The Role of the Literary Canon in the Teaching of Literature

Robert Aston

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000078923
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Éducation
• Categoría: Enseignement des arts et des sciences humaines

This book investigates the role of the idea of the literary canon in the teaching of literature, especially in colleges and secondary schools in the United States. Before the term "canon" was widely used in literary studies, which occurred in the second half of 20th century when the canon was first seriously viewed as politically and culturally problematic, the idea that some literary texts were more worthy of being studied than others existed since the beginning of the discipline of the teaching of literature in the 1800s. The concept of the canon, however, extends as far back as to Ancient Greece and its meaning has evolved over time. Thus, this book charts the changing meaning of the idea of the literary canon, examining its influence specifically in the teaching of literature from the beginning of the field to the 21st century. To explain how the literary canon and the teaching of literature have changed over time and continue to change, this book constructs a theory of canon formation based on the ideas of Michel Foucault and the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda, illustrating that the literary canon, while frequently contested, is integral to the teaching of literature yet changes as the teaching of literature changes.

1 Suspending the Given

An English Teacher Selecting Texts

A few weeks before I was about to begin my first full-time position teaching eighth-grade English at a public school in the suburbs of Northern California, I stopped by the school’s library to dig through the bookroom¹ and figure out what texts were available for me to teach. I was not provided with any pacing guides or curriculum maps; I was not expected to make meticulous lesson plans to defend my teaching practices. I of course unquestionably had to follow the California State Standards for English Language Arts and teach a version of what I thought was English, based on my experiences earning a single subject teaching credential in secondary English and having majored in English literature in college. Cautioned during my teacher preparation program that many English departments would use pacing guides and some schools would even have “scripted” units,² I was given what I thought was tremendous freedom in designing a literature curriculum. And, even though I only had a few weeks to plan a curriculum for the entire year, I was more than thrilled with the opportunity to choose whatever texts were in the bookroom.

It was early in the morning when I arrived at the school’s library, hurrying across a nearly empty parking lot, the asphalt already warming up under the sun’s sharp rays. The door to the library was locked. Peering through a window, I could see a lone librarian sitting at a desk, so I tapped on a window to get her attention. After introducing myself and telling her why I was there, she showed me to the bookroom, which was more of a large closet than a room. She casually pointed to the shelves that held the books commonly read by eighth-grade students, and then she returned to her desk, organizing stacks of paper, preparing for the coming school year. I was at first overwhelmed by the number of books packed into that small room. Bookshelves crowded with novels lined the walls, and there were a couple of rolling shelves loaded with boxes of books. I decided to start with the boxes. One box was filled with copies of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. About to set a copy aside for myself, I realized that the librarian had crept up behind me, observing my choice. She told me that I could not use Twain’s novel because the books in boxes were going over to the high school. Twain was to be reserved for eleventh graders in their course on American literature.

She pointed to a row of books bound in shiny green covers on the top shelf and told me that the eighth-grade teachers almost always used them. I pulled one down: it was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Feeling as if I were shopping at a store, I said I would take it. I saw copies of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders on what appeared to be the shelf for eighth-grade students but was quickly told that those were reserved for seventh grade. I asked her to show me specifically which books I could use. She smiled and told me that Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was also regularly taught in eighth grade, though she also mentioned that students, especially girls, complained that it was boring. I said I would think about that one. I noticed some books with orange spines tucked away on the bottom shelf behind a cart of boxes waiting to be sent to the high school. Carefully moving the cart, I bent down and removed from the bottom shelf a pristine but dust-covered copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I was delighted because I remembered reading that book when I was in eighth grade and so decided to take a copy. However, the librarian appeared hesitant, telling me that no one had taught that book in a long time. The last teacher who did teach it retired a few years earlier. I planned to select the rest of the texts for the year after meeting with the school’s English department. But before I left, the librarian handed me a thick brown anthology of literature, Prentice Hall’s teacher edition of Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes, which had been sanctioned by the school board and included various reading questions to ask students during discussions, and assessments to give after each text.

