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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.