Sometime this summer I’ll pose for an Author Shot to replace that trippy anonicon, but for now I have to ask you to take my word for it that I’m a white man. With a beard, if that matters.
Perhaps because of my privileged upbringing (private school) and context (exurban midwest), or perhaps because of a discomfort with confronting difference, the English literature I have come to know is white and male. Looking back on my literary career, I am beginning to worry that I have for too long bought into the separate-but-equal mentality of the canon.
Where other literatures have come into my education they feel decontextualized, tokenized, colonized: the sheer talent of a Toni Morrison, for example, would invalidate the canon’s premise were she not acknowledged, so there she is, with Ralph Ellison and Maxine Hong Kingston. But I don’t understand Morrison, Ellison, or Kingston in anything of the depth with which I understand Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, or even Zadie Smith.
Smith, because she writes something like World Literature, seems to escape some of the literary ghettoization of the American canon. Still, World Lit can’t always escape the gravitational pull of academics’ ghettoizing impulse: over and over again Kazuo Ishiguro explains to white interviewers that he doesn’t model his fiction on Yukio Mishima and Junichirō Tanizaki (Chekhov is his greatest influence, followed by James). Interviewers and reviewers, even (especially?) from academic publications, tuck Ishiguro into an ill-defined Japanese Lit.
There are dangers in assuming all authors are like Ishiguro, of course: I’m not sure Philip Roth could give a disquisition on the range of styles deployed by Tanizaki and then come back to explain the stylistic influence of a certain Polish translator of Chekhov. Still, it seems not unreasonable to imagine that authors of the twentieth-century novel, in all languages, are employees of one of the more culturally heterogeneous firms around.
Back to my problem: as a product of my time and place I know the canon as it is espoused by my university, and I know the canon as it is espoused by my authors. (Woolf and Rushdie are graciously forthright about the books they think people should be reading.) But I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know, the canons that boom outside the walls of my little University, the list of 100 Essential Books They Won’t Teach You In College.
Oh, there are so many places one could begin. I’m always a little out of touch with English department canon books b/c I was a German major before I was ever comp/rhet. And, my MLS work involving literature dealt with the books people actually read (outside of the English department) and children’s and young adult lit. Aside from that background, I have a very idiosyncratic relationship with literature.
Now, if you ever want a list of children’s and/or YA Lit, I’d be happy to make some suggestions. There is some very exciting YA literature from the past few decades. I can offer German language texts, too (keep in mind that this is coming from the person who owns Dune in German).
You may be idiosyncratic, Katy, but to judge from your LibraryThing catalog you are also a jaw-droppingly voracious reader.
So few of the students who go through intro lit classes will pick up a book after they graduate. Lit profs have only the 14 or 15 weeks it takes to satisfy a gen ed requirement to give students a map of the literary library, so that students who don’t have your natural drive for reading will at least get a sense of what’s out there, and feel that at least one author connected with them and represents something like their inner & outer lives.
This is part of why my own canoniphilia distresses me: I’m already at a demographic remove from the great majority of American students; if my syllabi are demographically identical, then I have that much less of a chance of breaking through to the infrequent or non-reader.
It’s probably safe to say that I’m a book freak and always have been. I certainly don’t represent the general population in any way. However, I do remember that way back when I was 10-11 and needed my mother to check out books for me from from the adult sections of the library (where, of course, the Sherlock Holmes books were located), I would always grab a book off of the “classics of literature” shelf as a way to prove my worth to the librarian (a thoroughly unpleasant woman who thought I should remain in the children’s department). Those literary classics bored me. I already read a lot, so I moved on to other books – I moved into my Agatha Christie phase which was then followed by my Stephen King phase in middle school. My mother would check out any book I wanted, much to the consternation of the uptight people behind the desk. I did not “get” Madame Bovary when I was 11.