The school year began as smoothly as it could, and at back-to-school night I was looking forward to meeting some of my students’ parents to do what the other teachers did—go over the year’s curriculum and then outline classroom expectations for students. After sharing my PowerPoint presentation with each group of parents who visited my classroom, several parents wanted to chat with me afterwards. They told me that they were very happy about my book choices, calling them “classics,” and saying that they had read them in secondary school as well (I have received the same types of comments years later). I felt reassured with my decision to teach Of Mice and Men. Later on in the school year, however, I received an email from a parent horrified that her son was reading Of Mice and Men, urging me to pull it from my curriculum because she thought it would encourage students to lob profanity at one another. I realized then perhaps one reason why Steinbeck’s novel had collected so much dust in the bookroom. But I asked her why she thought the novel would teach students to swear, and she struggled to come up with an answer, becoming curious in fact about the actual story of George and Lennie. I suggested that she read and discuss the novel with her son to quell her worries. I did not hear a concern from her again.

A year later, I thought I had organized a somewhat coherent literature curriculum and was feeling more comfortable with the texts I was teaching. Yet the impending Common Core Standards³ soon changed that. My school district slung together curriculum committees (groups of experienced teachers) to prepare teachers for the new standards and to “vertically align” the middle school and high school curricula. About halfway through the school year, English teachers from my district’s two high schools and two middle schools crammed into a classroom on my middle school’s campus. The central item on the meeting’s agenda was text selection. Prior to meeting, teachers from each school submitted to the committee chair (a veteran teacher from one of the high schools who had been self-appointed to the position) a list of all of the texts that they taught at each grade level. While waiting for the meeting to begin, I heard teachers grumbling defensively to each other that their texts would not be taken.

Although the meeting was ostensibly set up to start a discussion about text selection and to determine whether the district’s approved literature could satisfy the requirements of the encroaching Common Core Standards, the two-hour meeting quickly turned into an aggressive discussion about the placement of only one book—William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which was taught in eighth grade by seven teachers across both of the middle schools. Several of the high school teachers said that they had found online lists published by various school districts across the country that classified Lord of the Flies as a high school novel. They then argued that it was not even possible for eighth-grade students to understand the “central message” of Lord of the Flies. They said that ninth-grade students could, though.

Nonplussed, I asked what exactly students were supposed to understand about the novel as well as how they knew this. This precipitated a discussion by the high school faculty on the importance of symbolism and theme in the novel and a slew of other literary devices that seemed to carry weight among other teachers and, in turn, led to a sterile discussion on what literary terms students should learn in each grade and what texts were best suited for teaching those terms, suggesting that some texts should perhaps be excised from the district’s literature curriculum entirely. I pointed out that a novel could be read and experienced in more than one way, yet it was quickly apparent that I was the only middle school teacher at the meeting willing to battle to keep Golding’s novel (I was also the newest English teacher at my school). At the close of the meeting, we agreed, as if we had been bartering for books, to exchange Lord of the Flies for George Orwell’s Animal Farm and were asked to immediately remove Lord of the Flies from our curriculum so that students would read it for the first time in ninth grade. Although I did not see much of a point in mentioning it and did not want to cause any more upheaval, my students had already read Golding’s novel that year.

Occurring in some of my early years of teaching, the above roughly sketched experiences were formative ones, imprinting indelible marks on my thinking about the teaching of literature. Their reconstruction is certainly incomplete, being tainted by my current conceptions about the teaching of literature, and remembering them in their exactness would be impossible. Nonetheless, they point to some of the many issues that arise when selecting literature for a classroom. The texts that I read in secondary school and in college had existed for me on an untouchable plane that constituted the very discipline that I grew to cherish and felt that I had become a part of as an English teacher—as one of what Terry Eagleton (1983/2008) calls the “custodians of a discourse” (p. 175), responsible for ensuring the continuation of certain texts and teaching practices. I had thought that novels like Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies would be taught ad infinitum. But after actually teaching literature for several years and encountering both subtle and forthright forces—be they parents, other teachers, a bookroom, or an anthology—that seemed to push back against the texts I was teaching, I began to start wondering how exactly certain texts came to be taught over others, thinking that maybe it had to do with teaching standards, personal taste, or perhaps additional processes more difficult to describe and locate. Whatever the processes were that were legitimizing and excluding certain literary texts from the classroom, I felt that they needed to be understood and that “the tranquility with which they are accepted … disturbed” (Foucault, 1982, p. 25).

