Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward,
and The First Circle.
5) The new twentieth century genre of science fiction and fantasy is
extremely popular. Classics include Bradbury’s The Martian
Chronicles, Clarke’s Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and Herbert’s Dune. In the same vein, an interest in apocalyptic
literature can lead from the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelations
in the Bible to Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.
6) Twentieth and twenty-first century world literature offers an explosion
of possibility for 12 th grade readers. The list of works is endless,
of course, but could include novels by Hemingway, Fitzgerald,
Faulkner, Bellow, Morrison, McCarthy,Welch, Silko, Erdrich,
Helprin, Ondatje, Michaels, Mistry, Malouf and translated works
from Central and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East,
India, and Asia.
7) Twelfth graders can follow the path of poetry as it moves from the
nineteenth century into the twentieth and twenty-first with Poe,
Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, Stevens,
Rilke, Bishop, Plath, Roethke, Auden, Jeffers, Brodsky, Ginsburg,
Brooks, Collins, Dove, Forche, Graham, Haas, Hall, Harjo, Kinnell,
Kunitz, Lee, Olds, Pinsky, Snyder, Strand, Wilbur, Wolcott, and on
and on.
8) Biographies of especially courageous individuals of the twentieth
century inspire, among them Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom,
Iraina Ratushinskaya’s Grey is the Color of Hope, and Anatoly
Sharansky’s Fear No Evil.
9) By the twelfth grade, many students are interested as well in psychological,
sociological, political, and environmental books including
Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia and Neil Postman’s Amusing
Ourselves to Death.
All these suggestions, arising out of decades of experience with high
school students reading, are meant not as prescriptions but as indications,
with the hope of helpfully stimulating one’s own understanding of
stages of adolescent development and how a book might appropriately
meet, serve, enhance, and help awaken that particular stage. And of course,
all this general context should better enable us, rather than blind us from
being able, to recognize any individual need which may declare itself at
any moment.
John Wulsin’s essay was written for Books for the Journey, A Guide to the World of Reading ©
2004 and is used with permission by Wulsin and Michaelmas Press
(www.michaelmaspress.com)