Ooh, thanks for the background, Patrick. Interesting. It's especially interesting that an undergrad degree would have a focus, unless you just happened to pick that by the electives you chose. I guess my experiences have been similar--there was the required reading, then the reading that Professors encouraged me to do outside that. I tried to cover as broad a spectrum as possible in my undergrad courses, but I had my preferences too :) Anyways, I was trying to support the idea that there is Some objective criteria by which we can judge literature. It's not Much, believe me, what I'm arguing for here is to keep the idea of Objective Criteria from being thrown out altogether--not to go all the way the other way and call literary criticism an exact science. For example, no one used language like Shakespeare did. No one. Marlowe came close. And I haven't seen too many authors leave you so Undecided as to Which Side of the Issue the author stood on. I agree with Camille that Shakespeare was a populist--but he'd present a Shylock character that was everything S's audiences expected him to be, then makes him say, "if you cut us, do we not bleed," turning the responsibility for Shylock being who he is at least partly upon the system in which he operates--and very eloquently, too. There are a lot of objective reasons to put Shakespeare "up there" as far as being Worthy of Study. Including the fact that so much later literature alludes to his work. We should all read Ovid, Dante and Milton for those reasons too. But Salinger, Bukowski, etc? They're too recent still to fully know their importance. Any good author can be personally meaningful to us for a lot of reasons, but that doesn't mean their work is worthy of study if we had to define a curriculum. I know a lot of people that think John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is the best book written this century. I can't argue with the fact that they were moved by the book, and after reading it a couple times I can see for myself How they were moved. But it doesn't deserve the kind of credit they're giving it, and if I had to pick five novels for students to read in a course on Late 20th Century American Lit, it wouldn't make the list. There's just too much else out there that's more worthy of study. Jim _____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]