What comes to the top of your mind when the idea of classic literature is brought up?
Maybe Shakespeare or Charles Dickens or T.S Eliot. You probably have an idea of the past and the intellectual and academic ‘elite’. But where do these conceptions come from? Specifically looking at literature in the West, we can see a lot of influence from the idea of a literary canon.
But what is the literary canon? Are we pirates launching books to opposing authors?
Well, after a long bout of research, I am not really sure myself. The canon is loosely defined as a set of literature/authors that is highly respected and considered very important in society, but this definition can get muddy.
I reached out to the wonderful Dr. Lisa Grekul, an associate professor of English language and Cultural studies with a specialisation in Canadian Literature here at UBCO, to see what she thought.
Wendell Zylstra: How would you define the literary canon, in your own words?
Dr. Lisa Grekul: The list of the best, most important works of English literature. I would add to that and say that that list is real and not real. It's not real in the sense that you can’t google it and come up with a link to the literary canon [list]. But it is real in the sense that it affects what we read, what we teach, and what we consider essential reading for various programs. For an English major or English honours student, (...) it becomes this [list of] essential reading texts that you should know. It comes to us in sort of an organic way; there's no committee that ever sat down and said ‘okay, let’s come up with the canon’ and there it is. It comes about naturally.
I think that her answer seems simple enough, so then why are there so many articles, dissecting, debating, and going on as I do now about the canon?
Well, the debate comes from that point of view and the point of view of those who believe that there exists a comprehensive list of these texts. So what is the literary canon? A list of novels or an ongoing thought?
A famous example of a comprehensive canon came from literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom’s novel, The Western Canon, set out to define a set list of novels that were above all others. Bloom suggests that there should be a baseline for all literary scholars to preserve a sense of academic integrity. He posits the list of 26 writers as those who have created works that are so incredible and ripe for analysing that it would be foolish for any English scholar not to know and read. Now that’s all well and good and Bloom clearly had a very deep appreciation for literature, and at one point was considered possibly one of the most prolific English-speaking literary critics in the world, but there is a quite fatal flaw in Bloom’s ideas of the literary canon.
WZ: How do you feel about people like Harold Bloom who attempt to quantify these texts into a comprehensive list? Is that worth it, or does it just hinder our perspectives of literature?
LG: I personally would say I, of course, see great value in the works of literature that have long belonged in the canon and I would never dismiss their importance or suggest that we don't teach them anymore, but I think that’s it's an exercise in foley to believe that we can have a canon, (...) that we should adhere to it, and that we should organise our teaching, our thinking, and our scholarly work around that firm idea (...) of the canon. I also think that it’s offensive to some groups. So for both aesthetic and political reasons I’m not in favour of the position that scholars like Harold Bloom take. Taste is arbitrary, I think that's it’s politicised, and I think we have to question who makes (...) the decision of what is canonical over time. It tends to be people with privilege who enjoy an elite position vis-à-vis cultural production.
People following Bloom’s train of thought may be quick to dismiss the democratic approach of reading texts of all different kinds in an academic setting, as they tend to believe that there is an innate sense of good and bad writing. There is, of course, in the extremes, good and bad writing, but most writing that has been published has been so under laborious effort, for a reason. That reason, and what lies within the book, is worth exploring.
WZ: In an interview, Harold Bloom noted that he had known students that graduated with English degrees that had not ever studied Shakespeare. If we take a more democratic approach to what we study, how do we know which works are important?
LG: In some ways, the canon serves a purpose to tell us what we should know. It’s a framework and it has a very very pragmatic purpose in the sense that, if you are going to be a scholar of English, how do we determine if you are going forth and knowing what you should know, (...) because the alternative is ‘what do we read, who reads what?’ What if you were to finish your degree in English and you never took a course in Shakespeare? What if you didn't do any middle English? What if you never read a single novel by Charles Dickens? Are you well equipped to go out into the world and say, ‘I’m an English scholar”? What do you do if you’re unmoored and disconnected from any sense of tradition, is it just that anything goes? And I would say, yeah, anything goes. Because what is more important is the way we think and how we think about texts and the fact that we can read them in a really smart, savvy critical way. For me if there is no ‘you gotta check these boxes,’ that would be an ideal world.
