Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi

303 Pages·2005·2.97 MB·English

by  Lee Morrissey (eds.)

Debating the Canon: A Reader from
Addison to Nafisi
Edited by
LEE MORRISSEY
palgrave
macmillan
DEBATINGTHECANON:AREADERFROMADDISONTONAFISI
© Lee Morrissey,2005.
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Contents
Lee Morrissey, Introduction: “The Canon Brawl: Arguments
over the Canon” 1
1. Joseph Addison (1672–1719): from The Tatler, No. 108
(Thursday, December 15, to Saturday, December 17, 1709) 15
2. David Hume (1711–1776): from “Of the Standard of Taste,”
Essays(1757) 17
3. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784): from “Preface to the Plays of
William Shakespeare” (1765) 21
4. Red Jacket (c.1750–1830): “Why not all agree, as you can all read
the book?” from a speech to the Boston Missionary Society (1828) 23
5. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888): from “The Function of Criticism
at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism(1865) 25
6. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965): “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
The Sacred Wood(1919) 29
7. F.R. Leavis (1895–1978): from Mass Civilization and Minority
Culture(1933) 35
8. Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001): “Reading and the Growth of
the Mind,” How to Read a Book(1940) 37
9. Erich Auerbach (1892–1957): from “Odysseus’ Scar,” Mimesis
(1946; trans. 1953) 51
10. Leo Strauss (1899–1973): from “Persecution and the Art of Writing,”
Persecution and the Art ofWriting(1952) 57
11. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961): from “On National Culture,”
Wretched of the Earth(1961) 65
12. Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): from “Commitment: The Politics of
Autonomous Art,” New Left Review(1962) 71
13. Chinua Achebe (1930–): “Colonialist Criticism,” Hopes and
Impediments(1974, 1988) 73
14. Elaine Showalter (1941–): from “The Female Tradition,” A Literature
of Their Own(1977) 87
15. Annette Kolodny (1941–): from “A Map for Rereading: Or,
Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts,” New Literary
History(1980) 93
iv Contents
16. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002): from “The Field of Cultural
Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed,” The Field of
Cultural Production(1983) 103
17. William J. Bennett (1943–): from “To Reclaim a Legacy,” American
Education(1985) 111
18. Elizabeth Meese (1943–): from “Sexual Politics and Critical
Judgment,” in Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller, Eds., After
Strange Texts(1985) 117
19. Jane Tompkins (1940–): from “‘But Is It Any Good?’: The
Institutionalization of Literary Value,” Sensational Designs(1985) 123
20. Martin Bernal (1937–): from “Volume I: Introduction,”
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization(1987) 131
21. Allan Bloom (1936–1992): “The Student and the University,”
The Closing of the American Mind(1987) 133
22. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1928–): from “Rise of the Fragmented Curriculum,”
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know(1987) 141
23. Frank Kermode (1919–): from “Canon and Period,” History and
Value(1988) 147
24. Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1932–): from “Contingencies of Value,”
Contingencies of Value(1988) 153
25. Arnold Krupat (1941–): from “The Concept of the Canon,”
The Voice in the Margin(1989) 157
26. Charles Altieri (1942–): from “An Idea and Ideal of Literary Canon,”
Canons and Consequences(1990) 163
27. Alvin Kernan (1923–): from “Introduction: The Death of Literature,”
Death of Literature(1990) 165
28. Roger Kimball (1953–): from “Speaking Against the Humanities,”
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher
Education(1990; rev. 1998) 171
29. Paul Lauter (1932–): from “Canon Theory and Emergent Practice,”
Canons and Contents(1991) 177
30. Katha Pollitt (1949–): “Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me...,”
The Nation(1991) 187
31. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1950–): from “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon
Formation and the African-American Tradition,” Loose Canons: Notes on
the Culture Wars(1992) 193
32. Gerald Graff (1937–): from “Introduction: Conflict in America,”
Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize
American Education (1992) 199
33. John Guillory: from “Preface” and “Canonical and Noncanonical:
The Current Debate,” Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon
Formation(1993) 207
Contents v
34. Vassilis Lambropoulos (1953–): from “The Rites of Interpretation,”
The Rise of Eurocentrism(1993) 215
