School Study Media

Those works of fiction that people tend to study at school, often called the "canon". You can tell these by how many fanfics at Fanfiction.net have the writer telling you they wrote it for a school assignment and how many people on My Space have them listed as their "favorite book" even though they never mention reading anything else. Often where we are taught how to plant Epileptic Trees and first learn that Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory and that Freud Was Right.

Almost none of them were written with the intent of being studied and analyzed in a classroom, and most of them were definitely not written for kids.

See also Small Reference Pools.

Film

• Citizen Kane
• The Godfather and/or The Godfather Part II
• The Searchers
• Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, usually Vertigo, North by Northwest or Psycho
• Casablanca
• Schindler's List
• The Birth of a Nation
• The Great Train Robbery
• Threads
• Triumph of the Will
• The Battleship Potemkin
• The Jazz Singer
• The Bicycle Thief
• Metropolis
• Gone with the Wind
• The Wizard of Oz
• Rashomon
• The 400 Blows
• Anything by Federico Fellini
• Breathless
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Annie Hall
• Apocalypse Now
• Saving Private Ryan
• Requiem for a Dream
• Koyaanisqatsi - if you've seen this film, you're probably either a film student or a big fan of Philip Glass (who wrote the score)
• Gattaca - on the VCE syllabus for over a decade... famous for remaining priced at $30 dollars in Victoria, despite its age, until it was finally taken off the syllabus and fell to the discount bin
• American Beauty - Why? Because of it's influence on post-2000 arthouse and mainstream films alike.

Literature

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often quite controversially due to people mistaking Mark Twain's point for its exact opposite. Perhaps for this reason, Twain includes a facetious foreword threatening readers who look for meaning in it.
• The Aeneid
• Anabasis for students of Ancient Greek
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Animal Farm
• Anna Karenina
• Anthem and other Ayn Rand books are becoming increasingly common in the U.S.
• Arabian Nights
• Anything by Jane Austen, the most common being Pride and Prejudice
• The Awakening
• The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas is common in the UK
• Brave New World
• Bridge to Terabithia
• Works by the Bronte sisters, such as
  • Wuthering Heights
  • Jane Eyre
• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Butterfly Revolution
• Casabianca
• Cannery Row
• The Catcher in The Rye
• Anything by Charles Dickens
• The Cone Gatherers
• Crime and Punishment
• Daisy Miller
• The Devils Arithmetic
• Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edward Thomas, in Britain
• Effi Briest, in Germany
  • Also always there: The works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The rest is rotating, but they are very, very hard to miss.
• Ethan Frome
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Faerie Queene
• Fahrenheit 451
• A Farewell to Arms
• Flowers for Algernon
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Frankenstein
• The Gift of the Magi
• The Giver
• Go Ask Alice
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Great Expectations
• The Great Gatsby
• The Handmaid's Tale
• Homer's epic poems,
  • The Iliad
  • The Odyssey
• Harrison Bergeron
• Heart of Darkness
• The Histories of Herodotus, for students of Ancient Greek.
• Johnny Tremain
• Julie of the Wolves
• Anything by Franz Kafka
• The Kite Runner
• The Little Prince
• Lord of the Flies
• Lost Girls
• Lolita
• "The Lottery"
• Miriam
• Moby Dick
• The Last of the Mohicans
• The Master and Margarita
• Anything by Toni Morrison, but particularly Beloved or Song of Solomon
• The Most Dangerous Game
• Night
• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• In the Philippines, Jose Rizal's novels
  • Noli Me Tangere and its sequel,
  • El Filibusterismo
• Of Mice and Men
• The Old Man and the Sea
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• On My Honor
• One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, but author Ken Kesey objected to its use in classrooms because it wasn't "great literature" and guessed that teachers probably only used it because the sex and swearing could hold students' attention
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the U.K.
• The Outsiders
• Paradise Lost
• The Poisonwood Bible
• Alexander Pushkin's works (Eugene Onegin, Dubrovsky, The Captain's Daughter, Boris Godunov)
• The Red Pony
• Anything by Robert Frost
• Robinson Crusoe
• The Scarlet Letter
• A Separate Peace
• The Shahnameh in Iran
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Stone Fox
• The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• The Stranger
• The Sun Also Rises
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• That Was Then This Is Now
• Things Fall Apart
• To Kill a Mockingbird

Live Action TV

• Talking Heads
• Blue Remembered Hills
• Roots

Theatre

• Many a William Shakespeare play, usually in written or televised form, such as:
  • Hamlet
  • Macbeth
  • Othello
  • Julius Caesar
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • The Merchant of Venice
• An Inspector Calls
• Blood Brothers
• Various plays by Anton Chekhov (his short stories as well)
• The Crucible
• The Curious Savage
• Death of a Salesman
• Equus
• The Glass Menagerie
• Anything by Henrik Ibsen, particularly A Dolls House
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• Inherit the Wind
• Oedipus the King
  • Antigone
  • Classical Civilisation students and Classics students (different subjects ) will study a variety of plays from this time. Playwrights such as Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes are the more popular ones.
• Oleanna (depending on how deranged your high school drama teacher is)
• Our Town
• The Revengers Tragedy
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Waiting for Godot