved is pretty good, but its fucked up that better authors aren't on there. Why the fuck is Neurmancer even there?

I think Faulkner is the most underappreciated author in modern academia. Everyone will sing his praises, but there are almost no courses (at least at my uni and the one I studied abroad at) that included his books. Its just nuts because his prose is just staggering. There are some pages in Absalom Absalom that are better than the whole of "The House on Mango Street."

>>7617163
>they're not so quick to suggest any alternatives

has that nucka ever read a single book

I'm kinda curious as to the context of this image

>>7617260
>/lit/ here
oh

>>7617197

>academe
>not having a hard ideological bias to the left

are you 12 years old or something?

>>7617278
But it's true that it's a staple of our culture to attack and criticise the current order of things without providing any better alternative. That's why we have Punk Rock and the reason why "Dystopia" is now a genre of its own.

>>7617260
>/lit/ here
Never do that again.

>>7617163

>3) The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx

Is it possible to remove the Marxist-Socialist bias from academia?

Or does the preponderance of layabout academics and presumptuous intellectuals preclude any possibility of that?

It's clear why intellectuals drift toward socialism: they believe they can design and run society better than society designs and runs itself. It's also clear why academics favor powerful governments, because such governments are their main employer.

>>7617296
Punk Rock and 'Dystopia' genre lit is entertainment, not rebellion, not critique

But we have people suggesting alternatives all the time. Global caliphates, communist reform, tumblr statism, Remove Immigrants, 'just be kind to each other' hippy love etc etc. 'Better' is a word you used, not Comic-Man. Comic-Man asserts that nobody ever suggests alternatives, which is just profoundly stupid.

>>7617197
The Communist Manifesto is easy, I wonder where Das Kapital came on the list.

>>7617320
>Punk Rock and 'Dystopia' genre lit is entertainment, not rebellion, not critique

Try telling that to the artists themselves, or their fans for that matter.

>>7617296
>Punk Rock
>criticise the current order of things without providing any better alternative.
confirmed for never listening to punk
>>7617306
>memeing this hard

>>7617219
academia is babby-tier.

>>7617279
>>7617299
Come now, you must admit it's a handy distinction to make these days

>>7617332
44

>>7617338
>confirmed for never listening to punk

Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat are some of my favourite artists actually.

>>7617333
What will that prove? That artists and their fans have a delusional sense of relevancy? At the very best, it's propaganda calling for rebellion, but creation and consumption of media is not rebellion, it's consumerism.

>>7617278
It's a panel from Grant Morrison's (comics writer who, for some context, was still a wannabe punk pseud at the time) The Invisibles. This old guy is some cartoonishly evil Establishment villain who IIRC is in this scene psychically torturing the writer's tantric punk action hero self-insert.

>>7617320
>Comic-Man asserts that nobody ever suggests alternatives, which is just profoundly stupid.

I think there are a lot more people and especially artists who criticise society than there are people providing alternatives. A good example of this would be condensed into the entire Occupy Wall Street movement. Lots of criticising of the establishment, but no organised alternative.

>>7617360
Well that explains why he seemed like a cartoonishly evil establishment strawman then

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>>7617184

>>7617354
>creation and consumption of media is not rebellion, it's consumerism.

That's just Marxist rhetoric. Critique is critique whether it comes from mass produced film, books, or music or not.

>>7617320
yr not punk & i'm telling everyone

>>7617234

What does that have to do with The Prince?

I'm a high school dropout who didn't get his GED until 22 and I've read everything on that top 10 except Leviathan, which I plan to do eventually.

>>7617367
>organized alternative

Again, your word, not Comic-Man's. There were certainly alternatives among the Occupy Wall Street movement, there just was not a single alternative for the entire movement. They may seem like shitty ideas to you and me but the whole point of rebelling is having a different definition of what 'improve' actually means.

You know, I take it back. Maybe Morrison is actually a genius and Comic-Man's weak statements are supposed to be an ironic underscoring of how mired Comic-Man is in his own paradigm, unable to conceive of 'improvement' in any sense beyond what the social order already accepts as improvement, and as such can only defend his appeal-to-tradition/authority statement by moving the goalposts and adding 'btw the alternative has to be something I also approve of,' which highlights his intractability and the fundamental necessity of violent rebellion to enact change, ultimately supporting the very ideology he sought to criticize, making him the perfect Strawman to knock down.

bravo, Morrison, Bravo

>>7617286

>academeme

>>7617338

>anything I don't have an argument against is a meme

>>7617178
You're a friendless nerd

>>7617438
everything you know about punk you know from wikipedia and do not in practice or reality understand

nobody listens to the dead kennedys anymore

>>7617455
>nobody listens to the dead kennedys anymore
they're so mainstream by now you'll hear them, you know, late in normie nightclubs between AC/DC and Rage against
unless that's what you meant

>>7617455
>nobody listens to the dead kennedys anymore

>>7617438
In my experience academics were def progressives, but not marxists.