35. Edward Said (1935–2003): from “Connecting Empire to Secular
Interpretation,” Culture and Imperialism(1994) 221
36. Michael Bérubé (1961–): from “Higher Education and American
Liberalism,” Public Access(1994) 237
37. Harold Bloom (1930–): from “An Elegy for the Canon,” The Western
Canon: The Books and the School of Ages(1994) 241
38. Jacques Derrida (1930–): from “To Whom To Give To,” The Gift of
Death(1992, trans. 1995) 259
39. Marjorie Garber (1944–): from “Greatness,” Symptoms of
Culture (1998) 263
40. Richard Rorty (1931–): from “On The Inspirational Value of
Great Works of Literature,” Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in
Twentieth-Century America(1998) 271
41. Robert Scholes (1929–): from “A Flock of Cultures: A Trivial Proposal,”
The Rise and Fall of English(1998) 279
42. Azar Nafisi (1950–): from Sections 16, 17, 18, and 19 of Part II,
“Gatsby,” Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books(2002) 289
Permissions 301
Index 303
Introduction: “The Canon Brawl:
Arguments over the Canon”
Lee Morrissey
In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism
that is about to overpower it.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”1
In Beyond the Culture Wars(excerpted in chapter 32), Gerald Graff claims “what first
made literature, history, and other intellectual pursuits seem attractive to me was
exposure to critical debates.”2 Reflecting on his own experience as a student, Graff
argues persuasively that we ought to aim to generate discussion in the classroom so
that all involved might realize that we already represent a range of critical positions,
and that, by extension, we are already taking part in an extended, critical debate, even
in ways we are not fully aware of. Graff calls the process “teaching the controversies,”
and it can make for an exciting classroom. It is also, though, an excellent description
of the dynamic of debate that is embedded within literary traditions, and of how the
influential texts of those traditions can shape the terms for subsequent participants.
Indeed, traditions are made up of debates, diachronically (as past addresses present,
and present the past), anachronically (as something ancient seems to matter for the
present, and vice versa), and pluralistically (as an extraordinary range of voices make
up a tradition, and the readings of that tradition). Like Graff, I too believe that
weought to “teach the controversies,” although to Graff’s sense of critical debate in
the classroom I would add the importance of heightening awareness that such debate
is also central to the texts we read and discuss. In this sense, “we” are no longer teach-
ers and students, but the larger community of readers and writers involved in the
discussion.
Over the last two decades, there has probably been no debate within the academy
more notable or visible than that over the state of and the stakes involved in the study
of the humanities. The controversy has sustained a prominent discussion both inside
the academy and outside it. The resulting articles, essays, and books represent an
extended meditation on what college students ought to learn. Central to this contro-
versy are the lists of major works of “Western Civilization,” sometimes called “The
Great Books,” and sometimes thought to constitute “The Canon.” Books by several
participants in this debate, such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
(1987), E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987), Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals
(1990, 1998), Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon(1994), and David Denby’s The Great
Books (1996), became best-sellers, attracting both the general reader and faculty at
2 Lee Morrissey
every level of higher education. Consequently, it is not overstating the case to say that
this canon debate represents the central public controversy regarding the cultural
aspect of higher education. Indeed, some contributions to the canon debate have
achieved “canonical” status themselves. While the debate dovetails with what are
sometimes called the Culture Wars, it tends to come back to one recurring question:
what should college students read? This anthology, Debating the Canon, offers an
introduction to the controversy over the nature and content of the cultural compo-
nent of a college education. Because the debate over the Great Books has a long,
complicated history, likely unknown to the general reader, and often overlooked by
participants in the recent controversies, this anthology does more than provide selections
from the recent debates—it also provides primary-source material for understanding
the debate across the history of English-language literary criticism.
