Once again, the Canon, Multiculturalism, etc

Here.

There are some surprising quotes -- at least, I was surprised. I have always known that Stanley Fish was not your run-of-the-mill PoMo leftie, but I fell out of my chair upon reading what his next book is going to be about.

Stanley Fish, another blessed son of Providence. A delight, this guy - slippery fish. You can love and hate him and then love him again. One never knows what's coming...are you referring to his tussle with les enfants terribles of atheism?

(edit: just saw your link, sorry. But he's off and running again on Hitchens, Dawkins, et al. and the fallacy of modern liberalism and the separation of church and state...)

Fish is one reason to keep reading the NYT. There may be another, but my mind is blank at the moment.

Oh, yes, the luke-warm Yankee coverage.

Come to think of it, Doug, he is stealing your fire. If you hurry, you may be able to get your book published before he finishes his.

Personally, I see the canon versus the multicultural argument as fairly stupid. On the one side you have some people basically saying that nothing important has been written past a certain date in history and that good writing has only come from certain parts of the world. On the other side certain folks argue that old dead white men dominate the culture so we should show as many of them as we can out of the system. Neither of these ideologies is based in rational thought. Both are basically stupid at their hearts. There is room in our education to change and to grow and to retain much of what the “canon” has to teach us as well.

Science and math grow and change everyday and yet no one expects us to either abandon the past nor ignore the future. If I said that we should only teach science which came from Europe before the 1900’s you would think I was crazy. If I said that we shouldn’t teach science that came before 1900 or that came from Europe you would also say I was crazy. Why are the humanities that different from science or other subjects.

Bloom was an idiot to say that nothing important has been written since the 1950’s… He was also an idiot for many other reasons, but a person who says that teaching works from the canon is same as suppressing other cultures or women is just as big of an idiot.

That’s my 2 cents…

Eneveda,

A yankees fan? You are truly evil.

One thing that gets lost in the all the uproar about Fish is that he is an excellent teacher and a high class Milton scholar. His students will tell you he loves Milton much more than political discourse. But he is also one of those guys who just can't keep his mouth shut when he sees something he thinks is lunacy.

This this for more Fish/Milton.

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2261

Arctic-Stranger,

Chilly wind you bring with you.

Agreed on Fish and Milton, if not baseball.

Go Sox!

Great game last night.

While reading the article Doug start off with, it occured to me that ex-communists as conservatives makes great sense to me. With Communism thoroughly discredited, the only place left for an unreconstructed totalitarian would be to hide out as an authoritarian conservative. It doesn't matter which ideology puts you in power, it's that you are in power. The only way to ensure your program is the winner in the race for control, is to implement it yourself. To do that you must do it from a base of power. At this time in America, authoritarianism from the right is more likely a path to power than leftism.

Like all the Neocons, he's a cynical bast@#d.

>On the other side certain folks argue that old dead white men dominate the culture so we should show as many of them as we can out of the system.

That's a fairly weak understanding of the Post-modernist critique.

>If I said that we shouldn’t teach science that came before 1900 or that came from Europe you would also say I was crazy. Why are the humanities that different from science or other subjects?

It's an interesting question. Are the humanities as emphatically structured as the sciences? Do we believe that there is some ultimate goal that Literature works towards? If so, what is it?

As for teaching science that comes from the 17th century, we tend to do so only when the science is still widely accepted. Or use things such as a flat-earth conjecture to show why we've largely abandoned such a conjecture.

This doesn't mean that a conjecture is completely abandoned. Witness Einstein's cosmological constant. It does mean that it is much easier to evaluate which works have merit.

But it does mean that you'll likely spend a full course studying Ptolemaic Astronomy, unless you're doing it from a cultural studies perspective.

>but a person who says that teaching works from the canon is same as suppressing other cultures or women is just as big of an idiot.

Any codification of a canon functions purely by basis of exclusion.

Here is a comment from someone else:

"In her article on Alan Bloom's salience today,
Rachel Donadio stated, 'Today it's generally
agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon
wars. Reading lists were broadened to include
more works by women and minority writers, and
most scholars consider that a positive
development. Yet 20 years later, there's a more
complicated sense of the costs and benefits of
those transformations. Here, the lines aren't
drawn between right and left in the traditional
political sense, but between those who defend the
idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts
that students should master and those who focus
more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.
However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of
the issues he raised still resonate - especially
when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.'

I would like to see some discussion here of
this claim. Is it not the case that 'those who
focus more on modes of inquiry and
interpretation' place themselves, unabashedly, on
the political left? She refers of course to those
who do 'theory', which in many cases positions
books and their authors (if they have an author
at all) as either progressive or counter-revolutionary.