Anyway, I knew to go on to other books, but not everyone does. A lot of the reading we do in school does not get people interested in reading. That’s a problem. It’s also a problem that people associate reading with novels and associate that with reading for school. A lot of work in education and LIS is starting to focus on introducing more non-fiction reading – particularly when working with boys. I also think that genre fiction isn’t given the credit it deserves. A lot of people read s/f, romance, mysteries, etc., and a lot of these people aren’t viewed as “readers” by academics. Not all academics, but there are a lot of book snobs out there who should read some of Janice Radway’s work.
I think you’re asking an interesting question here, Mike, but based on the conversation that’s developing further in the comments, I’d like to ask if you could clarify which question(s) you want an answer to, because I can talk about several. Do you want a list of books to read outside of the “classic Western canon” for yourself? Do you want a disquisition on how to get non-readers interested in reading within the academic context? Do you want to talk about how to use non-”classic” literature to still teach students how to do literary analysis/paper writing? Or do you want to talk about how teaching classic literature for the purposes of analysis has very little to do with teaching students how to enjoy reading casually?
Like k8, I can talk about children’s and YA, as well as the mystery and sff genres, in great detail, and since I used to have to teach largely non-reading ESL students American-style study skills all in one crash course, I developed some interesting thoughts on how to use more mainstream genre fiction (casually interesting and less linguistically challenging) to teach analytical skills (academically necessary.)
Katy just posted a wonderful autobiography of reading that tackles the problems of canonicity from a psychological rather than a sociological viewpoint. Because of the vagaries of Trackback it doesn’t seem to have appeared in this comments queue.
Dana, all four of those conversations sound awesome. Do I have to pick just one?
I am interested in the claim implied by your fourth question, in part because I can’t tell which of two directions you would take it: is the act of analytical reading unrelated to the act of casual reading, or is it that students trained as literary analysts see reading only as a kind of work? (They don’t do organic chemistry on Friday evenings, so why should they pick up a novel?)
Mostly, my question is one you don’t list: where can I find discussions of books that are as wonderful as any book in the traditional western academic canon but that aren’t being taught?
Alas, I can’t answer your last question with a handy link or anything. I can tackle some of the ones I proposed, though (obviously, or I wouldn’t have suggested them.)
To continue working on my reply to your comment in backwards order, I think what I meant by “do you want to talk about how teaching classic literature for the purposes of analysis has very little to do with teaching students how to enjoy reading casually?” was that teaching truly non-book-reading students to enjoy reading books has to be approached in an almost entirely different manner from the way most of us are taught to read and analyze books in traditional English class. No one had to teach me to love to read fiction; I just naturally enjoyed sitting in one place, traveling within my own mind. My brother, by contrast, couldn’t be forced to sit still for that long when he was younger, and has only just started to learn to like reading as an adult. ESL students (and many language learners) are generally taught to just read articles and short stories, and view books as too daunting. So I think part of the challenge of helping people learn to really like reading is helping them see it as a real personal choice to find something they will enjoy, rather than a group assignment. It was for that reason that I made an Amazon internet activity for my students before taking them to a bookstore. (We had been reading mysteries in class as a group beforehand, and then they had to pick out their own book, read it, and do a book report for the final project.) Just the idea that they could choose things that are actually interesting just to them was a revelation for some of them, as well as the idea that reading a book that wasn’t classical literature could still be academically helpful.
For people who do like to read, but maybe not classics (yet), you can decide if the point of the class is to teach them how to analyze things and write papers, or if the point is to teach them to understand more challenging types of writing. If the goal is the former, you can use any book to do that. I wrote an entire semester’s curriculum based on looking at juvenile mysteries in a more analytical way (cultural ideals being implicitly taught to American children through Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys, comparing lessons for male & female audiences, changes in updated version of the books, etc.) The content of the books wasn’t hard to understand, but there was enough meat there to help them learn how to write papers. (Of course, this runs the risk of convincing the students that the fun books aren’t really fun, because they had to think about them too much, but whatever. You can ease them into it.)
