Are the Canon Wars Over?

: Rethinking Great Books

Mary Ann Frese Witt

The Comparatist, Volume 24, May 2000, pp. 57-63 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina Press

DOI: 10.1353/com.2000.0010

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/com/summary/v024/24.witt.html

Access provided by University of Arizona (8 Jul 2015 21:03 GMT)

 ??? COHPAnATIST

ARE THE CANON WARS OVER?

RETHINKING GREAT BOOKS

Mary Ann Frese Witt

Are the canon wars over? Who won? My brief answer is that, Uke some
of our recent miUtary conflicts, they have fizzled out to a kind of stale-
mate punctuated by periodic saber rattling (or cannon firing) and name
caUing from various factions. There is no question, however—to leap to
a very different analogy—that the Great Books Canonic Cyclops was
badly wounded by the wüy, motley band of multiculturaUst-deconstruc-
tionist-feminist-intertextologists. Unlike the cyclops of antiquity, how-
ever, this giant, if reconstituted, has survived.
Many of us grew up beUeving that the erstwhüe Great Books Giant
was immortal. We now know, to paraphrase Valéry, that like the ideal
of civiUzation he represented, he is mortal. The immortal disguise that
beguüed us was a creation of the universities. The first American pack-
aging of Great Books was made by Charles Eliot, former president of
Harvard, in 1910 with the creation of his canon in the fifty-volume
Harvard Classics. But the first Western CiviUzation course based on the
reading of Great Books was, Mary Louise Pratt has noted, a course at
Columbia caUed "War Issues," created when young American men were
being drafted to fight in the First World War.1 The study of the intel-
lectual heritage and cultural values of Western Civüization, it seemed,
would create both an understanding of the United States' place in Euro-
pean civüization—thus serving to counteract American isolationism—
and a sense of loyalty and devotion to the moral ideals represented by
that civüization. In 1919, the course became the "Western Civüization"
course still taught at Columbia.
What were the ideals of Western Civüization and in what form were
they to be transmitted? The canon makers at Columbia, and in the 1930s
at the University of Chicago and St. Johns College, set out to answer
those questions by developing curricula. Like canon makers before them,
from QuintiUan to the Renaissance humanists, they created a list of
books to serve as the core of an education. Unlike earlier canon makers,
however, they seemed singularly unconcerned with language and style.
Translation was apparently simply a given. Indeed the criteria for the
choice of books was not primarily literary, but included history, mathe-
matics, science, phUosophy, and religion. Through the St. Johns pro-
gram, it was stated, "the student earns his intellectual heritage from
Homer to the present, and learns to be a free and responsible person"
(LawaU 7). The cultivation of freedom and responsibüity, it would seem,
were the end products of the great books education for Americans.

Vol. 24 (2000): 57
 CANON WARS AND GREAT BOOKS

American-style packaging ofthe canon perhaps reached its culminat-

ing point with Mortimer Adler's "Synopticon," that vision of a compendi-
um of leather-bound volumes on a shelf, volumes that, once read, would
make one educated. Adler, again, was not interested in matters of aes-
thetics, style, and language. One criterion for being included among the
"great books" was "availabiUty" in English (the fact of translation was
elided). Were styUstic concerns decadent European husks to be discarded
in the repackaging of the kernels for Americans? An anecdote about the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, pubUshed soon after Adler's crea-
tion of his Synopticon, went as foUows: A solid midwestern believer, un-
happy about the publication of a new Bible, is said to have declared, "If
the King James Bible was good enough for the Lord, it's good enough for
me." The Great Books of the Synopticon must have given the impression
that they too were dictated by God in EngUsh. Adler, in his How To Read
a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education, published in 1940, was
again inspired by war to formulate a moral purpose for the reading of
the great books of the Western tradition. The result of a liberal educa-
tion, in his view, is "free minds" and "free men": Free men wül be able to
resist fascist propaganda, to exercise their judgment, and ultimately to
save democracy. Knowledge inevitably leads to "right action." Reading
the great books will "qualify men for their poUtical duties" (Adler 370).
The moral ideaUsm enunciated by the proponents of the Great Books
movement reveals the peculiarly American face of the acquisition of
humanistic knowledge as a means of acquiring status and power—the
point explored by John Guillory in his 1993 book Cultural Capital: The
Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Adler and his followers seem to
have beUeved that it was possible for anyone to acquire knowledge from
the Great Books democraticaUy and for the purpose of preserving democ-
racy. It was the next generation, the new critics in the 1950s, who forged
the Unk between canonical works of Uterature and an eUte "high culture"
preserved and cherished in the universities at a time when a new mass
culture seemed to be engulfing society at large. The new critics privi-
leged the close reading of poetry above the Great Books approach to
literature, thus replacing moral and social criteria for the canon with
internal and aesthetic ones. They brought back concerns for stylistics
and language—even languages other than English—to the study of
literature.
Implicit or explicit purposes for studying literature have surfaced
throughout the history of the institution in the West and can perhaps be
divided into four categories: 1) the moral (such study makes us better
people); 2) the practical (such study makes us more literate and more
job-qualified or gives us the "cultural capital" with which to acquire
status); 3) the aesthetic (the understanding of beauty elevates us spir-
ituaUy though it may have no practical effects); 4) the cultural (the read-
ing of our own literature enables us to understand our culture and the
reading of the Uterature of other traditions enables us to be more cultur-
ally aware and more tolerant). The cultural justification can take two

