13 December 2011

Canonical Nationalism





In my opening statement, I tried to differentiate between the practical and the theoretical/ideal. After saying that canons are forms of discourse and not just lists, and that they are, at heart, expressions and codifications of power, I said that there is a canon of books taught in high school English classes in the U.S., and lists do a good job of showing us its borders and imperatives. For instance, the 1989 study reported by Arthur Applebee in "Book Length Works Taught in High School English Classes" (PDF) updates a 1964 study of the same thing and discovers that very little has changed. In my experience, those books remain common in high schools, though there has in many places been a strong push to sprinkle in more texts by writers who are not white men.

But for about fifty years now, the core books taught in most high schools in the U.S. have generally remained the same.  The high school canon achieved its canonicity mostly through inertia: these books were taught because they were considered important, and they were considered important because they were taught. Teachers, administrators, and parents could recognize a “good” curriculum because it was a familiar curriculum. All sorts of ancillary materials were prepared around these books, and the books have benefitted from an industry of publishers, editors, administrators, and teachers enforcing their canonicity.

A list of most common books, of course, is not a list of what is taught at any specific school, and few schools limit themselves only to these books, but as a window into what is most valued by high school curricula, it's useful information.

At our discussion, I said it's worth trying to figure out what the high school canon is trying to teach, and I suggested that its goals would seem to be to get students to be capable with complex language and with the analysis of literary themes and symbols. If those are the primary goals of high school English classes then the same could be accomplished with all sorts of different books -- and to be particularly provocative, I offered a list of African books that would do it: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Famished Road by Ben Okri, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, etc. Indeed, a broader canon would create better learning, because if you read Sophocles and Shakespeare alongside Death and the King’s Horseman and maybe Akira Kurosawa’s movie Throne of Blood, students would get not only a more global view of literature, but a deeper understanding of tragedy as a form.

What I realized as the discussion continued in all sorts of different directions was that my fundamental dissatisfaction is not with any particular list of books, but with the idea of national literatures.

I like what Edelstein says in "Gerrymandering the Canon":

The nationalistic imperatives of survey courses in U.S. and British literature don't make a lot of sense to my experience as a reader and writer. Once, when I was starting a job at another school, a colleague asked me, "So, are you an Americanist?" I repressed an exclamation of, "Good god no!" He was a proud reader of nothing but books written by people born in the U.S.A., so I just caught my breath, shrugged, and said, "No, I'm more of a generalist, really," and moved on to talking about the weather.

Why in studying imaginative writing do we limit ourselves to imaginary communities? Especially when the texts themselves were created by writers of more eclectic reading habits than our classes encourage?

Perhaps my antipathy to uninational approaches to literature is a result of my own education. The last classes I took in American and British literature (and both were called that) were during my high school years. In college, I avoided classes focused on only one geographic area's texts, and instead took marvelous courses on specific literary/artistic movements (Avant-Garde Literature & Art 1900-1940), individual writers (a life-changing class on Virginia Woolf), and particular literary forms (I was a Dramatic Writing major for three years, so lots of classes on drama). The only nationalistic class I took was a magnificent course on 18th century British and French literature: Samuel Johnson and Rousseau, Voltaire and Swift, Diderot and William Godwin, Vathek, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein. (And I took the class because I'd just read the American writer Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and had found its language and references baffling, so I figured this class would help. It did.) Grad school was different, because my degree wasn't in English specifically, so there weren't as many lit classes, but this was also during the time when the prefix "trans-" was applied to everything in academia, so even if there had been nationalistic courses offered, they would have been things like Trans-American Transness of the (Trans)Cultural Mode.

We have arranged at least some of our teaching and scholarship around nationalist ideas that are convenient and useful for limiting the scope of what we have to aspire toward expertise with, but I wonder if the limitations are worth the benefit. At the very least, it seems to me, what we could look at is what sort of literatures were available in particular nations during particular eras -- to look at the lack of translation, publication, and distribution of some things and the prevalence of others. (To study the New England Transcendentalists still, but to do so alongside some Hindu texts.) Nations have borders, but once you get beyond the most isolated areas and eras, the textual environments within those nations are not monocultural, so literary history should not be, either.

Ultimately, this comes down to teachers' habits as readers. We can't teach what we don't know, and if we mostly read books written by people born in the U.S. and the U.K., that's what we'll teach. At the very least, though, we should aspire to be as eclectic in our influences as the writers we study have been.

This all still feels inchoate to me, despite what I've written here. It's hard to think outside the system that created you...


  1. This feels like an old discussion, so I looked in Wikipedia under World Literature and found: "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of Weltliteratur in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations, including translations from Sanskrit, Islamic and Serbian epic poetry. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in their Communist Manifesto (1848) to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production."

    Many colleges and universities used to offer courses for non-majors as well as degrees in world lit -- did this disappear while I wasn't looking?

  2. There's been a real resurgence in interest in Goethe's ideas of world literature over the last decade or so, and some really interesting publications about it. And certainly, various schools handle it all very differently. One of the big things that keeps my own department focused on a nationalistic approach are the state and federal requirements for teacher certification, particularly with regard to the Praxis test. That's where the pragmatic has to trump the idealistic view. I'm not in the teacher certification program, so I don't know all the details, but that's certainly been one of the reasons why we have surveys of American and British lit, and most of the high school programs I'm familiar with structure at least part of their curriculum on such things, too, so it makes sense to train teachers to be able to teach that way. Eventually, with luck, they'll be able to make some changes in their schools' curricula, but they're unlikely to be able to do that as new teachers.

  3. When you put the link to Immaginary communities, I was hoping to see something from Phillip Wegner's book, not Anderson's, which is ImmaginED communities... Wegner is much more up-to-date.

  4. I've only read pieces of Wegner's book, and had it pegged in my mind as about utopianism, so that's why it didn't first come to mind. But I've now alterred the link to be Anderson for the first word and Wegner for the second so I don't enforce a choice between them on readers.