yeah, no, i’m not buying this argument. i’m pretty critical of the canon but the solution isn’t to throw the whole thing out, it’s to broaden our parameters for which works are deemed culturally significant, diversify the canon, and teach it in ways that challenge the traditional interpretations. but lit written before the 21st century has value in and of itself, even beyond the practical applications i mentioned in this post.
first of all, “understanding what other people knew and referenced” is a fundamental part of media literacy that does directly impact your ability to recognize bias, stereotypes, and other devices that reinforce structural oppression. even a basic understanding of literary traditions in the western canon will make you a more informed and enlightened media consumer in 2020, because those traditions inform everything that gets made today, including fanfic and video games. understanding the context in which modern media exists is ESSENTIAL to understanding both authorial intent and authorial bias. to use an easy example, most kids don’t pick up on the antisemitic overtones of the gringotts goblins in harry potter because they’re kids and they have no context of the historical portrayal of jews as money-handlers - that’s why we still teach the merchant of venice and the canterbury tales and oliver twist, to build up that historical context for those specific themes and imagery. contemporary media is rife with offensive stereotypes dating back hundreds of years, but audiences will continue to passively consume them if they don’t actually know that they’re stereotypes.
secondly, understanding the timeline of literary movements and genres help us understand shifts in cultural values over the years, because at its core, writing is just one of the ways humans make sense of the world around us. studying history teaches you what happened, and studying literature teaches you how people reacted to it. similarly, movements and genres develop in response to each other as well as the world around them. contemporary writers don’t just invent completely new ideas out of nowhere; they’re building on established traditions, and being able to draw those connections heightens the experience of reading contemporary lit. historical context informs the themes and literary devices and themes and narrative structures an individual author chooses to tell their story just as much as their own personal experiences and beliefs and position in their culture’s power structure.
there is no such thing as a book that exists in a vacuum. the genre of climate fiction is for the most part a 21st century development that has grown out of sci-fi and speculative fiction that reflects our contemporary fears and anxieties about climate change, but it has roots in how the romantics reacted to the uncertainty of industrialization and modernity by emphasizing the terrifying power of the natural world. it also builds on themes of exploitation and subjugation common in feminist literature and the postcolonial movement. contemporary american climate fiction specifically exists within the context of our history of slavery and genocide and the manifest destiny doctrine, as well as the severe economic inequality we live with today, and you see those elements embedded throughout the genre’s landscape, both in form and content. and so when you pick up n.k. jemisin’s the fifth season or chelsea bieker’s godshot or tochi onyebuchi’s war girls, you’re reading a book that would not exist if it were not for the last 250 years of social upheaval and industrialization and colonialism and technological advancement and all the other books that were written along the way, and being able to recognize all those contributing factors makes reading a much, much richer experience in the end.
and frankly, fiction sparks empathy in ways that textbooks can’t, even the books we typically think of as dusty old white man “classics.” i wasn’t psyched about reading all quiet on the western front in high school, because wwi was boring from my 15-year-old southern california perspective (i vividly remember characterizing it as “just a bunch of guys in trenches and the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand”), but i came away from it with a visceral sense of horror, understanding how young those guys in trenches were and how much psychological damage they were left with after the war. some books belong in the canon because, taught effectively, they force students to step outside of their own perspectives and experience the world from the subjective perspective of someone in a time and place they’ll never experience. our schools typically teach history from an objective perspective, but students, especially teenagers, need the subjective. they need a human connection, not just statistics. the value of night, the bluest eye, and the grapes of wrath, among others, doesn’t just come from the quality of their prose, but from their effectiveness at making that connection. that’s why the canon has expanded so much over the past several decades! we need a much larger canon, not a smaller one!
i mean, otherwise, what’s the point of studying the arts and humanities at all? any quote can sound deep out of context. the goal is not simply to be able to analyze a quote, it’s to be able to place that quote in the context of the source text, and then place that source in the context of the rest of that moment or movement in literature, and then place that literary moment in the context of its historical period, and then to finally place that period in the context of the whole history of the world, and do it all with moral clarity and empathy for the oppressed. because that is going to be the framework through which you view every political, economic, philosophical, and moral choice you make for the rest of your life.
we already live in a world where kids grow up being told that “the classics” are dense and boring and irrelevant, and i’m sure that most students, if given the choice to skip them altogether and only read fun, easy, popular stuff, they would! but that doesn’t mean it’s good for them. you don’t grow if you aren’t being challenged. and because students come in already primed to think the most of these books are stupid and pointless, the onus is on teachers to make them engaging through whatever framework meets the needs of their classroom. english teachers need to give students the tools to challenge narratives that reinforce oppression by actively teaching books from an oppositional viewpoint, even if it means openly saying “you know why we’re reading this? because it’s offensive and it sucks.” help them find the throughlines that connect to kill a mockingbird to their eyes were watching god to the hate u give, or lord of the flies and 1984 and the handmaid’s tale and the hunger games. make discussions and assignments about proving an understanding, not just regurgitating information. there’s a clear middle ground between teaching goethe to fourth graders and never challenging students to read outside of their comfort zone at all.
look, harold bloom is dead and there’s no reason to only teach the books he considered the canon, but also, “the canon” isn’t just one dead white man’s static creation. it’s a dynamic, collective concept that is evolving along with our values as a culture. some texts lose relevance over time, others gain it. understanding the world in 2020 requires a much different reading list than it did in the 18th and 19th centuries. i don’t think anyone outside of the most conservative people in academia would advocate for a closed canon that doesn’t continuously expand to include voices that have historically been excluded from the literary establishment, or perspectives that challenge the views ingrained in us by oppressive power structures. but that’s significantly different from just saying “the concept of a canon is oppressive so we shouldn’t have one at all.” sometimes we just read books because they’re important and they teach us something valuable that will make us smarter and more empathetic and better at calling bullshit. i don’t really know what else to say, man.
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