From: heath@athena.cs.uga.edu (Terrance Heath)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Date: 12 Aug 92 17:09:19 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens


Shall we dance?

In article <BsuqH1.50J@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca> msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris) writes:


>                                   Tuesday, the 11th of August, 1992
[I wrote :]

>                                                  Albeit that study will
>  relegate me to the outer realms of academia (I will perhaps end up
>  teaching the canon in someone's English department to make a living,
>  just so I can pursue the study and teach the literature that has
>  meaning to me in someone's African-American Studies Institute [note
>  the difference between an institute and a department]).

[And Mr. Morris responded :]

>I don't get it, Terrance. I'd kill to get a permanent job in an Institute.
>But, in my field, these are just about nonexistant. And these African-American
>Studies, and Women's Studies, and Gay Studies institutes seem to me to be
>a fast-track to trying build up scholarship, to build up legitimacy for
>exactly the kind of works you're interested in. It looks to me like
>a whole big bunch of money being dumped to create *new* positions.
>Are you complaining it isn't happening fast enough? Or are you complaining
>that it isn't happening at the expense of Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy?

	 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.)
	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.

[I was feeling sarcastic again and wrote :

>  Perhaps, if nothing else, I can use my energy to do the work which
>  will help propel some of these authors into the canon.  Until then,
>  enjoy the banquet.  I'll be in the kitchen, talking to the help.

[And Mr. Morris replied:]

>See, just as I didn't accept your notion that you are a guest in somebody
>else's house anymore than I am (especially when it comes to the Literary
>Canon, because, as I tried to explain, ``the house'' equals Pop Culture
>and the Literary Canon has nothing to do with that---people in power
>read Tom Clancy if they read at all), I do not accept your metaphor here.
>See, I figure it's exactly that Institute that's going to get you a job,
>while the people who study Hardy won't be getting hired.

	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 continued :]

>  Perhaps I resent having to study, for so long, literature in which I
>  (and people like me) were invisible (a la' Ralph Ellison), or, when
>  we are visible, are depicted through the eyes of one who cannot lift
>  the veils of racism, classism, etc. I have to go outside of the
>  canon to find that which gives me the strength to refute the negatives
>  I find within the canon. 

[And so did Mr. Morris]

>I guess I just don't understand why your identification with people
>in literature of any kind seems to be so strongly connected with
>skin color. Terrance, I've been reading lots of classical Greek literature
>lately, and liking it, or James Joyce. But I'm not Greek or Irish,
>nor indeed pagan or Catholic. I'm no closer to being Greek or Irish than
>you are. Or English really. Thomas Hardy isn't any more my drawing
>room than yours.
>
>Don't get me wrong, I can certainly understand your *positive* interest
>in authors who write the black experience, or are concerned with
>the politics of race. What I don't understand is the *negative* reaction
>to authors who haven't concerned themselves with the black experience.

	As long as we're hopping between drawing rooms, let me take
this opportunity to refresh your tea (Milk? Sugar?), and clarify
something.
	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.
 


>Terrance typed from an interview by Claudia Dreifus of Alice Walker:
>  [Dreifus] - Your books are taught in hundreds of universities around
>  the country.  Yet there are many professors who complain that there
>  students should be reading Plato and not Alice Walker.  There's a
>  "back-to-basics" anger that writings like yours have become texts.
>
>I would say that if we buy Dreifus' first line here (not to mention
>the people who have been posting about reading Hurston for
>this or that class, or how high-school teachers try to teach modern,
>relevant books rather than old, stuffy classics to motivate students to
>read something), then Alice Walker is much more effectively canonized
>than you've been leading me to believe, Terrance.

	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.

[much venom concerning a quote from Alice Walker deleted for brevity's
sake]


>  
>Dinesh D'Souza, in _Illiberal Education_, quotes Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,
>chair of the Women's Studies program at Emory University: ``[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.''

	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'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 institites and studies are being called
for, and how to address the needs that  arise from the lack in the
curriculum.

	Perhaps my attitude has become of of academic and literary
seperatism, 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.




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