And, um, this is getting really long, so I’m going to stop here and eat some dinner. If you’re still interested, you can ask further questions here, or you can encourage me to continue blathering via email, since perhaps not all of your audience is interested in my extended thoughts.
I’m interested in all of those questions too, Dana. I think that I find stereotypical English Department ideas about reading somewhat suspect because of what I know about people from personal experience and my library school training. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I’m really interested in the way we treat non-fiction in school settings. We focus so much on novels, poetry, and sometimes drama, that this huge genre that engages so many people is ignored. It’s no wonder some people tune out of school-sponsored reading – it is composed of a fairly limited sub-set of texts.
I don’t remember seeing my brother read much fiction until he was in his early 20s, and that was because I lent him my Tolkien before the first movie came out. I had a hell of a time getting those books back! However, he always read a lot of non-fiction. He was reading Carl Sagan’s books when he was in middle school and he would re-read them until he felt he “got” them. That’s heavy reading and devoted reading. I see the same thing with people who read about sports, health issues, biographies, graphic novels, comics, fan fiction, etc., not to mention online media.
btw, the juvenile mysteries course sounds like a lot of fun and a good way to get students to focus on representations of culture in texts. I seem to focus (lately) on speculative fiction and historical fiction (and the sometimes overlap between them) and the ways they connect to culture and other texts.
Places where people discuss books: aside from the many book blogs (and there are some fabulous ones out there), the group discussion boards at librarything can be fascinating. People have created their own groups based on their reading choices and interests and, while some conversations are fanboy/girl talk, others have more depth and offer links and other references to discussions outside of the community.
Dana & Katy, this conversation is just wonderful—in many ways it is a sort of conversation I need to overhear rather than participate in. (As I think the post confesses, I’m very much the sort of academic reader who rather digs Henry James and who doesn’t fully understand what can be exciting about writing that varies from the standard lit fic formulae.)
I am coming to appreciate that the problem of canonicity, in your experience, has had as much to do with top-down methods of academic reading as with the “approved” or “appropriate” texts themselves. Dana, that lesson plan—and all the convolutions of pedagogical power it implies—is pretty fantastic. If you go to university in England, I know, you get essentially two parallel syllabi: the assigned texts that everyone in the class should read, and then an enormous list of related texts from which you are advised to pick and choose.
k8, good point about the non-fiction. I think a lot of English/language teachers steer away from teaching non-fiction, because it seems harder to have people analyze writing structure and style, since so many of our own English class backgrounds (and so many of the tests we’re supposed to prepare students to take) focused on narrative structure, literary device, etc. Also, from an ESL and lower reading level perspective, a lot of times people perceive non-fiction stuff as being more difficult, because it can tend to focus on more thoughty thoughts and abstract concepts, rather than descriptive settings and conversations.
However, there is obviously a lot of room for teaching non-fiction. This is actually something that seems to come up more in history departments than literature ones. When I was doing my Latin American history concentration at Grinnell, the prof spent a lot of time with us not only discussing the content of the assigned books, but also the actual written structure of the books, looking at what made some books more successful and readable than others, and what the authors’ structural choices could mean about their approaches to the material. I wish I’d been able to take even more classes looking at that, because there really is a lot of variance in the way non-fiction books are written.
I also recently went to a talk at work by a history prof talking about his most recent book. It was a biography of a Japanese mid-level post-war community leader (ex-nobility? the mayor? something.) Anyway, the poor prof spent more time defending the fact that he had written a biography than he did telling us about why he thought that particular guy was interesting, because there is apparently a lot of pressure in the Japanese history circles right now to only write things that “expand the theory” and provide “new ways” of looking at, well, stuff that already happened. Instead, I think the prof could have spent less time worrying about that, and more time talking to us about why the subject’s personal diary was such an interesting form of writing, how the subject’s perspective is very different from other diarists of the time, and how this might have influenced the way he chose to write his own biography of the man.
Also, I know Carl Zimmer talks about the craft of science writing in various places. I can’t find the exact blog post I was vaguely thinking of, but here’s an interview with him on the subject, asking what advice he’d give to budding science writers and scientists trying to communicate with the general public. (He points out that he was an English major.)
