Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense
There's a lot to deal with in this post, so I'll start with this. I think there is a pretty solid line drawn here, if the tradition is that right=conservative, a looking back at the past, and left=progressive, a looking forward to the future. To me, if one advocates a locked-down, rarely-changed canon, one is saying that what has come before is absolutely good and worth knowing about, to the disdain of what is newer. That's practically the definition of conservatism--the assumption that things were better in the past and we need to conserve them. That may be the case if you favor a patriarchal, European dominated literature and political structure--some of us don't. So we look elsewhere for divergent viewpoints--we're progressive in that sense.
And Fish is pulling one of regular rhetorical tricks--saying something people can agree with and then following up with something completely unrelated as though he's proving his point with it. Academics probably shouldn't proselytize in the classroom--I certainly try to avoid dumping my personal politics on my students--but political statement has been an undeniable part of literature for as long as humans have been writing. Am I supposed to avoid teaching Lysistrata because it has major parallels to our current situation? Or am I proselytizing simply by putting it on the reading list?
My job, as I see it, is to make literature accessible to people who might otherwise never give it a shot. That means I have to find things they're interested in, and if that means I'm teaching newer stuff written by people who aren't white or male, then that's a good thing.
The other major problem is something I don't know how to combat, which is the idea that a university degree has to translate into a high-paying job in order to be worth anything. It's a cancer on our society, and I don't have any real answers as to how to cut it out, outside of hoping that the current economic system collapses, and all those people with Business degrees find themselves flipping burgers for a living.
Actually there's a story in the NYTimes right now about how many successful young busy-ness-men have been skipping the MBA... could the busy-ness BA be far behind?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/1...dd86&ei=5087%
0A
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.
I don't think that this is necessarily true. There's a certain truth to the idea that students can't read everything -- I'll agree with that. But it doesn't follow that "canon-formation" is a zero-sum game. Just because students might not read some of the same things that they had in the past doesn't mean that those things have been completely eliminated from the canon.
I think that in the process of canon-formation (which is always going to fall short somehow) we have to think about for whom we are forming the canon. Creating a course reading list means creating a type of canon -- what things should your students read? Why are some things not worth teaching this semester?
I'm just not convinced by this claim that we're leaving things out in the end. Or at least, that we're leaving things out any more than people did when canon formation really began in the 18th century. Some of the decisions made then had to do with politics and personal relationships (did you get along with Alexander Pope? If not, you might have been left out).
Plus, seriously, do you realize how many of our students (at least the English majors) are interested in the 18th century? I can't get them too excited about my stuff, but they sure liked the 18th c. stuff. Colleges still run courses in historical literary figures. Do most students take them? No, of course not. They're not English majors.
But I didn't take physics in college. Or art history. Or Spanish. I took things in my major, and I learned the necessary amount of science to graduate; I took music history courses; and I took Latin.
I realize I have no point at this point. I'll stop and go back to my job letter.
You have a good point about how the canon was built. Miller Williams has a poem titled "A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeenth Century," which is fairly unremarkable, except for the section which reads:
You've lost the ones that were hopelessly only good,
saying things that nobody else could say
and lucky to be heard in their own day.
The nature of the beast is that some are going to get left out--some for personal, petty reasons, some because they just weren't of the level of the other writers of the time, and we are constantly culling the list in order to make room for new writers, most of whom will fall by the wayside the same way.
And then there are the choices we make in the classroom that are simply based on our not wanting to teach that same thing again. For instance, I'm teaching Othello this term partly because I didn't want to teach Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream again. In a year, that might be Measure for Measure or Twelfth Night, but I feel fairly confident that even if I don't teach Hamlet, they'll have gotten it from someone by the time they finish college.
In a year, that might be Measure for Measure or Twelfth Night, but I feel fairly confident that even if I don't teach Hamlet,
On an only slightly related note, I vote for Measure for Measure. But that might be because I'm weird. That's a crazy play (I also saw a version of it when I was in DC a couple of years ago that used some real actors and some puppets. Sersiouly, it was weird. But also really cool)
"Sersiouly"
Really? I can't spell that? Ugh. I also realized that I'm having trouble typing the word "university" lately.
