Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002
_______________________________________________________________
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
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.