Also, I don't see how it is possible to teach
the humanities at all without placing the
important books in their historical context.
Otherwise, students have no route to meaning, an
indispensable part of mastering the texts. I
would have liked this article a great deal better
had the author noted that teachers of literature
and the other arts have designated
themselves as commentators on matters requiring
considerable expertise in political and
diplomatic history, political science, and comparative anthropology.

To those here who do not regard what goes in
the humanities curriculum as having application
to the public opinion that elects our government
and hence affects or decides foreign and domestic policies, I beg them to pay attention to those developments in the arts curricula that are
introduced, all too vaguely and carelessly, in Rachel Donadio's essay."

What part of the piece would you like comment on?

#11

My point isn’t that science and humanities are exactly alike. My point is that if something stops changing, growing, and moving then it’s dead. To say that only certain periods of time (namely the distant past) and for the most part only certain parts of the world (namely Europe) have anything to offer us in the way of important writing is asinine. Writing going on now also has much to offer us as do authors from all over the planet and of both genders. Anyone who denies this may as well kill themselves because they are saying that our time and our future has nothing culturally to offer us which is truly worth our time. If that’s the case then really what’s the point of going on?!? So I guess there are points and purposes to books (not to mention all the arts). They help to give meaning to our lives, they help us gain insight, they help us to understand the ways in which we are related to each other, they help us to see our world in new ways, and I could go on and on. If those things are true (and I believe they are) then new books would definitely be just as important as things from the past and the reverse is also true!

Also, when it comes to the other side of the argument, you can say I’m over simplifying things but I have heard 100’s of different people argue and read so many times I’ve lost count that the canon is just another way suppress women and anyone who isn’t white. This argument is just as silly as the other side. The canon wasn’t created to suppress anyone. It came together because these were writings which many have deemed worthwhile and important.

All I’m saying is that both of these arguments are insipid. The canon has a great deal to offer us, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for newer or diverse books. There’s room for both.

Another comment, from a different discussion thread (not a LibraryThing one), with which I agree. I think it gets to the heart of the matter: of course 'the canon' should not be closed. And it is reasonable to expect that previously-marginalized social groups will begin to produce great writers, whose works should become part of it. But this should be through merit, not through a kind of affirmative action.

----------------------------------------------
"This is a mischaracterization: when Toni Morrison is substituted for Shakespeare, Rita Dove for Milton, or Rushdie for Dostoyevsky, the reading lists are not being "broadened." Rather, works of inferior quality are being substituted for superior in accord with the race/class/sex spoils system. It likely is true that "most scholars consider this a positive development," but the reason is not that the substitution passed some objective test of merit; rather, it is that the scholars themselves were selected for their posts partly on the basis of their approval of the race/class/sex spoils system. The fact that they believe that an undergraduate's limited time for literature is better spent with Dove than with Milton, say, or with _The Satanic Verses_ than with _The Idiot_, does not in itself conclude the discussion.

Kevin Gutzman"

First, I still don’t agree that we cannot add some diverse works to college lit. courses with having to lose a significant number of “canon” works. Most of my undergraduate lit. classes were usually focused on short stories, plays, excerpts from longer works, essays, and other shorter works. Usually there would be one, maybe two, novels thrown in to the mix. With a class like this there is no reason some works cannot be added for the purposes of diverse perspective.

Second, I do not think that affirmative action has a place in deciding the merit of literature. However, as to the idea of having some kind of test to decide the merit of a piece of literature, I think you will find that an impossible task. There will never be a test created to decide this which will not be deemed favorable to at least one group by at least some of the groups involved. No matter how one designs the criteria for deciding a book has “merit” some folks will say it discriminates against one group or another. Choosing literature of worth will always be subjective to some degree. Look no further than some of the threads here to see that this is true. I’ve seen people completely trash (and do a really good job of explaining why they believe they shouldn’t be taught) books which are widely accepted as classics. I’ve also seen way too many experts argue over if one book or another should be taught. While I believe there is a group of works that most would agree should be taught, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy to decide what other works should be included.

>And it is reasonable to expect that previously-marginalized social groups will begin to produce great writers,

Will begin?

Yes, will begin. Prior to the 20th Century, African writers are almost non-existent. Women writers are somewhat more plentiful -- and in the canon -- but scarce.

A situation of equal rights for the two sexes would surely have seen female Platos and Virgils and Dantes. If there are so few, it is either because (1) women cannot produce great literature -- and this is nonsense, or (2) they did produce great literature but it is hidden away somewhere, which may be true in one or two cases but not in general or (3) social conditions of the times kept women from access to the full apparatus of culture.

