[tifo_gcs]

I just stumbled into this thread because I'm bored at work, so please bear with me if I say anything that might already have been posted. I had three years of discussion with my high-school English teacher over Lord of the Rings. On a scale to ten, he would rate it a 7, not higher. When I pressed why, he said it wasn't literature, for the simple reason that it did not reflect, reveal or refocus anything about life. Simply put, because there where such "fairy-tale" creatures in the books as elves, dwarves, orks, talking trees and the like, it wasn't the real world life, and since literature is about life, Tolkien's works couldn't be considered literature but simply escapist fiction, although the quality of the writing was top notch. What I found very interesting was that we had this discussion at the same time that we were reading Kafka's "Metamorphosis," in preperation for a paper on world LITERATURE. In case any of you don't know the storyline, it's about a guy who wakes up and finds himself transformed into a human-sized beetle. My teacher's response when I pointed out the flaw in his argument that humans becoming beetles was about as plausible as elves and talking trees was some wandering about how it might be purely mental and that people might be seeing Gregor (protagonist in Metamorphosis) as a beetle although he was still human. Please note, my English teacher refuses to lose an argument despite being obviously in the wrong, and so he ended the discussion there.
Point I'm trying to make is that some people may have the same view as my English teacher.
That aside, and this as an aside, Lush is right. Let's not discourage kids from majoring in English. With a good teacher it's a fantastic subject.