From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 18:04:59 GMT



                                     Thursday, the 13th of August, 1992

Responses to Terrance Heath.

Terrance writes:

  	 I'm beginning to wish I'd never brought up Thomas Hardy, let
  alone having ever heard of him. (Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a
  favorite of mine, believe it or not.)

Umm, I keep using him as an example of somebody who is canonized but
clearly isn't everybody's cup of tea (I like sugar, sometimes lemon,
sometimes milk, sometimes neither, thanks). Since I have not had
the lit education you have had, Terrance, I've never read *any* Hardy.
(My wife, Martha, is really in to 19th C English novels, has read lots
of Hardy and George Eliot and Jane Austen, so what I know, I know
vicariously. She prefers Eliot to Hardy by the way.) So, I figure you know
more about Hardy than I do, and it's probably better for me to stick
with mentioning Hardy than somebody with which I'd be on more familiar
ground.

I do apologize if this is only bringing back bad memories for you
of The Class from Hell. :-)

Now, I assume that there are professors out there who are experts
in Hardy, know everything about the man and go to meetings where they
debate every line the guy wrote. Unlike many of my scientist colleagues
(who think any money spent supporting someone who does something other than
science or engineering is money wasted), I think it's really great to
have these professors around. Of course, these professors are competent
at one thing: Thomas Hardy. If they train doctoral students,
they are likely to train them in Hardy. If they vote at faculty meetings
for whom to hire, they're likely to favor somebody who is an expert
in Hardy.

In other words, it necessarily is going to take *time* to canonize
Zora Neale Hurston by standard operating procedure. If she's really
as good as you and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese say she is, then I'd say that'd
be borne out in about 100 years. It does not constitute a flagrant injustice
that she is not yet included in the canon in the way Hardy is included,
*even though she may be better than Hardy all the way down the line*.

  	I look at the various and sundry intitutes of
  "other-than-canonical" studies as a means of creating one's own
  discourse, rather than waiting for another 100 years to get in on the
  action of the current discourse. It is about the only thing we can do
  in the meantime, as study of all that is worshipped in the canon
  leaves us little time for anything else. Admittedly, one could spend
  one's entire life studying the "classic" and never completely
  understand them or even finish the task.  Some of us only have time to
  take what we can from what is there and get on to doing more important
  work with involves reclaiming the validity of our lives and history,
  and some of us choose to to some of this work through literature; that
  is, the study of that literature which is our own.  
  	People are striking out to find their own literary traditions
  and literary homes from which they make speak with greater certainty
  and comfort.

Terrance, I suspect you're going to find things'll change alot for you
when you get to grad school. I don't think people are so much asking you
to study The Canon as to go through some standard undergraduate course
called ``Literature'' so that you have a common language with other
people who have ``Literature'' degrees, so that when you say Hurston
is much better than Hardy, as good as Shakespeare, people are going to
know the yardstick you're using.
  
I said that Black Studies institutes were a fast track to getting
some scholarship going. Terrance replied:
  	Therein is the rub. Fields such as Afro-American Studies,
  Women's Studies, Gay & Lesbian Studies, etc. are relatively new and
  unploughed fields just lying in wait for an army of young geniuses to
  come along and begin cultivating.  There is a LOT that has yet to be
  done is those feilds, thus the likelyhood of finding a job in these
  areas is pretty good, I admit, for interested scholars. Anyone who
  could would be a fool not to dive in with both feet. So perhaps the a
  better way of saying the above would have been this : Having grown
  tired of waiting for out invitation to the banquet in progress, we
  have taken it upon ourselves to host our own.

I think it is wonderful thing that this scholarship will get done, and
I applaud your motivation to do it, to write biography perhaps.
  
  	I think what I resent is that I was kept so busy with my nose
  in the "classics" that it was years before I even new that certain
  books by black authors even existed.  I did not know that any one of
  us had ever put pen to paper. And when I discovered what had been
  indavertenly kept from me while I was running arount chasing Plato's
  coattail, I became angry. I stayed that way, because something of my
  identity had been kept from me - it was deemed not important enough
  for me know, yet.

OK, again I think your positive interest in writers who write the
black experience is good. I quarrel only with your hostility at writers
who do not write the black experience.

You've explained that you went to a rigid school, and maybe that has
much to do with it. I believe that most people who go to public schools
are made to read next to nothing and probably read modern, politically
relevant works before any more traditionally canonical stuff. This is
because students mostly won't read anything unless you candy-coat it
in some way.
   
About Alice Walker, Terrance writes:
  	And the teaching of her writings and those of other authors
  are decried and fought at nearly every university where they are
  taught.  Call me a vigilante, then.

Umm, my point was that, in the battle between Alice Walker's novels
and Plato's dialogues, namely which should be taught at university,
Alice Walker's novels seem to be winning out. Now, *I* happen to think
that Plato might be more important to be taught, he being more important
to an understanding of our political institutions, how they work, how
and why they thinkably could be otherwise, and Alice Walker's
works, being modern novels and politically relevant and therefore easy
and accessible, might well be read on one's own outside the
classroom. But, of course, I seem to be on the losing side of the
argument. Then I seem to get called evil and racist and elitist or
whatever by the Mss. Dreifus and Walker for even wanting to argue
the point. I object to this.
  
  [much venom concerning a quote from Alice Walker deleted for brevity's
  sake]

I am very opposed to the political stance she was taking.
  
I quoted Elizabeth Fox-Genovese:
                                                        ``[M]uch of this
  talk about white and black perspectives is pure nonsense.  In fact,
  it degrades us to speak as though rationality and logic were entirely
  masculine white concepts. And black and female authors deserve better---
  Zora Neale Hurston, for example, didn't want to be a `black female'.
  She wanted to be Shakespeare.''
  
Terrance countered:
  	And, in her time, the things that kept her from being such
  were being black and female, or rather the social perception of
  blackness and femaleness at the time. 

I looked up this quote because Alice Walker was claiming to herself
the badge of ``black female''. If Hurston's work is as good as you say, it
isn't clear to me that she was kept from being Shakespeare at all.

And Alice Walker is a *very successful writer*---a ``serious-genre''
author whose books are taught everywhere, who has had a major film
made of one novel---, and she's identifying herself with the most
downtrodden on earth. And complaining that some people think Plato
might be more important to be taught at university than her books.
Many writers would like to be so downtrodden.

  	I've read Mr. D'Souza's book, and found some of his arguments
  convincing (the discussion of appropriation comes to mind, but that
  would have to take up another thread), but also found that he failed
  to consider the reasons such institutes and studies are being called
  for, and how to address the needs that arise from the lack in the
  curriculum.

I found much that I didn't like in D'Souza---a curious mixture of
statistics and anecdotal evidence that doesn't necessarily support
his claim that things are as bad as all that. On the other hand, I
think that affirmative action is essentially unjust and there's no way
we're going to erase from people's minds the knowledge that it is
unjust, so I think D'Souza may be right about the racial incidents
on northern campuses being reaction to a perceived unfairness. I thought
his suggestion to tie preferred admissions to economic disadvantage,
and not to race, a good one. Anyway, I turned to him only because
I remembered mention of Zora Neale Hurston in the book, and when I
found the quote, I thought it an effective counterweight to Alice Walker.

  	Perhaps my attitude has become of of academic and literary
  separatism, at least temporarily.  As I said above, I will happily
  come to the party, when invited. Until then I will forget about it,
  and have one of my own.

But, isn't requiring you to read Thomas Hardy exactly an invitation for
you to come dance at the party?

               Mike Morris
        (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)


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