Sorry I'm a bad speller.
I also like Measure for Measure. And I also think it's because I'm weird. 
Also: Brian pointed out to me that he's never read Achebe's novel, but that he does know the Yeats poem -- coincidentally, me too. But I don't doubt that the reverse is true for many. I think this idea that all English majors of any generation have been indoctrinated with the exact same information and values misses the reality of any English or Lit degree: that it's more art than doctrine, and that the education of each individual graduate is unique. It also misses the fact that, in our world, the degree is just the *start* of an education.
Howdy -- found and linked your post, and liked what you had to say. I particularly liked what you had to say about the zero-sum nature of the canon.
Anyway, I thought I'd ask: Do you know what Mark Lilla is saying? I've read the "book camp" sentence several times and have no idea what it means. Though at the end it sounds like he's saying that Toni Morrison isn't challenging, which makes me wonder if he's ever read her.
Matt, Thanks for linking to us! I'm not sure about that "book camp" comment either, but I took it to be a comparison to a "fat camp": as though the canon were an expensive 6-week program with a rigid food and exercise plan. Not sure if that's right, but that's how I took it. ...more at YOUR site...
Another blog where there is some discussion of this topic from a bit more of a High School POV:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/09...iches/
#comments
The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. . . . In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.
Oh, I dunno -- anytime Dryden, Pope, and Eliot get replaced by Austen, Woolf, and Morrison, I think it's fair to describe that as an "invasion of politics." Though I'm alarmed to see that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton have been replaced by Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer. I blame the 1960s.
Hey Berube, make that comment at my blog! Anyway, just wanted to mention that I've read the Yeats poem (in high school, I'm pretty sure, but I can't remember whether it was assigned or was just sitting there in Perrine's Sound and Sense) and have never read the Achebe, though I'd like to, and some other English classes in my high school (Pittsburgh public schools, class of '8
did. And never particularly made the connection between the title and the poem.
No time to comment extensively, tho I found myself pulled in a half-dozen different directions reading the NYT piece, agreeing *in part* with almost everyone.
But Lilla: “What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy and religion who just left the University of Chicago for Columbia. “That’s where the conservatives went wrong. The case for the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West.” Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is “the most alienating experience possible,” he continued. “When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.”
I read the "book camp" comment as a snarky interpretation of the whole "Great Books" ethos, where everybody reads the same works, thereby laying down a kind of shared set of ideas & perspectives that (ideally) they can start discussing & arguing from. It's an attractive ethos (& for those who consider it a homogeneous West-affirming experience, check out those "Great Books of the Western World" sets from U Chicago in every used bookstore -- there's shitloads of highly subversive works in there [Marx, Spinoza, Voltaire, etc.]).
What I read Lilla as advocating -- obfuscated by selective quotation in the NYT -- is reading literature as "alienation," rather than as affirmation. The founders of the GB would probably agree -- reading Plato, or Aristotle, or even Shakespeare -- is an experience of stepping outside, way outside, of one's 21st century linguistic, social, & conceptual spheres. In ways that reading Toni Morrison (who's generally a terrific author, & very important) sometimes isn't.
[Which is only to say that Morrison, in the way in which she addresses issues pertinent to & present in the lives of readers -- race & gender as conceived in 20th century America -- writes about things which many -- by no means all, by no means enough -- of our students have already been thinking about. She writes about the "American condition."]
The duller of the canonical conservatives keep arguing for the canon as the "repository" of Western values, which shows that they haven't read the canon: the canon is actually just the high points of a series of arguments about those values, which haven't been (& won't ever be) settled.
***
But hey, I got a tag! Looking forward to replacing Mark Strand in the canon someday.
At the very least, Mark, you've got a better last name.
I like the idea myself of having a common cultural bar to order drinks from, and we do: the French know what the goose who laid the golden egg means, a Romanian cuckold also has horns on his head, and Americans understand the heroism and folly of tilting at windmills. So on and so forth. That's all the shared treasure of those Books Great and Small that have caught on over the years.