VcH. 24 (2000): 58
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different forms with shades in between. On the one hand, students learn
to revere the "authoritative" books of Western culture. On the other
hand, they learn to experience new, unfamiliar cultures. The early
fifteenth-century Renaissance humanists, who inaugurated the form of
literary study untü recently at the heart of European and American edu-
cation, believed not only that the study of Greek and Latin texts in the
original would make young men more virtuous, deepening their moral
understanding; but also that such study would make them better rheto-
ricians, more successful in politics. Thus the moral and practical ratio-
nales for studying the humanities appear at its inception. The aesthetic
rationale was formulated somewhat later, and perhaps most influen-
tiaUy by Winkelmann in his notions on the noble, stül harmony of Greek
art—a notion that prevaüed until Nietzsche exploded it with a demonic
subtext. The eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth-century gentle-
man and sometimes lady was defined by refinement and taste as weU as
virtue and rhetoric. Goethe added the diversifying cultural rationale to
the studying of what, as we well know, he first called "Weltliteratur."
The reading of the literature of other nations would enable the world's
peoples to understand each other and eventually to rise above their
differences to a fundamental unity, an essential humanity manifested
by the creation of a Universal World Literature.
These four rationales have been, in varying and changing forms, vig-
orously attacked and defended during the past decades. The first pur-
pose, the moral one, seems to have become dormant after the Second
World War. FormaUst aesthetics superseded democratic packaging; the
Korean and especially the Vietnam war could hardly arouse the same
conjunction of moral virtue, patriotic fervor, and aUegiance to the eternal
values of Western civilization with the reading of Great Books. The
1960s radicals would of course construct their own anticanon, no less
Uterary, from Rimbaud and Nietzsche to Allen Ginsberg. But the moral
rationale and the link between reading, virtue, and national purpose
found its defender in Allan Bloom, whose 1987 Closing of the American
Mind became a best-seUer. According to Bloom, there is "only one serious
solution" to the sickness he sees engulfing higher education. That is, "the
good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means
reading certain generaUy recognized classic texts [. . .] not forcing them
into categories we make up [. . .] but trying to read them as their authors
wished them to be read" (A. Bloom 344). NostalgicaUy, Bloom seemed to
wish to restore something he perceived as both immutable authority and
the immortal Great Books giant. The second rationale, the practical one,
continues to have its defenders—are not truly literate people more
employable? John Guillory, again in Cultural Capital, undercuts this
assumption by formulating what we reaUy knew already: today's profes-
sional-managerial class in both Europe and the US, in contrast to that
of fifty years ago, depends on technical, not literary, knowledge to ac-
quire or maintain its status. The aesthetic rationale found its contempo-
rary spokesman in Harold Bloom, perhaps the last of the great canon

