Canon Vs. Culture

Reflections on the Current Debate

Jan Groak, Jan Gorak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134818099
• Subtopic: Educational Policy
• Index: Literature

Canon Vs. Culture explores the consequences of one of the main educational shifts of the last quarter century-- the changes from academic inquiry conducted through a selected list of accepted authorities to an investigation of the cultural operations of an entire society.

Part One

Why the Revolution Happened

Opening the American Mind

Reflections on the “Canon” Controversy

WILLIAM E. CAIN

What is the knowledge most worth having? Which books should students read and study in school? Do debates about the literary canon, and efforts to examine and expand it, suggest that Americans have lost respect for and faith in their cultural heritage? Teachers, administrators, and politicians have been fiercely arguing about and attempting to answer these questions, and do not seem close to a consensus. The questions are not entirely new, but they have gained special urgency in recent years, as the multicultural, multiethnic composition of American society has become increasingly clear, and as many panels and commissions have issued reports on the “crisis” of American education and outlined plans to resolve it. The “canon” controversy not only involves choices among books, but also impels people to make decisions about the degree to which America’s diverse population will be represented in institutional life. It also leads them to consider the extent to which each person should share beliefs, goals, and values and hence live and work as a member of a national community.

Cultural conservatives who publish in such influential magazines as The New Criterion, Commentary, and American Scholar have been emphasizing for some time that the traditional canon has been badly damaged by Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists, and new historicists eager to make education serve ideological ends. These radical “canon busters,” so the conservatives contend, do not care about literature for its own sake, but, rather to promote political agendas by fixing on “race, class, and gender,” and nothing else. Tradition has been dismantled, jettisoned. Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball, and Bruce Bawer have presented this argument often, and they have won numerous converts to their side. But the argument falters upon close inspection. The content of traditional education, and the canon upon which it was based, was unfaithful to the complexity of the past that it supposedly honored.

My own case, I suspect, is fairly representative. I received an excellent education in both college and graduate school, studying with stimulating professors and reading the classic texts that Kramer and his colleagues prize. But it is now clear to me that I did not read widely enough. During my years as an undergraduate (1970–74) and graduate student (1974–78), I took twenty-five courses in English and American literature without ever reading a poem, play, story, novel, or critical essay by an African-American writer. This meant that I never read Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, or James Baldwin. In all my years of schooling, the only book by an African-American that I encountered was Ellison’s Invisible Man, which I read in my sophomore year of high school. Clearly this was an injustice not only to white students like myself—but, even more, to black students, whose culture was neglected and devalued.

It was a literary injustice, for the absence of African-American writers from reading lists prevented students from knowing the full range of the subject of “English and American literature.” It also proved that faculty members who taught courses in, for example, the American novel or modern poetry lacked command of the field in which they claimed expertise. They knew less than they needed to know to teach their courses well.

Consider, for instance, my undergraduate course in American literary realism and naturalism. At no time did the teacher mention Richard Wright, even though Wright explicitly located himself within this literary tradition and perceived Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, and other novelists whom we did read as his major influences. When Wright’s Native Son appeared in 1940, it was an immediate bestseller and was identified as a masterpiece of “naturalism.” Yet it was not even cited in the course that I took in the 1970s.

My education was thus seriously flawed in two respects. First, I never enrolled in a course that was specifically devoted to African-American literature. If there was such a course at my college, I do not remember it; and I am sure that if it did exist, no faculty member ever advised me to take it. There were no courses on African-American literature and culture in the English department (or in any other department) at the university where I did my graduate work. So I managed to major in English and American literature and acquire a doctorate in the field without hearing about slave narrative, African-American autobiographies, the Harlem Renaissance, or the Black Arts movement.

The second failing was, as my Wright example shows, that African-American writers did not figure in “American literature” courses even when they obviously belonged. These writers were not treated in separate courses, nor were they introduced into courses that purported to examine the entire scope of the American literary experience. Langston Hughes loved Walt Whitman’s poetry, and he saw himself as carrying forward Whitman’s aesthetic project into the modern age. But when we explored Whitman’s impact on modern poetry, we highlighted Hart Crane. Hughes never came up. He was as invisible in my poetry course as was Du Bois in my course on American cultural criticism, and as were Ellison and Baldwin in my course on postwar fiction.

