Laura Green on "The Canon Wars Again"

Last Sunday--September 16, 2007--the regular "End Paper" by Rachel Donadio in the Times Book Review Section was a revaluation--and rather complete misrepresentation--of Allan Bloom's 20-year-old Closing of the American Mind. (I say misrepresentation because in fact the target of Bloom's often uninformed vitriol was precisely the opening of "the American mind" to, e.g., "Continental" influences; closed-mindedness is precisely what he, like many Straussians, passionately advocates.) The chief idea that she drew from Bloom was the wrongness of "multiculturalism" in the teaching of literature, and this idea was backed up with many quotes (more than those few in defense) from the usual suspects, to the effect that the literary curriculum has been dumbed down, and "classics" replaced by dubiously qualified contemporaries, minority representatives, etc. Much of the criticism, it should be said, consists of a (mis)identification of multiculturalism with identity politics, an identification that unfortunately has been promoted on all sides; the two can indeed be made to seem associated, but in fact neither depends on nor entails the other. Identity politics in most of its forms is conceptually indefensible; "multiculturalism" takes many forms, some of them arguable, but in literary and cultural studies it is an intellectually unavoidable response to a diverse and globalized world.

I asked Laura Green, who is an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University, to comment on Donadio's article:

"So I read the Donadio essay, and my response is the usual one: I'm just not seeing the fire, even in the account of those who think there's a problem. For example, Donadio says that 'In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and T. S. Eliot,' and 'in 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.' This hardly seems like a radical shift: Shakespeare and Chaucer holding steady, and am I really supposed to mourn the passing or de-emphasis of Dryden and Pope in undergraduate classes? (Pretty much every English major I know has read or will read "The Wasteland," so I'm pretty sure Eliot is still up there.)
Every year I teach the "Survey of Brit Lit II"; we always read Yeat's "Second Coming," though I myself have come to like it less (and I always make the connection to Achebe's novel, which most of them have, indeed, read). The survey is one of 4--Brit Lit I (where Milton is taught), Brit Lit II, American Lit I, American Lit II.
Indeed, maybe it's just where I've taught, but I'm not seeing the decline of the canon. At Berkeley, I t.a.ed for a similar survey course; at Saint Mary's, I taught a strange thing called "Collegiate Seminar," which was a sort of Western Civ class, as well as an 18th c. Novel class; at Yale I taught for many years 129, a class in Epic from the Odyssey through Joyce's Ulysses. And here at NU, I teach the aforementioned Survey, alongside my fellow survey-teachers, and we have the usual, quite traditional period requirements, including a Shakespeare class, three of the four surveys, a requirement that they take period classes from three different century groups, and a required “Backgrounds in English and American Lit.” And how they grumble about fulfilling that! We offer a "major figures" course in Milton, though when our Miltonist retires, I'm not sure we'll replace him with the same.
It's true that not every institution has those requirements--some don't have any, and some are more interested in things like multimedia textuality--but so what? This is a democracy, after all--where is it written that every one of the 1.6% of students who major in English have to have studied the same thing?
I think Mark Lilla has a point that 'What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,' and that is indeed a major source of irritation with the way our students read. But he's way off base if he imagines that our students mostly find it in Toni Morrison! Beloved is in fact not an affirming novel--neither is her earlier work, such as Sula, though her later stuff has gotten sappier--and most of the students I've taught it to (I used to teach it in a reading & composition class at Berkeley) find it plenty inaccessible and alienating.
I do agree that humanities scholars and teachers haven't done a very good job of presenting their case, but as the article acknowledges, it has always been 'hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America.' Given that fact, I'm not sure how much better we can do, or even how much it matters.
There also is a genuine challenge for any historically- or chronologically-based discipline: History is getting longer, and people keep writing and events keep happening. My 'Survey of Brit Lit II' generally manages to stagger in fiction as far as Woolf, in poetry as far as Auden, with one Walcott poem because there's a great Yeats/Auden/Walcott sequence to teach. Are we soon going to need a 'Survey of Brit Lit III'?"