The best part about David Foster Wallace’s “Literary Analysis” course syllabus isn’t the fact that he assigned Jackie Collins, Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, or Mary Higgins Clark, it’s that he issued this warning to his students about it:

“Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking that this will be a blow-off-type class. These ‘popular’ texts will end up being harder than more conventionally ‘literary’ works to unpack and read critically. You’ll end up doing more work in here than in other sections of 102, probably.”

(Via W. Thomas Webb)