When I hear complaints about the expansion of the literary canon, I recall the gaps in my own education. Kramer, the late Allan Bloom (the author of the bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind), former Secretary of Education William Bennett, and other conservatives have maintained that the “great books” are being attacked, reviled, scorned, and condemned to the rubbish heap, and that this “barbarism” (a word that both Bennett and Bloom have used) is being promoted by academic left-wingers. But I think it is impossible to take this argument seriously. Do conservatives favor a return to reading lists that excluded black writers? Are there no new writers who merit serious attention? Conservatives fail to realize how closely they resemble those who asserted in the 1920s that the writings of Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Hemingway did not belong in the canon (or even in bookstores) and should not be taught. Contrary to the conservatives’ charge, the “great books” do continue to be taught today—they have not disappeared from reading lists—but other books, with their own claims to distinction, are being taught as well. The field is different, and the goal is to read more, not less.

Many very good writers and texts are now being rediscovered, and they have enlarged our conception of what literature, philosophy, and history encompass. To conservatives, these changes seem disastrous and are tied to the widespread decay of tradition, but “tradition” is an elusive term, and is no more an unalterable fact of nature than the literary canon. When Wright was left out of the course on realism and naturalism that I took in college, this particular body of material was distorted and misrepresented. The American literary tradition that I was taught wasn’t just inadequate, it was wrong. The “tradition” does not make coherent sense when African-American writers are absent from it.

The history of literary studies in America testifies that “the tradition” has changed dramatically, time and again, and that texts that strike us as unquestionably “great” were once regarded very unsympathetically. In 1895, a young professor at Yale named William Lyon Phelps offered a course on “the modern novel” that centered on Twain, Conrad, and Hardy. This was considered so shocking that it was reported on the front page of the New York Times, and it so angered Phelps’s senior colleagues that he nearly lost his job. Twain, Conrad, and Hardy are now, of course, writers whom we instinctively list as part of the American and English literary traditions, yet when Phelps first taught them he was said to be violating tradition and replacing true literary values with what was merely fashionable.

Take, as another revealing date, the year 1930. When the literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen—later the ground breaking author of American Renaissance (1941)—went hunting that year for a copy of Melville’s Moby Dick in the Yale University library, he found it shelved in the “cetology” section. Melville’s novel did not gain its renown as America’s epic until it was rediscovered and reinterpreted in the 1920s. To the staff at Yale’s library, it was not a great book in the literary tradition but was a solid source of information and lore about whales.

Writing in 1954, in The Literary Situation, Malcolm Cowley stated that:

Perhaps the principal creative work of the last three decades in this country has not been any novel or poem or drama of our time, not even Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga or Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls or Hart Crane’s The Bridge; perhaps it has been the critical rediscovery and reinterpretation of Melville’s Moby Dick and its promotion, step by step, to the position of national epic.¹

Cowley understood that the greatness of Moby Dick did not declare itself, but required the critical analyses and arguments that D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Lewis Mumford, Raymond Weaver, Constance Rourke, Yvor Winters, and Matthiessen provided. Today the place of Melville’s book on reading lists seems secure, yet it was not always deemed an important work in the American literary tradition or even recognized as a literary work. “Tradition” changes. It is not outside history. It has changed in the past, is changing now, and will change again.

Teachers and students should not take anything for granted: they should be critical about the books and traditions that they study, and should be aware of the different shapes that the canon has assumed over time. Knowledge expands; its terms and texts alter; and the fresh perspectives according to which it is viewed may appear to some scholars to be disturbing. But in literary studies, the changes in the canon have been positive, and the multiple traditions currently in the making have already enhanced the subject. I would not want to go back to the kind of schooling that I received in the 1970s.

***

The changes for the better that I have described are increasingly evident in college and graduate school reading lists, syllabi, monographs and collections of essays, conferences and symposia, and revised anthologies of literature. The arguments for these changes seem to me obvious as well as irrefutable, but, clearly, many people do not find them convincing. To those repelled by the expansion of the literary canon, each discovery of a new African-American or other minority writer is yet another sign of cultural decline. A frequent occasion for conservative protest—and it has been especially heated—is the two-volume Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990, 1994, 1997), a major project designed to review and open up the canon of American writers and texts. The nineteenth-century part of the Heath Anthology includes such familiar figures as Irving, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. But it also includes a large number of women, African-American, and Native American writers who have rarely appeared, if at all, in earlier anthologies.