The reason for the left bias is the location of the biggest best most-endowed universities in America: Boston, New Haven, San Fran, Trenton, Philadelphia, and LA

>>7617464
you only ever hear about them from people who remember punk vaguely from when more interesting people near them in previous years wore their merch, period

there is literally better, more recent material from jello biafra, and it's not even like anybody except troglodytes really cares even tehn

>>7617455
This level of pretentiousness is below /mu/-tier

>>7617475
sorry, let me ask everybody on the next tour i'm on whether they like the dead kennedys and report back (they will not)

>>7617478
((And your virginity will still be safe))

>>7617471
Jello's new stuff is in no way on the same plateau as his Kennedy's material

>>7617483
keep wearin' that dead kennedys shirt and maybe you can get some hot topic pussy ;)

>>7617492
Nah your mums good enough for me

>>7617488
the album with king buzzo is my favorite of his by a wide margin

>>7617495
sieg howdy, that is. they have other collabs

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>>7617184

DARN YOU OFFTOPIC PUNKS

YOU'LL BE IN HOT WATER WHEN I TELL PRINCIPAL HIRO ON YOU

>>7617371
He is intentionally a strawman, for reasons explained if you read the comic. Not that I'm suggesting you should if you weren't interested.

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>>7617184

>>7617194
>>7617276
>>7617379
>>7617502
>>7617515
Don't you understand the concept of "lowest common denominator"? And, more importantly, it's not like there is much choice for this... type of material. Most of the books people have to study are still necessarily those authored by DWM, there's simply so much more variety among these that individual works will not turn up as often.

>>7617507
there are no books on punk in the top 500 of this list and so we have to discuss it

>>7617495
>>7617501
yeah well melvins are cheating

I was stuck in the car with an aquintance who was playing this "punk" shit, it was terrible, absolutely terrible pop music.

>>7617163
>3) The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41bhCXqdJHM

>>7617545
punk is a brand just like 'rock and roll' is, but there's plenty to be listened to in the current landscape

I always want to recommend the album 'flies in all directions' by weatherbox to /lit/ but it's never apropos. just listen to/read the lyrics of this song, 'bathing in the fuss'

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OKAokJtjYM
>http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/weatherbox/bathininthefuss.html

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This is relatively patrish. The same website posted a syllabus of Junot Diaz's:

“This class concerns the design and analysis of imaginary (or constructed) worlds for narrative media such as roleplaying games, films, comics, videogames and literary texts. … The class’ primary goal is to help participants create better imaginary worlds – ultimately all our efforts should serve that higher purpose.”

Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.”

Reading List:

“A Princess of Mars” by ER Burroughs
“Dracula” by Bram Stoker
“Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller
“Sunshine” by Robin McKinley
“V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore
“The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
“The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” by NK Jemisin
“Lilith’s Brood” by Octavia Butler
“Perdido Street Station” by China Miéville
“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson (Recommended)

Some things to consider always when taking on a new world: What are its primary features—spatial, cultural, biological, fantastic, cosmological? What is the world’s ethos (the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize the world)? What are the precise strategies that are used by its creator to convey the world to us and us to the world? How are our characters connected to the world? And how are we the viewer or reader or player connected to the world?

Advanced Fiction

Description: “An advanced workshop on the writing and critiquing of prose.”

Reading List:

“Clara” by Roberto Bolaño
“Hitting Budapest” by NoViolet Bulawayo
“Whites” by Julie Otsuka
“Ghosts” by Edwidge Danticat
“My Good Man” by Eric Gansworth
“Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li
“Bounty” by George Saunders

>>7617184

no wonder kids don't like to read. "reading" means brainwashing and poorly written books to many students, clearly

>>7617562
Absolutely haram

>>7617194
>>7617276
I went to a very diverse and new-age/liberal public high school, and we read The House on Mango Street, Things Fall Apart, and Like Water for Chocolate in 9th grade for our world literature-themed english class.

We even had a unit dedicated to why we were reading Things Fall Apart (because HoD was racist, we were told).

I remember sorta finding TFA somewhat agreeable, but after reading an excerpt taken out of context from HoD, I thought it sounded way cooler, and borrowed my dad's copy and read it in one sitting. The next day I showed my teacher the passage from one of the first damn pages where Marlowe essentially says that it's stupid that white people think of themselves more enlightened than Africans.

She gave me some bullshit response and told me not to bring it up again. I walked away from that class with a deep hatred for her and the retarded curriculum she and the other brain-dead english teachers decided on. Five years later, in college, I was assigned the same three books.

The point of my long ramble is that politically correct academics assign their students these mediocre, middlebrow novels in order to "correct" some sort of perceived bias they must have been subjected to by reading muh dead old white dudes in high school.

>>7617386
Save your breath, i never was one.