But to return to my bar metaphor, we're not all still drinking mead and undiluted sweet wines. Time goes forward always. Now personally, I've read Dryden, Pope, and Eliot in fairly large chunks, and I don't remember the alienating parts. I only remember the parts that felt to me like connection -- connection across time and space with the one important thing that matters: human consciousness.
To my humanist consciousness that's the important thing, and I'll take it whether the author has been dead for 2000+ years, or whether he loudly slurping his coffee in the next room...
"I'm alarmed to see that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton have been replaced by Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer. I blame the 1960s."
--That part is an argument for the opposite, isn't it? Half the top six remain unchanged (and we all know very well that Pope, Dryden, and Eliot are all still being taught, even if they're not in the top six), and that's an argument for how radical the changes have been? Hardly.
If anything it's evidence of how carefully and with what timorous moderation these reading lists are updated. Weaseling your way into the canon ain't easy... ask any author!
Yet more on this topic, from a "reactionary" point of view:
http://
rossdouthat.theatlantic.c..._canon_wars.php
My brother (in comments to my entry) pointed me to this piece by Lilla, arguing for teaching the canon (but not Emerson) because it's unsettling -- and what these kids need today, with their iPods and their egalitarianism, is unsettling. But his argument that "great books" are necessary to achieve this unsettling is profoundly lame; he says that a great teacher can't ruin Moby Dick or teach it in a blandly affirming way, which is just not true. His argument really suggests that we should be reading lots of stuff from other cultures (Genji, anyone?), and to avoid this he has to rely on an argument that these can be taught in a bland multiculti way while the Western Canon is impossible to ruin. Pah.
I also doubt that most students have been thinking about the kind of thing that Morrison writes about in Beloved.
Also, Lilla's claim that kids are all egalitarian and need to be taught stuff with hierarchies in them is just ridiculous. Or if you really want to alienate kids, teach them things where the hierarchies are reversed, like The Female Man or (a book I've only started) The Radiance of the King. Maybe double that last with Henderson the Rain King: everyone's guaranteed to be alienated by one of those books!
Those sound like books I ought to take a look at, Matt. Thanks.
Thanks for the link, Matt. Lilla's is an interesting piece, full of things to argue with. For instance:
"The study of things foreign cannot guarantee alienation. As anyone in a university knows, it is possible to teach foreign cultures from a flat, multicultural perspective that sees the whole world through democratic American eyes. And the study of certain things American, taught from the right perspective, can be deeply alienating, too. Cf., Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, the Civil War. Just steer clear of anything polluted by Emerson.
3. The best reason to rely on the "great books" in liberal education is that they are almost impervious to bad teaching. A great teacher can shake his or her students up with a mediocre book, but even a dull teacher will have trouble ruining Moby Dick. Most attacks and defenses of "great books" curricula miss the point. There is nothing sacred about these works; they do not teach moral uplift, good values, civic inclusion, toleration, or proper hygiene. They are open, radically so, to interpretation and questioning. Their effect depends less on teachers than on a chance spark falling from them onto a young mind ready for combustion. And that's a good thing."
While I *generally* agree w/ Lilla's last points on the "nothing sacredness" of certain works, I think he underestimates the crucialness of the teacher. I personally think that even a dull teacher would have trouble defusing the subversiveness of Moby-Dick; but there's a grand tradition of reducing Huckleberry Finn -- one of the great subversive books -- into a bland moral tale. And who the hell ruined Emerson for him??? Emerson, in the right hands, is every bit as unsettling as his more acerbic buddy HD Thoreau (another writer whose critique of the entire western tradition has been reduced to happy tree-hugging by short-sighted teachers).
"And who the hell ruined Emerson for him???"
No kidding! He's walking evidence that the teacher matters. Anyway, if the teachers didn't matter, LIT classes would be reading lists followed up by proctored ID tests... and those would be just to make sure the students did in fact read (and therefore did absolutely "absorb") the greatness in question.
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