VcH. 24 (2000): 59
 CANON WARS AND GREAT BOOKS

warriors. In 77ie Western Canon, the Books and School of the Ages (1994),
Bloom seems to dismiss the moral and practical rationales as belonging
to an outmoded cultural right and the cultural one as a tool of what he
calls "the school of resentment." Claiming to be the true Marxist critic,
following Groucho rather than Karl, Bloom positions himself toward
other critics by citing his mentor: "Whatever it is, I'm against it." The
aesthetic seems almost a place of refuge for him—where else is there to
go in a world that is falUng apart? For Bloom's tone is ultimately elegiac
—he shores the fragments of a once-soUd edifice around him while fear-
ing that he may be one of the last readers alive. Yet he imparts a pur-
pose or a use to aesthetic pleasure: One reads great works in order to
"augment one's growing inner self." Although he admits that one mean-
ing of canonicity is "what has been authoritative in our culture," his
major criterion for inclusion among the great works of the Western can-
on is originaUty, which he caUs strangeness. The social or cultural func-
tion ofUterature seems peripheral; what counts is the individual encoun-
ter with the beautiful and the strange.
The fourth, cultural criterion finds contemporary voices among
multiculturaUsts and proponents of cultural studies. Henry Louis Gates,
in the conclusion to his essay on African American canon formation, con-
structs a curious sentence which seems to embody a forked argument.
The mode of the first half of this sentence can be described as Olympian-
Goethean. "To reform core curricula, to account for the comparable elo-
quence of the African, the Asian, and the Middle Eastern traditions, is
to begin to prepare our students for their roles as citizens of a world cul-
ture, educated through a truly human notion of the humanities." In the
second half of the sentence, however, he descends to the canon bashing
so popular a few years ago: "rather than—as Bennett and Bloom [Harold
and Allan] would have it—as guardians at the last frontier outpost of
white male Western culture, the keepers of the Master's Pieces" (117).
Now the Olympian-Goethean is not the usual mode of discourse of
cultural studies advocates and the ideal of becoming a citizen of a world
culture stül seems not only very far away but insufficiently formulated.
If New Critics, Structuralists, and Poststructuralists erased the author
in the web of textuaUty, cultural studies and postcolonial studies, along
with feminist criticism and gender studies, brought him or her back with
a vengeance. The author's ethnicity, gender, national origin, and less
frequently, social class, became the new criteria for canonicity. We can
see this operating beyond the university when we read in the newspaper
that a proposal to the San Francisco school board demanded that half of
the authors read in the high school curriculum be nonwhite and that
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual writers be identified as such
("San Francisco Expands"). The reading of Uterature, in this perspective,
is supposed to serve as a tool for students to learn to understand and ap-
preciate the values of other cultures, to see how gender and sexual orien-
tation offer different perspectives, to be schooled in "diversity." But the
emphasis on diversity does not, at least at the present time, seem to

VcH. 24 (2000): 60
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entail any aspiration toward a common humanity or becoming citizens
of a world culture. What we have now, I would suggest, is an uneasy
stalemate in the canon wars and an unresolved sense of purpose in our
teaching of great books and world literature. Most academics have grown
a bit weary of bashing the canon for being dead, white, and male, but
this debate continues in the schools. In the meantime, we continue to
teach our canonical favorites while expanding toward more worldwide
and ethnicaUy diverse representation, but we are unsure of the rationale
for our lists. We are too embarrassed or too jaded to think seriously
about a moral purpose for the study of literature; we know that the prac-
tical one has almost disappeared; we may cling to the aesthetic while
suspecting that our student's aesthetic needs are met by other media; we
may use the cultural rationale while perhaps fearing that courses in an-
thropology, history, or even "culture" courses in foreign languages might
be better vehicles for studying the diversity of cultural values.
But perhaps there is another sense in which an awareness of cul-
tural diversity may help to justify the study of literature. Here Harold
Bloom's criterion of "strangeness" may help, though not precisely in the
way he intended. The "great books," first appearing as the texts of the
classics in their original languages, later presented as august, eternal,
leather-bound, but translated and democratic, and more recently con-
figured as the elitist preserve of the Master's Pieces, will no doubt con-
tinue to change clothes. While counter-canon readings have opened up
important questions on the nature of power and exclusion in the making
of great book lists, the claim that all traditionally revered texts are
monoUthic conveyors of conservative poUtical dogma is manifestly false.
Do Machiavelli, Marx, and Mill belong in the same bag? Literary and
other linguistically rich texts, read by readers rather than received by
passive receptacles, can indeed be strange encounters that stretch the
mind beyond the familiar into the diverse. I would suggest that for to-
day's North American students, Dante may be stranger, and in a sense
more culturaUy diverse, than Chinua Achebe. Achebe after all writes in
modern English in a well-known genre about problems with which
everyone is somewhat familiar, even though we may delude ourselves
into thinking that we "understand" African culture after reading him.
Things Fall Apart, now at last firmly placed in the modern canon in our
schools, is on some level accessible, although more attentive readings
lead one into the "strange" world of Yoruba mythology. The Divina com-
media, on the other hand, much translated because a definitive transla-
tion can never be obtained, steeped in a tradition with which we are in
the process of severing connections, imbued with moral, religious, polit-
ical, and phüosophical views completely divergent from those around us,
and written from a poetics with which we are unfamiUar, is inaccessible
without help. The student who manages to grapple seriously with the
text, even in translation and obviously more in the original, will expe-
rience aesthetic, cultural, and moral defamiUarization. Yet Dante is

