Now that the NY Times has dropped its "Times Select," we can get articles like Rachel Donadio's on the Canon Wars for free. Which is a good thing.
Donadio's article is a fairly safe account of the various reassessments humanities people have been giving as of late. It is of particular interest to see the lists of big shots in academia she cites who are saying that maybe teaching literature is a good thing.
The problem is that the canon wars themselves were ridiculously ill-advised to begin with. And the fall-out has had a terrible effect on the humanities as a whole. Instead of recognizing, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, that "the humanities" are "essential ingredients of democracy," politicians, parents, and even professors themselves have cowed to the claims and promises of fast-capitalism and scientific expansionism. Here is the fact of the matter: English classes will probably not make you more money. Art history definitely won't. Nor will such classes cure cancer. But that isn't the criteria by which they should be evaluated.
The canon wars, as well, were fought over the wrong criteria. And continual reassessment of what was gained or lost often falls back into the same debate, using the same terms. We must get out of that.
So what is the right criteria? I would put it simply this way: the definition of literacy is not whether or not someone has read Hamlet, but whether they have the ability to read a text like Hamlet well. Education is not about stuffing one's head with information--it is about cultivating the ability to think, to assess, to judge, to imagine. There is no single reading list that one must follow to develop these strengths, which is why arguments that "every educated person must have read X" are misguided. But that isn't to say that there aren't texts that do this better than others. Such as Hamlet. Or Homer. Or Emily Dickinson.
Unfortunately, only one small paragraph in Donadio's article is devoted to this issue, but it contains a fairly money quotation from Gerald Graff: “What does it profit progressives to get minority writers like Walker and Black Elk into the syllabus if many students need the Cliffs Notes to gain an articulate grasp of either?”
Indeed. Reading lists are always flexible; as many critics of the canon are eager to point out, few books are recognized as "classic" from the very beginning, and often their status changes depending on the period. But the essential skills of thinking are in constant need of renewal. And that is what humanities classes do best.
I apologize if my posts have been sounding repetitive as of late. It is simply remarkable how many new articles keep popping up on these issues. Pictures from the Olympic Mt. Hike are forthcoming.
Here is a rather lengthy, but interesting, analysis of the loss of newspaper book reviews by the former editor of the LA Times Book Review, Steve Wasserman. His documented decline of not only the numbers of book reviews as well as the quality of those reviews is important because, as he says at the end of the piece, "[Readers] know in their bones something newspapers forget at their peril: that without books, indeed, without the news of such books—without literacy—the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs."
Critics would call this a fairly socially conservative, somewhat reactionary thesis, one that lends itself to the worst forms of high art elitism. But Wasserman addresses this criticism by drawing a remarkable analogy, which, for me, was the biggest take-away of the piece. When he took the job at the LATimes, Wasserman had a clear goal in mind:
My greatest conceit was my intent to use my new post to answer a single question: Is serious criticism possible in a mass society? If it were possible in L.A., then it would be possible anywhere. I wanted the Book Review to cover books the way the paper’s excellent sports section covered the Dodgers and the Lakers: with a consummate respect for ordinary readers’ deep knowledge and obvious passion for the games and characters who played them. Analysis and coverage in the paper’s sports pages were usually sophisticated, full of nuance, replete with often near-Talmudic disputation, vivid description, and sharp, often intemperate, opinion. Its editors neither condescended nor pandered to those of the paper’s readers who didn’t happen to love sports. No, this was a section aimed directly at fans, and it presumed a thoroughgoing familiarity with the world of sports.
This passage struck me when I first read it, and, as I was watching SportsCenter this morning, I realized that he is absolutely right. In fact, I bet one could argue that sports analysis (not sports broadcasts in general) may be the most erudite mass discourse in America, complete with a technical vocabulary, complex analysis, and a general sophistication that demands attention. For someone like myself, whose understanding of most sports is fairly limited, really understanding sports analysis takes time and effort, eventually getting more comprehensible. In other words, digesting the relatively elitist sports commentaries becomes an education.
One could say the same thing for pop music fans. To be sure, I get irritated when I hear (again!) "You mean you've never heard of band X?" But I know from experience that it is only by hanging out with people who have heard of band X that I will become not only more knowledgeable about pop music, I will also learn to appreciate it more. If I only hung out with and talked to people as sports and music illiterate as myself, I'd miss out.
So perhaps "elitism" can be a more democratic thing than we think. Sophisticated analysis from people who have committed a large chunk of their waking lives to a particular practice, activity, or artform bleeds out into the rest of society. To be sure, there is always the risk of it becoming a ghetto, or a bizarre form of one-upmanship ("I'm more punk than you are!") But doesn't it mystify things like poetry and art to treat it any different from the commitment, and the care, that we give sports?
Speaking of sports, my fantasy football league starts today.