From: barclay@RAIL9000.gatech.edu (Barclay Blanchard)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 12 Aug 92 12:40:12 GMT
Organization: Georgia Tech Research Institute

In article <14216@mindlink.bc.ca> Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian) writes:
>Barclay Blanchard finds my attitude condescending and patronizing. I'm sorry to
>have offended her, but that is a risk of trying to speak one's mind
>frankly--and so speaking ought to be a compliment to the partner in the
>conversation.

Yeah, I do appreciate frankness.  How I feel about what you said is a personal
thing; you needn't apologize for it.  But I similarly think that it was a 
compliment to you that I was straight about how I felt.

>I'm also sorry but I don't accept "balance" as a reason for including people
>who otherwise aren't likely to end up on college reading lists. One might as
>well spend part of a math class studying Maya mathematics--which is brilliant,
>and was far in advance of European and Asian mathematics 2000 years ago, but
>became extinct with the Spanish Conquest. It certainly deserves study, but to
>make real sense of it--to truly appreciate it--we would need heavy training in
>anthropology, archaeology, and a host of other disciplines.

I was disappointed that we didn't study math history as part of the math 
curriculum.  I think that it's important to know where a discipline has been
(so to speak) when studying where it is (although usually we study where it
was 40 years ago, it seems) or to help fashion where it is going.  And with
literature, I don't think we should reject the standard canon.  I think we 
should expand it; it's part of our literary heritage.  But I don't think you 
and I are going to agree on that.

>Similarly with talented but (so far) uninfluential writers from ethnic
>minorities and other groups, their work deserves attention. But it's not likely
>to be very informed or perceptive attention if we have no context for it. (I
>can think of a superb 19th-century Canadian novelist, James De Mille, who wrote
>a satire that can stand with anything produced by Twain, Butler, and other
>contemporary satirists; but if De Mille's book were the first of its genre that
>a student encountered, it would seem like a baffling tall tale and little
>else.)

But there is a context for African American writers that goes back at least as
far as 1899 (we studied Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces in a lit class last
spring, about the blacks' struggle to become part of American society's power
structure after the Civil War, written in the then accepted form of a 
sentimental novel, and our teacher said that there are several other such works
published and others still being found).  There's also some context for women
writers.  The problem, IMO, is that many (if not most) African American and 
women writers (etc.) don't get much chance to study their particular heritages.
And studying a work in a class is a lot different and ideally richer an
experience (in my experience) than reading it in a vacuum, on one's own
without the benefit of historical context and a lot of other information that
teachers often bring out.


-- 
Barclay Elizabeth Blanchard    barclay@rail9000@gatech.edu
"I've been laughed at by some of the funniest people."
--Lissie, Alice Walker's _The Temple of My Familiar_