When I was younger I always read the typical books that were popular for my age group: The Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, all of the Roald Dahl books. Then I was brought to light in ninth grade when my class read Charles Dickens’ work of art Great Expectations. Not only did it make me feel accomplished and cultured, but I loved it, each and every word (except maybe for the chapter that included an extensive amount of boating terms that I just did not understand). My fellow students gave me a sizable amount of grief, as they despised Dickens and our teacher for forcing us to read it, with long and detailed sentences (which I happen to adore) and a time period to which they could not relate at the ripe age of fourteen. But it’s a “classic”!
In his book Interdisciplinarity, Joe Moran discusses intertextuality and states that “texts… question the attempt within literary studies to regard certain kinds of authors or texts as more valuable or worthy of study than others” (Moran 76). This intertextuality explains why in high school teachers require their students to study works of high regard such as Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, “Beowulf”, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and a myriad of Shakespeare plays and sonnets. These types of works are alluded to and referenced throughout the literary world, and so as English major I was grateful that they were required in my school. However, I question what makes a text so “valuable”.
Modern books may make it onto the Bestseller List or win an award, but still the books that students study in their secondary educations are what are considered “classics” and older texts. Rarely have I encountered a class where we read a book from a decade after the 1970s. Perhaps this is simply as result of my selection of classes, as I elected to take a course called “Major Novels” rather than its alternative “Contemporary Literature”; my decision to do so, also, was because I valued these texts more highly than those in the Contemporary Literature curriculum. Was this ingrained in me because of my schooling and the teachers under whom I had studied, or was it society and the media promoting the titles of these books rather than others? And are these works deserving of the recognition and higher praise that they receive? Or is it all perception and bias? What truly makes a text valuable in comparison to another “less valuable”?