The Heath editors devote a sizable section, for example, to “the literature of abolition,” which provides samples of poetry and prose by David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, John Greenleaf Whittier, Angelina Grimke Weld, Sarah Moore Grimke, Henry Highland Garnet, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and Abraham Lincoln. The work of every one of these writers is historically important and interesting in literary terms. It was not usually studied in the past, and not considered literary, for the simple reason that the critics and scholars who defined American literature, and established its legitimacy in the academy, perceived slavery and abolition as social and political issues and, therefore, as not the sort of thing that the writer of a truly “literary” text would engage. There were few black professors and students at the elite institutions where the case for American literature was prosecuted in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The white majority did not see the contribution to literature that black writers had made, nor were they able to bring into focus the literary achievement of white essayists and lecturers, like Garrison, who were aligned with blacks in the antislavery cause. This same white majority misread, under-read, and too narrowly demarcated the writings of the canonical authors so that Emerson’s and Thoreau’s abolitionist speeches were marginalized, and Melville’s powerful account of a slave mutiny and its aftermath in Benito Cereno was explicated as a universal tale about the conundrums of appearance and reality, and not as a story about slave rebellion and murderous revenge against white oppressors.

The Heath Anthology adds a wide range of new writers to the field of nineteenth-century American literature, and, in the process, it furnishes a fertile context for the essays, stories, and poems of the so-called traditional canon. Emerson, in “The Poet” (1844), and Whitman, in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, both appealed for the emergence of a truly “American” literature that would shake off the burden of English literature and be faithful in style and themes to the spirit of American democracy and freedom. These well-known, frequently taught texts can now be located in the Heath Anthology alongside the abolitionist writings that, in the nineteenth century, were in fact regarded by many as the foremost literature of America.

To support this last point, I would cite, among others, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass. When Phillips summarized the “philosophy of the abolition movement” in 1853, he stressed that the speeches and written texts that had resulted from the fight against slavery answered the calls that had long been made for a distinctive American literature: “This discussion has been one of the noblest contributions to a literature really American.”² Two years later, in his own review of the antislavery movement, Douglass declared that the 1850s would “be looked to by after-coming generations, as the age of antislavery literature.”³ To Phillips and Douglass, as well as to many who did not share their abolitionist views, it was inconceivable that an appraisal of the literature of the 1850s would fail to emphasize the contentious, astonishingly abundant literature of slavery.

But the conservative reviewers of, and commentators on, the Heath Anthology spurn this kind of broad claim about literature and have indicted the book as a literary travesty and cultural nightmare. In the October 1990 issue of New Criterion, an editorial spotlights the Heath Anthology as “the latest example of what the politics of ethnic and sexual redress has done to the academy.” The editorial goes on to refer to it as “a monument to the intellectual bankruptcy of the multicultural imperatives it champions,” and concludes that it is “a shabby production, intellectually shallow, politically tendentious; it deserves the scorn of everyone who cares about the preservation and transmission of American literature.”⁴

The most striking feature of the New Criterion’s editorial is the absence from it of actual analysis and argument to back up the vituperation and complaint. As the self-evidently correct alternative to what the Heath editors have done, the writer invokes “literary value” and “literary excellence.” There’s no indication of what these terms mean. Their content is, it is assumed, crystal clear to all, and dissent or difference of judgment is unthinkable. Of course in one sense the writer of the editorial cannot afford to offer definitions for literary value and excellence, because as soon as he does so, he will be conceding that the meaning of these terms is not unmistakably plain. And if it is not plain, then the consequence is that reasonable, informed people might disagree about both what the terms mean and which texts embody it. It is exactly such disagreement and dispute that make literary studies dynamic and absorbing—and that, furthermore, have characterized the history of criticism, with its many quarrels about value. The conservatives cannot brook (or even admit) disagreement, since doing so pierces the idea of a clear-cut canon and enables new writers and texts to press their claims for inclusion.

In the December 1990 issue of the journal, Paul Lauter, one of the Heath’s editors, replied to the editorial. He noted that the canon which the New Criterion maintains must be protected at all costs has altered considerably over the years. “Let’s remember,” Lauter observed, “that in 1920 Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ would have been acclaimed, whereas the work of Melville was all but forgotten.”⁵ Lauter also made the important institutional point ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Index