It was with Graff’s idea of teaching the controversies in mind that I set out to
compile this collection of major contributions to the debate over the canon. Over the
years, I have addressed quite a few groups of students, or I should say emerging readers,
who were unaware of the controversies Graff would have us engage—and I am not
referring simply to their not knowing about a debate over the canon. While most of
my students do not know about any canon controversy, they also and more impor-
tantly do not know about the various critical positions that produced the canon
debate. That is, like so many of us when we first started to read—and debate—they
did not know that their critical positions already had a history. This anthology began
as supplementary readings for those students. That course packet then, and this
anthology now, are intended to do the work of introducing the controversies, so that
in class we can actually teach—by which I mean engage—them. To read these essays
is to be introduced to literary theory put into practice, as the most abstract points of
literary-critical theory became involved in the most practical of practical criticisms.
Moreover, as there has probably not been another issue over the last two decades that
has involved so many different figures and literary critical positions, participants,
cognizant of the possibility of a wide audience, made their claims with diction as
colloquial as we had ever seen them use. For all the concern about the texts of the
past, the debate itself represents an intellectual and cultural history of the present. In
this way, the debate over the canon mimics an important quality of the canon itself:
the sense of an extended debate over recurring questions, with shifting answers,
sometimes shifting even with the same terms.
Of course, to read these essays is to be invited to consider why we might (or might
not) read and teach what are sometimes called the “Great Books.” My own sense is
that the titles often included in a list of “the” Great Books remain acutely relevant for
us as readers, as students, and as teachers, although reading them often involves decid-
ing for ourselves—repeatedly—whether they ought to be considered “Great.” Rather
than reading them because they are (or are said to be) Great, one reason for reading
these books is to be found in how they raise the question of Greatness so acutely. Some
say the Great Books do so in themselves, on account of some quality of how they are
written. Some argue the Great Books are great on account of the extraordinary influ-
ence they have exerted. Others might combine the two positions and argue that the
quality of the writing leads to the influence. Each of these positions, though, has a
history within the development of literary criticism. Indeed, the selections included in
The Canon Brawl 3
this anthology suggest that we cannot understand the recent debate over the canon
without seeing them as related to the development of literary criticism in English.
There is a way in which the list of the so-called Great Books is produced by an emer-
gent modern institution of literary criticism in the eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early
twentieth centuries, or long after most of the books then judged to be Great had been
written. In this way, the Great Books are to books what literature is to the literary: a
codification, and a classification of an almost indescribable quality that both precedes
and survives the designation.
To those of us living in twenty-first century America, with the protection afforded
by the First Amendment or with the variety of means of publication (broadcast, vir-
tual) now available, the idea that books might be dangerous seems merely imaginary
or dystopian. However, until at least the eighteenth century, many people believed
there was nothing more destabilizing than print. As evidence, they could point to the
upheaval of the Protestant Reformation and the seventeenth-century wars of religion
as unfortunate consequences of making books, and especially The Book, so widely
available to so many new readers. It is no coincidence that modern English literary
criticism—in its periodical, textual editing, and incipient academic varieties—emerges
during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the Restoration that ends
the period of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. One way of reading this post-
Restoration emergence of English literary criticism is to see it as an attempt to make
reading safer, or maybe to make the world safe for printing. Developing a list of
important authors and texts, and providing readings of their importance, is part of
that eighteenth-century contribution to safer reading. Although, to be fair, the liter-
ary critics involved did not call such lists “Canons,” they were laying the groundwork
for what would become the Great Books approach to literary history.
