From: heath@athena.cs.uga.edu (Terrance Heath)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 13 Aug 92 17:36:06 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <14240@mindlink.bc.ca> Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian) writes:
>
>I don't accept as given the "necessary cultural pluralism of our times." I live
>in a multicultural country, which is fine, but if a group does not have some
>kind of shared references, common experiences, it isn't a group at all. For 30
>years, the shared references have largely been TV commercial and Saturday
>morning cartoons. That's not enough.

	I would agree here, but I would have to break down the
"groups" into bodies smaller and more managable than entire countries.
Admittedly "tribes" are formed now on different basis, whereas
ethnicity or theology (or both) were what divided the group of a
country or state or city into the smaller groups of Christians and
Jews, Blacks and Whites, Serbs and Croats....you get the general idea,
there are many different things coming into play currently (such as
gender and sexual orientation).
	Having lived my entire life as a minority within a dominant
culture, I can attest to the fact that often common experiences and
shared references are the realm of the smaller (in my case ethnic and
affectional) group.  My experience has been as an American who is also
of African descent, and as a minority who has found shelter from the
realities of societal and intstitutional racism in the folds of a
minority community in which the experience of those things are shared,
as well as a certain world view that is different from that of the
dominant, european-influensed, culture, and which serve me much better
than than some of the ideas that the dominant culture has to offer me.
	At the same time, some of the ways of the dominant culture are
inevitably adopted by the minority group, thus we are not Africans,
but African-Americans, with a personal and group identity which is to
some degree a fusion of those two cultural influences. However, that
which is adopted is also adapted to suit the particular experiences
and needs of the minority in a diaspora (Note how Black slaves
transformed the religion given to them by their masters, designed to
keep them content with their enslaved state). 
	If a set of common references is to somehow be created for a
society which contains groups such as this, it is dangerous to do so
without an understanding of what has been called the "cultural
pluralism of our time", because to do otherwise is to base those
references (which are really the unwritten rules anyone needs to know
in order to get along in a given society) upon the experience and
outlook of one particular groups, thus forcing other (perhaps
minority) groups to either comply or become ever more marginalized.
Better, perhaps, to establish those common references with respect to
the different cultural perspectives of those smaller groups within the
larger body of the "nation", in order to create a society which does
not require some of its members to divorce themselves from a part of
their identity in order to get along in culture which overlooks their
needs and experience.

>I've mentioned Frye's definition of classic as a book that won't go
away


	It's been my experience, upon discovering books that have
deeply changed my view of myself and the world around me, that
sometimes a classic is also a book that has been (for reasons best
examined in another thread, perhaps in another newsgroup) *KEPT* away.


-- 
"Black men loving black men is THE revolutionary act!"
			-Joseph Beam_
Terrance Heath 
heath@athena.cs.uga.edu