"geek, ahoy!" - an incredibly nerdy survey

There were a few universities I had my sights set on upon graduation from high school. All were chosen for different reasons, some of them highly contradictory (Emerson College because it was so far away, University of Hawaii because it was close to home, etc.) I chose various intended majors on my applications, all of them having something to do with Literature or Communication. I ended up going to school on Guam and chose the only thing I really could: English Literature. I had only one reason: Because I liked it. Actually, because I liked it, I knew I'd excel in it and I wouldn't have to work too hard.

That turned out to be a crock considering I quickly realized that English majors read more than twice the amount of most other majors and write significantly more papers. There is no practicum in this field. It's just reading and reading and writing and writing and it never ends. Despite the fact that I've read most of the things I have to read in my college courses and all the material is rather familiar to me, I still have to re-read everything so that the details stick and become second nature while I pull an all-nighter, cranking out some insane twelve-page paper.

Then there's the reality we all were aware of back then but didn't understand till it was too late. In majoring in something we "loooooove" and not selling out, we sold ourselves short. I cannot do anything with this damn major. I can get to certain places that require a lot more work and extra school, no doubt, but nothing I can look forward to immediately. All of this could have been done in my free time while I opened myself up to a different field, figuring out what works and hoping that the thing that works will give me guaranteed cash relatively soon after I got that damn degree.

Whatever. I didn't happen that way. I didn't sell out. Yay, frickin', me! And I'm only planning to one day go back to school to finish up because I've already invested so much time and energy and money (that I'm still paying back). I've come too far to abandon it.

So really, what my major has done is provide me with a brain interested in something as dorky as the following. I will not tag anyone. I will not expect anyone to respond. I'm just using the gears in my head for something. Anything.

Directions:

Below are some of the most significant periods in literature. Name your favorite sub-genre (if applicable), author and work from each period. Also name the one work or author you like least.

1. Greek Tragedians

- writer: Sophocles
- work: Orestes by Euripides

2. Roman

(I don't know if this is asking for Roman tragedy or Roman literature in general, so...)

- genre: Classical Poetry
- writer: Seneca
- work: Metamorphoses by Ovid

3. Old English

(This was around the same time so I'm skipping over any Beowulf mention and heading over to Japan)
- work: Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

4. Medieval

- genre: Humanism
- writer: Dante
- work: Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory
- least favorite: Geoffrey Chaucer

5. Renaissance

- genre: Elizabethan
- writer: John Milton
- work: Don Quixote by Cervantes
- least favorite: William Shakespeare (No, really? Yes! Really.)

6. Neoclassical

- genre: Restoration
- writer: Moliere
- work: Candide by Voltaire

7. The Victorians

- writer: Charles Dickens
- work: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

8. Romanticism

- genre: Dark Romanticism
- author: Edgar Allan Poe
- work: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- least favorite: Jane Austen and the Brontes

9. Transcendentalism

- Though not techincally a "transcendentalist", the only author connected to this that I appreciate is Emily Dickinson

10. Realism

- genre: Russian Realism
- author: Leo Tolstoy
- work: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

11. Edwardian

- author: H.G. Wells
- work: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

12. Naturalism

- author: John Steinbeck
- work: An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

13. Existentialism

- genre: Absurdism
- author: Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll
- work: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

14. Modernism

- Lost Generation
- author: Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- work: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
- least favorite: James Joyce, William Carlos Williams

15. Post Modernism

- genre: Beat Writers
- author: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Ray Bradbury
- work: Howl by Allen Ginsberg, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

When we get into the last couple movements, the lines get blurred a bit so I just entered certain works and authors where I saw fit. And there was no way I would have been able to just choose one for existentialism, modernism and post-modernism.