These conditions have now changed and thus I expect that we shall see female and Black and Asian Shakespeares and Miltons. Have we already seen them? Perhaps in the last few decades? I don't know ... too early to say. Let's wait a couple of hundred years.

Of course a good education should include contemporary writers, whether or not we call them part of the 'the canon'. Doing this has not required the attentions of the PC crowd: I read James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison when I was in university and that was 40 years ago, not to mention a raft of female poets.

What is great literature, Doug?

The set-up quote:

"... when Toni Morrison is substituted for Shakespeare, Rita Dove for Milton, or Rushdie for Dostoyevsky, the reading lists are not being "broadened." Rather, works of inferior quality are being substituted for superior in accord with the race/class/sex spoils system..."

As it happens, I'm not particularly fond of Toni Morrison, and haven't reading Dove or Rushdie but have read plenty of Shakespeare, Milton and Dosteyevsky. What happens to this statement, though, when instead of comparing prominent contemporary writers who are generally still too recent to judge in any canonical sense to some of the classics of the Western World, we instead compare some previously excluded classics: compare Shikibu to Dosteyevsky, Kalidasa to Shakespeare and Ferdowsi to Milton. I love both Dosteyevsky and Shakespeare, and find Milton interesting and skillful though not inspiring. But I'd say that if you are allocating reading time you'd gain more insight of the world, of yourself, and of great literature by reading from all six than limiting yourself to just three, even if it meant that in your whole life you never made it to Troilus and Cressida (a play that I, personally, rather like).

Or put Toni Morrison up against contemporary alternatives - say Updike. Suddenly, Morrison compares quite favorably.

So, that little paragraph was just another facile attempt by a conservative to justify having a closed mind and a xenophobic view of the world.

I believe I'm hearing some broad agreement on this whole topic:

-that imposing a "closed" canon and throwing away completely the list of works long recognized as classic are both mistakes, and we need to find some midpoint that acknowledges the excellence and relevance of both classics and some newer works

-that those who support either end of this spectrum might be doing so based on purposes that are not strictly oriented toward helping students think critically about great ideas

-that there is disagreement about the value of studying the humanities, students' motivation to do so, etc.

It seems to me that a project to carefully expand the canon would be an awful lot of fun, but it would almost certainly be impossible to keep it focused on pedagogical goals. The question is, what are the correct set of goals that such a project should aspire to meet?

Anyone who is not an outright indoctrinator, but who has a set of beliefs that they consider important -- i.e. important for all of us to believe -- has the problem that, on the one hand, we want the outcome of education to be the passing on of those beliefs to the next generation, and, on the other, we want to help young people think critically.

And there is a tension between those two goals.

I want young people -- everyone -- to believe in the truths of science. But I also want them to have arrived at those beliefs via a path of critical thinking, that includes a skeptical examination of science.

The same goes for the great achievements of Wesern civilization. (We are slowly moving towards a world-society, and the achievements of Western civilization will be incorporated into the achievements of non-Western civilizations, as part of the common heritage of humanity. We are a long way from that yet, and so each great world culture necessarily must contemplate the others from the outside.)

As for Shikibu, Kalidasa and Ferdowsi -- I am ashamed to admit I have never heard of them. If one were building a "world-canon" list, should they be on it? If so, let it be by all means.

Doug,

Not reading those three authors is a failing of the American educational system - a failure that is at the core of critiques of the "Western Canon". Interestingly, in Victorian England you likely would have been exposed to both the Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and Kalidasa's works - they were both included in Sir John Lubbock's hundred books, which was one of the early canonical lists. Old Colonial England, of course, had its own reasons for being fascinated by literature of Persia and India, but, the truth is, the couple of generations of Victorian scholars were likely far more globally open-minded and educated than the canonists of Bloom's generation (though not than Bloom himself, if you read him with care).

Kalidasa was one of the great poets and playrights of India, and very much a Shakespeare equivalent in terms of his impact on the Sanskrit language and Sanskrit literature. The Shahnameh is the great Persian epic, which for the Persian, Turkic and Arabic worlds holds a status comparable to the Iliad or Ulysses. Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji, arguably the first novel and a masterwork of medieval Japan. Her stories are the most illustrated work in Japanese art.

Well... okay. I shall read them ... providing they have happy endings.

I don't think not reading them was YOUR failure - foundational books like this get read in our school years - sadly, only crazy people like us read Shakespeare after our hair turns grey. And they are best taught rather than read independently, so the reader gets more background and learns more of what went intot he work.

BUT, the failure to teach these kinds of works was the key battle in the culture wars, and it is beyond me why conservatives latched on to excluding such works from curricula. They were destined to lose from the beginning. Denying the value of world literature is right up there with denying evolution. They should have read more Goethe.