>>7617197
You can't really juxtapose _The Wealth of Nations_ to the Manifesto in that way. A better comparison would be _Das Kapital_, and it actually does appear further down the list than Smith's book. The Manifesto, however, is as relevant as either of the other two and is in general a more 'teachable' text. It makes sense that it would appear on more syllabi for reasons of brevity alone. That might sound like academic laziness, but everyone is on the clock.

It actually is surprising that _The Wealth of Nations_ is more taught than _Das Kapital_, however, considering the breadth of the latter's relevance outside of classical political economy. I take that to indicate the opposite of the usual slander about academia being Marxist.

>>7617601
boxcar aside tho, bivouac, dear you, and unfun > 24 hr revenge therapy

his forgetters album was also really underappreciated

>>7617603
dont wear out your underscore key lad

>>7617613
How else will they know I'm snobbish enough to italicise, m80?

>>7617620
backslashes or asterisks, how folks usually do in lieu of underlining and italics

>>7617561
>clichés everywhere and a nosecant
There's the reason why it's all called "pop-punk" now.
At least the music being terrible is a reliable constant

>>7617620
html tags

>>7617612
Oooof dont make me play this game. Dear you and 24 hour revenge therapy are my tops. I havent actually listened to forgetters yet. Ive heard good things though. I assume your a jets to brazil fan too?

>>7617627
the marketplace of punk is a nightmare, you'll notice there's really no other way to get a band together

weatherbox are a singer-songwriter project with an ensemble cast of musicians; their music gets much stranger and less poppy the fewer people involved with the recordings

what i'm saying is that brian warren from weatherbox is one of my favorite poets

>>7617626
>>7617628
Thanks for culturally enriching me, mi familia.

>>7617637
I like jets to brazil but disproportionately orange rhyming dictionary. check out 'die by your own hand,' 'turn away,' 'o deadly death,' and especially 'ribbonhead' on the forgetters LP

>>7617627
>all called pop-punk
It's not. Learn your genres boy!

>>7617645
I feel it. Someone once told me jets to brazil vocals sound like stewie from family guy and now i can never get that thought out of my head when i listen to them. Ill check out those forgetters songs, thanks anon.

>>7617552
Here's a challenge for all the "Communist Manifesto" critics: find a book which is the same length and has had the same influence.

>>7617586
>it's oppressive to be dead

>>7617655
my diary

>>7617655
Bastiat's The Law has 75 pages on my edition.

>>7617655
>Being short in length is a good thing

>>7617707
I'm not saying it ought to be taught, only there are other obvious explanations for its placing so highly than the spectre of academic marxism.

>>7617701
an honourable attempt - it hasn't had the same influence, though.

>>7617655
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet)

48 pages you pinko fuck follower of a bankrupt philosophy

>>7617737
>bankrupt
ironic

>>7617163
>The Communist Manifesto I by Plato and The Communist Manifesto II by Marx and Engels are two of the three most widely taught books

And people think conservatives are paranoid for taking Gramsci at his word?

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>>7617342

>>7617655
Burke's Philosophical Enquiry

>>7618856
>he thinks The Republic is proto-communist

kek m8

>>7618856
Plato used the state as an analogy to his metaphysics.
Also I agree, Gramsci was right and world is fucked

>>7617184
Ree beyond measure. Literal, unequivocal proof that occidental literature is fucking DEAD and the academy is in a raped-apart shambles.

>>7618905
>>7618912
I understand that the primary purpose of Socrates' utopic vision is to communicate an ideal of the rational ordering of the individual soul, but throughout the work he also advocates for his distinctly political vision - asserting its possibility as an actual mode of government, and its goodness as a form of social order.

>>7617648
You guys are both fags t b h

>>7617655
Genesis

>>7618919
If anything The Republic is proto-fascist. Definitely not communist.

>>7617178
>thinks the prince is satire
>hasn't read the discourses on livy

>>7617184
Morrison is the Harriet Tubman of literature: a worthy author certainly, but wildly overrated by pathetic cucked academics in search of a Numinous Negress.

Cisneros is trash.

Neuromancer's popularity on university syllabi is strange. Babby's first post-New Wave SF? "Literature and Technology"? The relic of someone's early-90s attempt to make literature "relevant" to "youth"?

>>7617586
Conrad didn't hate non-Europeans. Literally the only thing he's "guilty" of is giving accurate descriptions of them. Your teacher was a scrub but unfortunately you were just a kid, so she gets to impose her retarded worldview on you.

Paul Graham put it this way:
>Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter—just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her?

Except replace "Conrad character" with "Conrad" and "sixteen-year-old girl" with "thirty-year-old public school teacher"

>>7618943
It's strange since it's a bad novel and sf has so much more to offer

>The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
I'm legitimately surprised this isn't 1st.

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>>7617655
The Nicene Creed

>>7617276
I kinda decided I hated academia when my theory textbook called Light in August super racist and everyone went along with it even though I was the only one who had read it.

>>7617655
The Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra