Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002

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Gorak, Jan (Ed). Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate. London and New York: Garland, 2001, pp. 227. ISBN: 0815308892,
  $ 85 (US).

Reviewed by

William S. Haney II

 

As Jan Gorak says in his introduction to Canon vs Culture, the contributors of this collection attempt to assess the change in the humanities brought about by a greater openness to multiculturalism and non-European traditions.  This comprehensive book covers a wide range of views on canon formation over four parts with three essays in each.  The key issue of the canon has to do with the mortality or immortality of literary works.  Shakespeare, as the center of the Western canon, has achieved an immortality that sets the standard for others.  In the debate over the canon, traditionalists like Harold Bloom, the arch defender of the Western canon, stand in opposition to anticaonical theorists such as Foucault, Barthes, as well as postcolonialists, Marxists, and New Historicists.  If the immortality of a literary work depended on its aesthetic value, and if aesthetics is defined arbitrarily in terms of a Eurocentric value system, then one might argue in favor of an exclusively Western canon.  But once aesthetic value is interpreted as a trans-cultural of global phenomenon, then any tradition, including a non-Western tradition, can produce canonical works of immortal stature.  The practical import of this debate for higher education has to do with what texts to include in Great Masters courses in major universities such and Stanford, Harvard, and Oxbridge, and what criteria to follow in university hiring.  Canon vs. Culture does a wonderful job of presenting these issues in a multi-cultural context.

Part one of the book is entitled “Why the Revolution Happened.”  In the first essay, "Opening the American Mind: Reflections on the 'Canon' Controversy," William E. Cain recalls his undergraduate American literature courses in which African-American and Hispanic voices were silent.  For the future he hopes that American universities will incorporate a wider and fairer representation of ethnic voices in their humanities curricula.  Cain faults conservatives who feel that "great books" are under threat for failing to recall that in the 1920s, the "writings of Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Hemingway did not belong in the canon."  He argues that the history of American literary studies shows that what constitutes "the tradition" changes radically over time as new writers emerge and good writers are rediscovered.  Collections such as the Heath Anthology add new writers from a wide range of ethnic background, even though its critics such as the editors of New Criterion consider its choices perverse and indefensible, a violation of "artistic and intellectual quality."  Cain's argument calls for greater inclusiveness in the canon, "not the elimination of the old canonical texts, but, instead, the addition of new texts that are valuable themselves and that lead to a deepened understanding of the more familiar, widely known ones." 

In "Canon Fodder: Women's Studies and the (British) Literary Canon," Jessica Munns argues that any inherited model of cultural studies soon becomes exclusive, like a closed shop, whether in feminism or other fields.  She shows how gender studies have greatly changed our understanding of self-identity and social practices, and believes that the Internet will replace canonical constraints with an era of "pick and mix."  She begins her essay by describing how women's studies broke up the masculinist bias of the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies by introducing issues of gender, race, and class.  Although the field of literary studies did not undergo a similar transformation, women's studies did much to alter views on academic curricula and the publication of anthologies.  Two women who were included into the canon through these efforts were Kate Chopin and Aphra Behn.  Munns now finds a willingness to recognize the contribution of women, given that so many of the early novelists were women, and to broaden the scope of what qualifies as literature.  She notes that "The study of women's writing now has developed beyond mere gender," as not all women write from the same context or identify with the same tradition.  We have entered the era of massive, unwieldy anthologies that attempt to embrace everything, but now also we "can all make our own canon: every teacher their own Norton: is this liberating and exhilarating, or just plain terrifying?"  Munns isn't sure, but she thinks that women's studies and the Internet will make it a potential future.

Philip Thody, in "Curricular Shifts in the Study and Teaching of French," like Cain also remembers the inadequacies of his undergraduate experience.  He remains sceptical of the cultural studies emphasis of the liberal arts education he received at King's College, London, which he thinks can potentially induce a militant withdrawal from the real world.  He suspects that he and his peers--exposed to their lecturers' teaching the conflicts of their profession but not to the political and social background necessary to understand these conflicts--may have been disadvantaged by their French curriculum.  When Thody became department head at Leeds University, he avoided the radical theory of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson and developed a curriculum that immersed students more directly  in contemporary French language, culture, and society.  He wanted to get away from a canon of cultural studies that taught the denunciation of the modern world: "The wider the syllabuses and the broader the canon, the better this intellectual training will tend to be."   Thody concludes that it would be unfair to make students of French study the evolution of the French language from the Vulgar Latin without reading modern French writers, who "win more Nobel Prizes for literature than either England, Germany or the United States."

Part two, “Old Canons / New Disciplines,” examines the current situation in the wake of the redistribution of cultural raw material in canon formation, focusing particularly on how canon selection has influenced three relatively new academic disciplines: sociology, African literatures, and creative writing.  Geoffrey Hawthorn, in "No Context, No History: The Sociological Canon," argues that canon selection in sociology has led to intellectual stagnation, to a crisis in "the division of intellectual labor."  That is, while sociology deals with a space separate from the demands of the polis, its lack of constructive ideals for this space has led sociologists to seek the security of canonical authorities and shun the kind of influential studies that would shape a developing discipline.  Hawthorn laments sociology's "paradoxical relation with itself," and even more ironically, its "lack of sociological self-understanding."  On the bright side, he shows that the way sociology has defined itself is now coming to an end as the "discipline" of sociology, if it still is one, becomes more defuse and begins to overcome its complacent, even paralyzed relation to its own canon. 

In "Accounting for Differences," Bernth Lindfors investigates the canon of African literatures and gives empirical evidence of a definite imbalance in programs in African literature, in which Nigerian and South African writings largely dominate.  Thus Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, tops every canonical reading list.  Part of the problem is that Western scholars are reluctant to make first-hand acquaintance with Africa or to publish in African journals.  Lindfors provides comprehensive statistical evidence that scholars of anglophone African literature "need to broaden their cultural horizons by exposing themselves to more give and take with their African colleagues."  Turning to contemporary poetry, Sandra Lea Meek, in "The Politics of Poetics," applies Lindfors conclusions about canon formation to contemporary creative writing.  Having traveled in Africa and steeped herself in African literature, Meek quickly realized that canon formation in America poetry excludes African poetry as antithetical to the regulating and proselytizing activities of American writing programs.  She persuasively argues that these programs need to encourage diversity, that "dialogue should be initiated and tolerated, not in a 'PC' or therapeutic way, but with a truly open, impassioned debate that doesn't center on the polite or prejudiced silencing of any group."

To avoid repeating past mistakes in canon formation in the Internet era, part three, “The Canon as Historical Phenomenon,” encourages a historical study of the making of the modern canon.  George Kennedy, in "The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Application to the Greek and Latin Classics," debunks the view the canon formation is a hegemonizing and imperialist activity and argues instead that it originates in "a natural human instinct" to order and preserve our cultural heritage.   Indeed for humanists, the "wider canon of Greek and Latin literature is everything that has survived."  At the end of his highly interesting overview of classical canon making, Kennedy says that research opportunities can be greater for neglected or less well-known Greek or Latin authors, but also potentially dangerous.  A graduate student who writes a dissertation on Virgil or Ovid has a better chance of getting a job than one who writes on Claudian or Ausonius.  Kennedy's essay suggests a distinction between the narrowness of a canon, as argued in parts one and two of the book, and a narrow definition of canon, which might be corrected by greater historical understanding of the original importance of specific works in the past.   Jeffrey L. Sammons, however, in "The Land Where the Canon B(l)ooms," takes issue with this conclusion when it come to the German canon.  He argues that German academics define literary works as having the value of sacred objects.  They invest in the canon all their political ambitions, not just their natural human instinct for order, and that these ambitions have increasingly less to do with the core of the traditional canon that Germans have designated as the "Classical-Romantic Age."  In the 20th century, German writing is dominated by recent political history, and the literature of humanity has become one of atrocity--of the Third Reich and the holocaust.  In defending the canon, Sammons feels like a "tragicomic figure," but confesses that Goethe's Werther or Schiller's Wallenstein, works he considers to be more subtle than philosophy, still arouse in him an "undiminished fascination." 

In "Canon and the Tradition of Musical Culture," William Weber analyzes how the canon formation of music is affected by the consumer popularization of music at the expense of the intellectual marginalization of musical culture.  He traces the development of music from medieval and Renaissance performances, through its Church sponsorship in the past to its civic sponsorship today and the effect it has on stifling experimentation.  In the 20th century the musical canon is "revered publicly to an unusual extent," while musical learning has remained a closed profession.  Weber describes the unique place of the musical canon as it evolved through the role of the master composer and canonic works in "celebrating the body politic," as well as through the moral force of the canon "against the depredations of commercial culture."  The model he advocates for a canon of music is one based on a contract between public and composer as suggested by Jeffrey Kallberg.  Here the norms are not fixed but evolve according to the assumptions shared by composers and listeners as they evolve through cultural expectations.

The concluding part of the book, “Old Canons / New Readings,” examines the influence on the canon of the relation between tradition and change.  Edward Chamberlain, in "Dances with Daffodils," analyzes Wordsworth's canonical poem, "To Daffodils," as a lesson in reading not imperial but postcolonial poetry, thus reversing the postcolonial aversion for this poem as well as others in the Lyrical Ballads.  Chamberlain argues that Wordsworth's poem constructs a revolutionary aesthetic of language, that it portrays poetic language as a dance in contrast to flat-footed conventional utterance.  It shows, like post-colonialists themselves argue, that language constitutes reality, and that to understand the real world we need first to understand the forms of language.  Of all the Romantic poets, Wordsworth "is the most marginal in terms of his language, his subjects, his home; and the marginality of race and gender that he himself did not represent, he wrote about."  Familiar also to West Indian poets, as Chamberlain puts it, Wordsworth's poetry "is deeply irrational and stubbornly unreasonable--like all poetry at heart."

James Sanders, in “Intertextuality and Dialogue,” embraces Chamberlain’s notion of change and revitalization, especially for early Jewish and Christian texts.  He does not consider the traditional canon threatened by postmodern suspicion.  Instead he defines canonical scripture as “identity narrative,” and shows that the Rabbinical Jews and Christians who originally founded these narratives were highly different, which explains the appeal these narratives still have today for culturally diverse groups.  Sanders describes interfaith dialogue, scriptural intertextuality, and comparative midrash as helping to define spiritual identity in trans-cultural terms.  He argues that “In a critical or historical reading, dialogue should be pursued not only critically, but also faithfully, that is, with both suspicion and consent.”  This would allow a text in one tradition to be interpreted, understood and appreciated by a different tradition. Thus diverse people would learn about each other by sharing stories, for there is “but one God, and Jews and Christians believe in that same God.”  In the final essay, “Reflections on the Eighteenth-Century Canon,” Jan Gorak, the editor of the book, deconstructs Foucault’s notion of archives and discourses, which imposed limitations on academic disciplines, by showing that writers in the 18th-century did not feel the confinement of free inquiry that Foucault’s theory proposes.  Rather, “From a limited number of classical works, eighteenth-century writers were capable of asking an almost infinite number of questions.”  Gorak believes that nothing would stop an expanded curricula today from being open to inquiry from outside of departmental boundaries.  He concludes that the “cultural revolution,” which this book so effectively describes, depends not on shattering cultural monuments, but rather on “expanding the habits of investigation and critical argument we train on them to the rest of social reality.”  Gorak and the other contributors of this fine collection show that a real cultural revolution does not shun conflict or critical inquiry, but rather encourages an expanded awareness and real debate about all aspects of contemporary society.