What is a "repertoire"? You may have heard the term in connection with music. The pianist says, "I can't play 'Melancholy Baby'; it's not in my repertoire." Your literary repertoire simply means the works and concepts of literature with which you are familiar. One can gauge the level of familiarity, of course, as well as the extent. Do you know 100 works very well, or 1000 works only vaguely? Do you know works from different time periods and regions of the world or works that are contemporary and local? You may not know a work, not having read it, but you may know of it and its significance. You may not know a work; you may have heard of the author, however. You may know it is a play or a poem or a fiction.

Our repertoire is more that just a list of the works we have read. What has your experience with various works taught you? If, for example, you have been fooled by a surprise ending a few times, you have learned that the outcome suggested by a story's line of development may not, in fact, be the way it turns out. You have learned from experience to be wary of the possibility of a surprise ending. This shows our repertoire includes the strategies and techniques of literature as well. You also learn about these things indirectly from teachers and commentaries and textbooks and other cultural experiences with tv, movies, songs, and spectacles. Our literary repertoire, therefore, is varied and comes from different sources.

What sorts of terms do we use to indicate levels or types of experience? Today, for example, we might call people who are familiar with technology such slang terms as nerds, geeks, gearheads, cyberjockies, technophiles, and digerati. The last two, technophile and digerati, are transformations of two far older terms for lovers of literature: bibliophiles (lovers of books) and literati (those knowledgeable about literature). Would you call yourself either? How about bookworm! Sometimes we use simply the phrase, "being well-read" to describe a reader. Even if you would never use these terms to describe yourself, you do have a literary repertoire. Even if you think of yourself in opposite terms, as a non-reader or avoider of literature, you still have some experiences and some familiarity with literature.

The objective of this page is to encourage you to describe your literary repertoire. Furthermore, you are encouraged to appreciate your repertoire, for it is yours and it reflects your current and past tastes and interests, as well as the tastes and interests of those to whom you have been subject (parents, teachers, friends, and other influences), for better or worse.

• What Works for You? Let's look at works themselves. Here you will be encouraged to examine lists of works to get an idea of your reading background.
• Write a Reader's Resume
• Write a story about a vivid experience with literature--either good or bad--but acquired before the age of seven.

Ideas of being well-read or widely read relate to the concept of "cultural literacy" a phrase some use to suggest the things that a person ought to know to function well in our culture. Being "well-read" also invokes the traditional idea that literature breaks into two general categories, variously described as high and low, or art and entertainment, or that which is geared to select tastes or for mass appeal. Finally, we should also take into account the idea of diversity, that one should be familiar with literature of other cultures and communities or with the literature of those who have been repressed in one's own culture. As you can see, this complicates your description of your repertoire.