By the way, on happy endings - everyone dies in the end with all of them, but that can be a happy ending, right?

By the way, one of the best discussions I've read recently of some of these issues is in Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian. Sen is a Nobel-winning economist (he taught at Harvard for a while, and may still) who writes extensively on cultural issues as well as economic ones, and he is steeped in both Western and Indian cultures. He has a wonderful essay in the book on the exchange of culture and information between China and India, and another nice essay that discusses medieval Indian mathematics and its influence on the development of math and science in the West. (Warning to ideologues: He is an heir to the intellectual work of Edward Said, so for those who have a congenital dislike of Said, I'd recommend trashing the book without reading it).

"By the way, on happy endings - everyone dies in the end with all of them, but that can be a happy ending, right?"

The BBC must have thought so when it came to pulling the plug on Blake's 7 !

heh ...

 

However, the choices made in the 70s and 80s at many universities were not to replace Milton or Dostoyevsky with Shikibu or Kalidasa, but to replace Milton and Dostoyevsky with Toni Morrison and Rita Dove. The canonists have a legitimate complaint, because the multi-culturalists were not replacing works with works of similar quality, but were replacing classics which had withstood the test of time with contemporary authors chosen primarily for political reasons.

Are you saying they didn't read contemporary authors before the 70s and 80s?

Or that contemporary authors shouldn't be read?

Or both?

>However, the choices made in the 70s and 80s at many universities were not to replace Milton or Dostoyevsky with Shikibu or Kalidasa, but to replace Milton and Dostoyevsky with Toni Morrison and Rita Dove.

MissTrudy - Lots of good points, and I do think that there has been a synthesis of some of the opposing views that were once argued with great ferocity and conviction. When the culture wars started, they included attempts to change the curricula at many colleges and universities by eliminating things like Black Studies and Womens Studies (you'll still hear a lot of hostility on these boards to "Studies") and implementing a "core curriculum" focused on Western culture and to focus the high school and elementary school curricula more on "fundamentals".

I did go to school in the 70s and 80s - the real push began in Reagan's 80s, and the battles weren't just over theory. They were and are over what was taught, how it was taught, who was taught, and who taught them. In my undergraduate institution, a well-meaning new President who talked of nothing but a core curriculum at the beginning of his term, when the Trustees had hired him and set an agenda, quickly found himself beseiged on the issue and having difficulty defending the position. He wisely turned his public persona to emphasize the need to diversify the student body instead. The core curriculum idea was unceremoniously dropped.

Conservatives generally succeeded in getting many changes implemented in high school and elementary school curricula, including severely limiting curricula serving foreign language students and eliminating most primary education developmental programs, generally while simultaneously limiting funding through things like property tax caps. Bush's unfunded No Child Left Behind is the most recent part of this legacy, and those battles continue (though only the theorists and the inveterate hard-cores still attack the Head Start program, which is the leading remaining developmental education program). But conservatives failed pretty convincingly in limiting the curricula in higher education (the "Canon battle" within the culture wars) there was a fad of implementing some core curriculums and strengthening requirements for a while, but the requirements imposed, ironically, generally focused on broadening, not restricting, diversity.

Re: 31

Formalized canons are certainly different from having core curricula. The hope is, in employing the latter, you don't unleash all the slovenly business students into the world without having forced them to spend at least a few hours thinking about the subject matter one encounters in traditional liberal arts disciplines. I think this is a good idea. As far as I'm concerned if you haven't done a little philosophy, mathematics, and natural science you've no right to a B.A.

As a general program this is much different than setting up a rigid reading list designed around the classics. You can still, presumably, make it through your core courses without having read Chaucer or Milton or Descartes or whomever.

As for the classic versus current debate, it seems to me that moderation wins out. When I've designed syllabi for Introduction to Philosophy I've tried to incorporate classic figures without going so far as to make it a "history of" course. We might read Aquinas and Augustine but do so in connection with contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion. Similarly for Descartes and epistemology.

The trouble for many students is that philosophy is so inherently difficult that it often only makes trouble to introduce texts written centuries ago in archaic prose.

I think your first sentence is one many (not all, but many) conservatives learned the hard way back in the 1980s. I remember a number of hardcore advocates for a core curricula reflecting an emphasis on a Western Canon being quite dismayed when the proposals morphed into weak core curricula with an emphasis on diversity and even forcing students out of the Western Canon.

I must say, though, I can think of very few schools that require students to study philosophy for their Bachelors - St. John? Harvard's "Moral Reasoning" requirement? And in philosophy aren't the current works written in archaic prose, too? I always found Augustine much clearer than, say, Habermas.