This was inspired by a discussion on a couple of mailing lists I’m on, when it became apparent that most did not realize how much the English literary canon has been degraded over the years, either the older conversants who don’t realize what’s going on in the schools and universities now, or the younger ones, who don’t know what the canon used to be.
Let’s start off with some perspective. I went to a very small, underfunded, academically rigorous public (not private) high school in a very small town in southern Indiana (there were 89 in my graduating class). Here is a partial list of what we read several … er … decades ago:
- Freshman year
- Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
- Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
- Sophomore year
- As I Lay Dying, Light in August (William Faulkner)
- The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
- Macbeth, Henry V (William Shakespeare)
- Junior year
- The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
- Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad)
- Hamlet, Richard III (William Shakespeare)
- Senior year
- The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
- Beowulf (unknown)
- The Iliad (Homer)
- Julius Cæsar, King Lear (William Shakespeare)
By contrast, I know someone with a BA and a MA in English, who was never asked to read a word of Shakespeare, and to this day, never has (I discovered this when we were at the theater to see Henry V, and we were talking about the play before the movie began).
It goes without saying that she was never asked to read Shakespeare in high school.
She did read the great 20th Century American authors: Hemingway and Faulkner, for example, authors that are now sneered at, “dead white male” authors. In fact, the canon has degraded much since she was in school.
I hear a great deal of inaccurate, and frankly ignorant, opining about some of the 20th Century authors they do read in school now — inaccruate and ignorant because these are authors that are great stylists, and will go down in literary history along with Hemingway and Faulkner. I’m thinking of Toni Morrison, though Maya Angelou would also fall in that category (albeit not so high as Morrison). Anyone who can read her Nobel Prize acceptance speech without having to wipe tears from his eyes is surely souless.
Acceptance into today’s canon does not imply that the author should not be in the canon. That isn’t the issue.
The issue is why new masters should replace the older masters.
The answer to this has nothing to do with literature, any more than most current English department courses have anything to do with literature. The answer is identity politics.
Asking why Toni Morrison is in the canon is a fool’s question. The issue is why has Shakespeare been removed from the canon.
Back in the 60s, English had become academically sterile. There just were no dissertation topics left, considering that a dissertation must be considered original research. That, plus the social upheaval of the hippie movement, and those counter-culturalists’ move into academia, set the stage for what we see today.
Identity politics presented these academics with something to write about, and “X Studies” departments started to sprout like weeds. It has progressed so far today that if you go to many English department websites and peruse the faculty page, you’ll see that very few do English literature, and instead their specialties are things like “feminist studies” or “queer studies” or some such identity politics topic.
Politics has replaced academics at the university.
The decision to remove the masters from the canon is pure politics, identity politics. Because they are “dead white males” they are irrelevant — the long-established concept that great literature is great because it is timeless, that is, its themes transcend temporal and cultural boundaries is now a scorned axiom. Because they are “white males” they are therefore inherently oppressive (or disenfranchising, or marginalizing, or whatever). And instead of the masters, we now have “third-world authors” who are added sometimes because they are great authors, and sometimes just because they need an author from such-and-such a group or region.
The canon is “more representative” of the “disenfranchised,” you will hear them say. With a straight face. As they look you right in the eye. With no shame whatsoever.
The other axiom of a liberal arts education, that its purpose was to educate in the sciences, arts and humanities of one’s culture, which comes down to us from Greece and Rome, through Europe and Britain, is now anathema. This is now “cultural imperialism” and “disenfranchises” minority students.
The only option, then, is to excise any author who represents said cultural imperialism. That means no Shakespeare, no Chaucer, no Homer, no Vergil. No Milton (though he was blind, so one could make a case that he represents the differently-abled), no Hawthorne, no Conrad, no Faulkner — God knows, no Faulkner!
People need to know this, because unchecked, this trend will only spread like a cancer. Write letters to your editor and school board, go to school board meetings, make sure you know what your kids are and are not reading, write letters to your legislators, do something before our cultural history has been completely erased from the educational system.
Some of these authors should be in the canon. Others should not. However, that really is beside the point.
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