random thought -- teach how your perspective on literature changes with experience and age. Have them reread a popular YA book, like Bridge to Terabithia or A Wrinkle in Time, and talk about how they view it now as opposed to when they first read it.

Erin, could you do short stories or novellas? Then you can do a range of authors and periods and genres. So you can aim more for "something for everyone" instead of trying to think of a single novel that everyone's going to get excited about.

Most of my kids are ESL or Latina/o students. A lot of stuff I consider classics, they've never read.

A concept I'm toying with: chronological exposure to lit: Socrates, Beowulf, Canturbury Tales, Renn poets (Herbert, Herrick, Donne), Romantic poets, the novel (Pride and Prejudice? Frankenstein?), um...then into Americana -- Whitman, Hawthorne SStories, Fitzgerald, Millay, and then end with modern, like Kazuo Ishiguro's newest?

I dunno. I could do genre lit, too: the romance! the gothic! the comedy of manners!

I will definitely include SS's, but it's a year course, so I want to teach a couple of novels, too.

If you’re not sure if you’re being asked out, just drop an unmistakable hint into the conversation referring to your heterosexuality.

Mention that you don't understand what's wrong with mixing plaids? Emphasize that you hate show tunes?

The chronological plan sounds a bit too much like the standard eng lit survey -- although, given your audience, it may be stuff they haven't yet come to see as standard. I like the genre idea better, especially since it opens the door to stuff (funny! scary! risque!) that's more fun than what they might expect from school reading.

(HoYay: A History may just have to wait for college....)

Mention that you don't understand what's wrong with mixing plaids? Emphasize that you hate show tunes?

Maybe this? If you're a man, just say, "Tonight after work I'm going to Hooters. Yessiree, I loves me some Hooters waitresses." Then howl loudly like a wolf.

I'm with amych. I LIKE English Literature, and almost died doing the Survey classes for my major because it was frontloaded with stuff that was hard (for me anyway) to read, like Chaucer and Beowulf and The Faerie Queen. My favorite and best classes all had literature from what I like to call the "readable" period of English Literature.. around 1850 - 1930. I realize that other people rpobably have different "readable" periods.

Perhaps a an explorations of all the different things that one might consider literature-- poems, plays, novels (of all kinds of genres), comic books, movie scripts, etc. Based on my (theatre) background, I tend to be really interested in how something goes from page to screen or page to performance, which I think would be interesting for kids who watch a lot of movies/TV.

I remember enjoying a unit I did in a high school English class where we did compare-and-contrast of very old and more recent works--I read the Oresteia and Sartre's The Flies, for instance. That might be a bit much for ESL students, though.

Probably the best class I took in grad school was a seminar on the memoir. We read The Education of Henry Adams, Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. It was particularly interesting to talk about how people shaped their lives into a story, and how their version differs from reality. They're all pretty accessible books, except for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Henry Adams is too long, but, as much as I hate to admit it, it's pretty easy to lift exerpts from it. Since then there have been some other great memoirs, like Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.