something that’s come up a couple times now, and so I want to clarify: this post isn’t me putting a bunch of old white dude authors on a pedestal just for being canonical–this post is a specific response to people who say, verbatim, that classic literature has no merit because it’s “too old” and therefore useless to the modern reader. for the most part, people making these arguments aren’t actually interested in literature as a discipline, they’re just mad their english teacher “invented a bunch of symbolism” in a classic novel and made them write an essay about it.
that being said, I do think this post is a good opportunity to discuss the often-stagnant nature of literary canon, what we’ve done to (hopefully) move away from the paradigm of important authors as solely rich white men, and how this shift actually supports my insistence that reading “old” literature is important. there’s been a recent, much-needed push to expand the kinds of voices being recognized as culturally significant, and to incorporate these authors into our standards of canonicity. (my university’s literature program was, for the most part, very good about this.) as we bring oft-overlooked voices into focus, taking care to be cognizant of the way these authors’ perspectives both influenced their work and hindered their recognition, our definition of “canon” authors spans a wide breadth of race, nationality, gender, class, religion, and orientation. these voices, having been missing from literary discussions for so long, provide a fresh look at literature as a genre and supplement many gaps in our understanding of history. many of these works are quite old, but that’s even more reason to go back and read them: what did we miss? whose voices were obscured, either intentionally or incidentally?
and it’s because of this expansion of canon, not in spite of it, that reading certain “boring white men” authors remains important, though perhaps for slightly different reasons. even if these works are only “important” because certain people in power decided they were important, it’s still critical to understand who made these decisions and what purposed they served. why were these works chosen? what themes were taught from their pages? can we, as modern readers, extract new meaning with a more rigorous understanding of the power structures at play? recognizing works that are harmful and damaging isn’t a way to sanitize their flaws, but to understand how they’ve influenced our culture and what specific harm these flaws have wrought. the prioress’s tale is a wildly antisemitic account of blood libel, but it provides insight into britain’s attitude towards judaism during chaucer’s time (which is to say: although england officially had no jewish populace following the edict of expulsion in 1290, there was no shortage of monstrous imagery and antisemitic fearmongering in british literature from the era). sometimes these harmful works even form the foundation of other, more valuable narratives: heart of darkness spews all sorts of racist and colonialist views (despite claiming to be an anti-imperialist text), but learning about this text provides greater insight into the literary climate to which chinua achebe was responding when he wrote things fall apart. (and just to bring it back to the “too old” argument for a moment: how many people would dismiss joseph conrad’s work on the basis that anything written in 1899 is too old, then turn around and claim that apocaylpse now is their favorite movie ever? these old books persist today, even in popular culture, if you know what to look for.)
studying literature is essentially studying history, or at least a very specific component of it. nobody worth listening to would argue that history is worthless to us because it’s “too old,” so why would they say the same about literature? we expand our understanding of both history and literature by incorporating marginalized voices into discussions from which they were previously suppressed, in the process learning more about the past. and the past tells us quite a bit about the present and, in many ways, influences the future.
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