“I personally wouldn’t care if a student graduated and never read Shakespeare. I would be more concerned, in fact, if a student graduated and had never read a text by an Indigenous writer, or a writer from a post-colonial context, or have no sense of feminist theory or queer theory or eco-criticism.”
So let us take it back to the conception of the canon, and why it was ever conceived in the first place.
The idea of the canon is one that dates back to the eighteenth century in England. It began in the schooling system, used to better understand which texts students would have to study in order to prove they had the skills to read and analyse texts. The academic literary canon largely dictated which texts were read and which texts must be read in order to consider someone a scholar of literature, or a scholar at all.
The eighteenth century also happens to be one of the most prolific centuries of England's colonisation across the world. This colonisation came with a heavy hand on forcibly overwriting all other cultures with English culture. To spread English culture, of course, you have to have a culture to begin with. A culture made up of ideas, foods, music, speech, and media, which in those days was almost exclusively books. Having a set idea of which books were good enough to be canonical, often in this context ones that preclude strong English elitism. English scholars were taught mainly English texts, from writers with perspectives that favoured England. Scholars would then go on to believe England to be the greatest in the world and attempt to enforce that belief on the rest of the world. This is obviously a large oversimplification, but it illustrates the problem of who gets to tell their stories and whether or not we can access these stories. Dr. Grekul notes:
“For some people to simply be able to write, forget putting their work out into the world, is a deeply politicised act. I can’t judge what is good writing until it is all democratically available, and it isn’t.”
The list presented is composed mainly of very old white English men. Some may argue that one does not need to see themselves reflected in the world; that all one needs is to read good writing, no matter the political ideas or personal identities of the author. Bloom certainly posits that politics and writing should be separate, and that good writing is good writing, without looking at the context of the writer. This separation is idealistic at best, and ignores so much of the issues facing the world. All art is political, because politics are part of social awareness, and social awareness is a big part of what fuels art.
This problematic version of the literary canon is the one that continues to affect how we learn to this day. The trickle-down of history becomes tradition, and when we do not analyse these traditions from colonial contexts, they are adopted into the young minds studying them.
As Dr. Grekul puts it:
“I don’t think that the professors who taught me would question why they do what they do. It was just what they did.”
None of this is to say that writers like Shakespeare are unimportant, but they are not the only way forward. It is important to examine what we learn and why we learn it, for both the student and teacher.
“To you as a student, and for me as a professor, why am I passing on what I’m passing on?”
So what does that leave us with? What do we study?
WZ: Which would you say students should look at first in their studies, past texts or contemporary ones?
LG: I do think on the one hand, that it's worthwhile for a student to know history and therefore to know at least something about the canon. Look, there’s no way any of us are going to read everything. But I think you should have a sense of what has come before, not least because it gives you the opportunity to critique it in a really sophisticated way, But at the same time, you need to know where you are now. I personally would advocate for a balance of some knowledge of the canon, but certainly some sense of what's happening now or what's happening in, say, the last 30 or 40 years. Because you’re a citizen of the here and now. The now requires knowledge and a familiarity with the past, but I don't think living in the past is going to serve you well.
So what? So go and read! Go to your local library and read. Read everything without prejudice and find what you enjoy and what makes you think. Be challenged. Be confused. It is good for you.
To attempt to create lists of essential readings that should be the backbone of all education is to attempt to remove part of that uniqueness and exploration afforded to the academic by the university. Look for things you have never seen, be open to all ideas, and do not throw away anything – old and new – without a second glance. If you are seeing a work anywhere, it has taken that author time and heart to get it there.
Try to find that heart.
And just to get you going, here are three recommendations for novels from Dr. Grekul herself:
- 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
A huge thank you to Dr. Grekul for her wonderful insights.
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