Franco Moretti (2007) points out the

minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on: a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows.

(pp. 3–4)

It would indeed be impossible for students to read every novel of the British or the American literary canon, let alone texts that fall outside those boundaries. Nonetheless, that such a limited range of literary texts—“less than one percent” of tens of thousands—has come to be taught in colleges and secondary English classrooms is astonishing when considering the volumes, the immense libraries of works, that have been written and published, as well as the works that students themselves generate each year in English classrooms.

The texts that embody the discipline that I studied in school and then promoted as an English teacher are a mere sliver of the many constellations of texts that have been produced over time. And it is this sliver that is the “canon,” the “official” works—or at times the “classics” that pleased some of the parents of my students and satisfied the requirements of teaching standards for a number of my colleagues. As Sir John Frank Kermode (1979) says, “The decision as to canonicity depends upon a consensus that a book has the requisite qualities,” that is, of a given group of interpreters (p. 78). While there have, in fact, been changes in the texts that constitute the literary canon (especially at the college level), which will be discussed in later chapters, the idea that certain texts are worthier of being taught than others still remains, and, notwithstanding slight variations, there has overall been consistency across the country in what literary texts teachers teach (Applebee, 1992; Damrosch, 2009b). (For me, this was actually helpful in finding a teaching job when I moved to New York City to return to graduate school. When interviewing for teaching positions, I was almost always asked about the texts that I had taught in California, receiving positive responses for my answers, and I thereby was not surprised to find school bookshelves and libraries with the same titles that I had seen in California.) The notion of a literary canon has a long and complicated history embedded in numerous explicit and implicit processes (explored in depth in later chapters). And while the concept of the canon has been attacked and criticized, it has also been defended, serving a useful but problematic function in literary studies. Thus, one of the central aims of this study, which will be expanded at the end of this chapter, is to understand how and why the literary canon, specifically of imaginative works, forms and changes with the teaching of literature.

Some Functions of the Literary Canon

Canons can serve a number of useful and important functions—especially in the teaching of literature. In the next chapter, I will outline the history of the concept of the canon itself, whereas in this section, I will describe some of the benefits of canons to literary study, society, and education in general, illustrating their uses, which, as will be shown, have also generated problems and bitter controversies. Important uses of the literary canon, the “greats,” or traditional literary works have been advocated by a variety of writers such as T.S. Eliot (1919/1982), Charles Altieri (1983), John Searle (1994), Irving Howe (1991/2015), and Harold Bloom (1973/1997), among others addressed in subsequent chapters, and range from practical uses of the canon for organizing texts in an academic field to preserving cultural struggles and serving as models and inspiration for future writers. The next section will call attention to the problems of these uses that, while appearing innocent to some, have galvanized others to seriously critique the canon.

Although they may limit the content of a discipline of study, canons function as evaluative instruments that help to unify a discipline, define its boundaries, and in turn give it structure and the capacity to be studied and experienced coherently. Philosophy has its various canons, which range from the body of works typically grouped with the Ancient Greeks to 19th-century continental philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Biology, physics, history, mathematics, astronomy, and so on also have their canons. Searle (1994), commenting on the practicality of canons, remarks that the purpose of education is not “to provide a representation or sample of everything that has been thought and written, but to give students access to works of high quality” (p. 10). It is not possible to have students survey all of the works written in a given discipline, but it is possible to introduce students to the texts that have been the most influential in building and changing a field, providing students with a foundation from which to study other works or to create their own.

Searle (1994) acknowledges that this leads to the problem that school can inherently be “‘elitist’ and ‘hierarchical’ because it is designed to enable and encourage the student to discriminate between what is good and what is bad, what is intelligent and what is stupid, what is true and what is false” (p. 10). The result over time is that a great number of works in all disciplines are inevitably excluded from course syllabi. Searle claims that, although the meaning of historical and scientific texts differs from the imaginative experiences of literary texts, there are still great literary works that are important to know. As someone like Isaac Newton or Einstein, for example, may be important to the study of physics, certain writers such as Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare have been important to ...