Well, you’ve certainly got me thinking about this topic now. This post on Good Readings seems rather relevant to the conversation.
[...] going on over at Mike’s academic blog, Ad Nauseam, specifically on the post “Finding the countercanon.” Originally, Mike posed his problem and request this way: Back to my problem: as a product [...]
Scott Esposito recently wrote an excellent essay about how American readers contextualize (or fail to contextualize) works from writers from outside that white male Anglo-American canonical tradition.
In the essay, Esposito discusses the recent American success of Roberto Bolano, and argues that for audiences whose familiarity with Latin American literature doesn’t run much deeper than Marquez and Borges, it can be extremely difficult to fully understand what a writer like Bolano is up to. So: perhaps the historically limited scope of the canon is self-reinforcing, in a way. If we’re only taught how to read canonical white male writers from England and America who write in English, it becomes difficult for the canon to truly integrate works coming from outside that tradition.
Thank you for linking to that wonderful essay, Ryan! As a recent rider of the Bolaño bandwagon I appreciate the call to more thoughtfully contextualize lit that comes from lingual and political positions removed from that of a privileged American middle class.
My concern lies in where the logical extension of Scott Esposito’s argument leads. I’m persuaded by his argument that 22,000 Americans bought Savage Detectives in hardcover because the New York Times helped us reduce his novel into a narrative context we could understand (”It’s like Borges and Marquez”), but does that reductivist principle really differ from our reading of, say, Virginia Woolf?
By way of exemplifying American ethnocentrism, Esposito reminds us that such-and-such a percentage of Americans couldn’t identify Iraq on a world map in 2003, but how many readers of the Harry Potter novels can point out King’s Cross Station on a map of London? And isn’t part of the point of reading novels written in foreign countries (whether Britain or Catalan) that they can help us remap our world?
Still, I take Esposito’s (and your) main point: without an internationalized canon, American readers—and American college students required to take one lit survey—remain essentially provincial.
I don’t think Esposito would dispute the idea that any reader (whatever their background knowledge or experience) stands to broaden their understanding through contact with literature from foreign countries. But: that’s a fair point about reading Woolf, the Harry Potter books, etc. Perhaps a contemporary American reader is likely to be slightly more knowledgeable about the context in which Woolf (or, say, Fielding or Defoe) was writing–but probably only slightly.
Another possible weakness in Esposito’s argument is the fact that Bolaño’s frame of reference is clearly much broader than Latin American literature–The Savage Detectives employs the voices of characters from many different cultural and literary contexts. No doubt a deep knowledge of contemporary Latin American literature (and culture, history, and politics) would help a reader’s understanding of the novel–but Bolaño also seems to be very much interested in cross-cultural questions about the social, political, cultural, and personal lives and role of poets and poetry.
Hmmm, since this is now going in the direction of American ethnocentrism, another thing that always bothered me about my English classes in high school was the way that ethnocentrism was assumed. As Goodreadings points out, American readers are not necessarily going to be familiar with the cultural context of writing by authors taken to be WASPs, but many teachers assume the students are, and teach accordingly. I have no accurate count of how many times a teacher asked us to identify the Biblical symbolism from a particular passage, but it was a lot, and I was always sure to notice, because it was one of the few questions I couldn’t answer, along with all the other heathen children in the room.
This wasn’t so much the problem in college, because all my lit classes were in Spanish, so the profs didn’t make as many assumptions about what the students would or would not be familiar with. Teaching world lit in an English class wouldn’t really be much of a stretch if profs already taught all the classical canon as if the students weren’t familiar with it. American/British literature already is world literature to a lot of students.
I just started browsing through a book on my to-read list that deals with these issues (from what I can tell, anyway). It’s an edited collection titled Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy. It’s edited by Patricia A. Sullivan and Donna J. Quailey, and was published by NCTE in 1994. I might just have more to say later on.