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| Hearsay: |
I wish we had an extra “n” to work with and that this involved heavy globs of lead being shot between ships and forts, but it doesn’t. Sadly, there’s nary a pirate anywhere in the article. ‘Tis about academics. Yarr.
But many scholars see these changes as part of a necessary evolution. To Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” (2006), the changes have been particularly beneficial in American literature, which has seen the most canon revision in part because it never had a very stable canon to begin with. “The old guard had very little to offer in the way of serious intellectual argument against the reading and teaching of … Olaudah Equiano or Djuna Barnes or Zora Neale Hurston, so the canon of the past two or three centuries got itself revised in fairly short order,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Only the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.”
Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped. One can debate the changing fortunes of writers on the literary stock market, but it’s clear that today the emphasis is on the recent past — at the expense, some argue, of historical perspective. As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”
Somehow that feels like a bad example. I can’t imagine more people have read Achebe than Yeats. Though maybe sometime in the next 20 years, as our parents and grandparents kick off, that may indeed become the case.
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September 17th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I don’t know about anyone else, but the canon wars definitly failed me as a student.
The idea of reading as many women as men or blacks as whites and hispanics as jews and homosexuals as straights, etc., is great on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it degrades our reading experience.
First it degrades it on a historical level. The new canon drops a ton of important historical writers in favor of the ethnic flavor of the month author whose work is already forgotten 10 years later (The books I read from the “new canon” in high school were never well received by the students and were all authors I’ve never heard from again) and thus it deprives us of the literary context that reading a Geothe or Milton can provide.
Secondly, as I said, the work simply wasn’t as good. Blacks and homosexuals and women can all write great books, and have, but the history of the west is such that the vast majority of writers (and thus the vast majority of great writers) have been male and caucasian.
I’m all infavor of inserting a terrific book like Invisibile Man or Ms. Dalloway into the school canon. But for the most part the new canon seems to be composed of irrelevant works of recent fiction by people who are resentful of their demographic and can only write about that.
September 17th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Somehow that feels like a bad example. I can’t imagine more people have read Achebe than Yeats. Though maybe sometime in the next 20 years, as our parents and grandparents kick off, that may indeed become the case.
If you are talking about the whole world, sure. But I think Alan Wolfe meant that more people in the american school system today have read Achebe than the Yeats poem. He is probably right.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Perhaps ours too. Our undergrads seem to escape poetry whenever possible, even when they’re Lit. majors.
September 17th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
“Things Fall Apart” was part of my Development Studies – not English – curriculum in the early
90’s. Post-colonial first, literature second.
How does reading Yeats help – stuffy cocktail conversation aside – our understanding of Achebe’s
use of Yeats, anyway?