In this anthology, therefore, I situate the recent debate over the canon in a larger
span of English literary criticism. The sense, today, that there is something called a
literary Canon, or, similarly, a set of texts that are Great, the reading of which might
improve the reader, can be traced back to these earlier developments in literary
criticism. Joseph Addison, for example, argues in The Tatler(1709) “It is impossible
to read a page in Plato, Tully, and a thousand other ancient moralists, without being
a greater and better man for it” (15). Through a literary-critical lineage that includes
Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, and F.R. Leavis, this claim is reiterated today by
some and refuted by others in the canon debates, nearly 300 years after Addison first
proposed it. David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (excerpted in chapter 2),
although somewhat neglected in recent histories of literary criticism, nonetheless
makes several important contributions to the development of criticism—and to the
idea of the canon. First, of course, there is the question of a standard raised by the
title. Eventually, we know, subsequent critics will treat the Great Books as the stan-
dard. But in this essay Hume’s discussion of a standard is both tentative and more
complicated than we might assume looking back—a standard is conventional.
Hume’s essay is neither about natural laws of taste, nor about universal rules of liter-
ature. Unfortunately, though, by arguing that even the “coarsest daubing...would
affect the mind of a peasant or Indian,” Hume the skeptic treats Indians and the poor
as if each were a rare instance of a natural category, with, some in the debate will later
argue, important consequences for the relative accessibility of literary history.
4 Lee Morrissey
The recent debates over the canon assume this institutional history, although
often only by mentioning its most significant figures in passing. Samuel Johnson, the
most important English literary critic of the eighteenth century, contributes more
than any English critic before him to the development of a Great Books sense of lit-
erary history. His Lives of the English Poets, for example, articulate a claim for a canon
of English literature as well as principles for approaching that canon. His periodical
essays, such as The Rambler, combine what we would now recognize as the topicality
of literary criticism for a wide audience with reflection on method. But it is with the
“Preface” to the Plays of William Shakespeare(chapter 3) that Johnson makes his most
important contribution to the canon debate. In his edition, Johnson addresses the
concerns of several influential previous critics who had tried to correct perceived
faults in Shakespeare’s style and structure. After Johnson, the question of whether
Shakespeare is worthy is much less important than it was before. Moreover, in the
process of responding to Shakespeare’s critics, Johnson also adds to what we might
call, after Hume, the “standards” for determining whether texts should be considered
valuable: “what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most
considered is best understood” (22). The longer the better, presumably, but Johnson
does say that a century is “the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit” (22).
In his criticism, Matthew Arnold, represented in this collection by selections
from“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865; chapter 5), builds on
Addison, Hume, and Johnson. He actually selects a few of Johnson’s Lives, publish-
ing them with a new Preface of his own, a helpful image of a kind of continuity across
the century that separates these two major critics. In “The Function of Criticism at
the Present Time,” Arnold adds a layer of conviction that Addison, Hume, and
Johnson, perhaps closer to the destabilizing effects of print in the seventeenth century,
either lacked or downplayed. Like Hume, for example, Arnoldbelieved that “English
criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course” (27). For Arnold, that rule
can be summarized in one word: “disinterest.” The job of the critics is “to know the
best that is known and thought in the world,” without regard to politics or consequence
(27). Elsewhere, Arnold refers to “touchstones,” which represent and measure the
best that is known and thought in the world. Eventually, what Arnold calls touch-
stones come to be known as the Great Books.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, an important part of the transi-
tion from standards, rules, and touchstones to “The Great Books” takes place within
the academy, as Columbia University, and later the University of Chicago, design
what Columbia now calls “Literature Humanities” and “Contemporary Civilization”
courses. Part of the story of this development has to include Mortimer Adler’s studying
at Columbia, and his being hired by Chicago in 1930. At Chicago, Adler helped to
reorganize the undergraduate education, remodeling it on what he had experienced
at Columbia. His 1940 book, How to Read a Book(excerpted in chapter 8), remains
in print today. By creating and editing Great Books of the Western World, published
byEncyclopedia Britannica starting in 1952, Adler probably did more than anyone
to popularize the idea of The Great Books (and the idea that they were Western).
Given how familiar the term, and the sense of continuity it has come to represent,
would become, it is all the more important to remember, then, that in 1919 T.S.
Eliotcould claim that “in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we