VcH. 24 (2000): 61
 CANON WARS AND GREAT BOOKS

lumped with other canonical writers into the old, all-too-familiar white
Western tradition.
I am in favor of using race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and
gender as criteria for choosing modern authors for curricula, not,
however, under the rationale of diversity but under that of familiarity.
It is high time that we paid attention to the phenomenal and continuing
changes in the makeup of our student bodies. A Latino student would
probably find Borges "strange" but might be better prepared to approach
him after reading Chicano writers. American students black and white,
male and female, can more readily enter the world of Richard Wright
than they can that of Virginia Woolf. Female students, nonetheless,
might experience some "shock of recognition" in reading Woolf, and
might then find Proust more accessible. Perhaps the most important
criterion for choosing modern writers is their ability to bring originality
of vision and language to the portrayal of a familiar world. We hope to
find the black female student who, after immersing herself in Toni Mor-
rison's voice, finds her own. Reading literature that connects on some
level to the familiar, the known, and the personal may also help to pre-
pare for reading truly diverse writers such as Dante and Homer.
We cannot and we should not go back to living under the rule of the
Great Books Giant packaged in his leather-bound dictated-by-God-in-
EngUsh-packaged-for-teaching-Americans-to-be-men form. The "author-
itative" rationale has aU but disappeared from our education, and rightly
so. Martha Nussbaum, in her recent Cultivating Humanity: A Classical
Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, suggests that we follow a So-
cratic model by replacing "Great Books" with "useful books to help you
think for yourself." Another model might be the hypertext, even if we
don't actually use it. The image of a clickable Divine Comedy, Iliad, or
Gilgamesh, substituted for the leather-bound, might be used to induce
awareness of the problematics and the divergences of translation, the
importance of translation studies and of language, manuscript varia-
tions, gaps in historical thinking and literary style, diversity of reader
response, in sum, intertextuality. Not only should wè "teach the con-
flicts," as Gerald Graff argued, we should "teach the translation." If the
reading of Uterature in classical and modern foreign languages is in the
process of dying, as it seems to be, and since we can in any case never
master the languages of a truly global literary curriculum, we should at
least make our students aware of the fact and of the problematic of
translation, and not aUow them to think that somehow the whole world
of knowledge, and of imaginative writing, is simply "accessible" in En-
gUsh. Teachers of world Uterature should have a firm reading knowledge
of at least one of the languages in which the literature they teach was
written, and they should make use ofthat knowledge in the classroom.
Thinking clickable might also help to create links between the familiar
and the diverse, while avoiding any definitive "packaging."
If skirmishes continue and will for some time continue to pop up
here and there, the Canon Wars that began about a decade ago appear

VcH. 24 (2000): 62
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to have reached, if not a truce, a stalemate. The Great Books Giant,
wounded and more maUeable, strides along. The wars, with their eternal
list juggling, have obscured and postponed serious thinking about an-
swers to the big question, which is, simply put, why study literature at
all? We are aware that the once-central study of literature has been
marginalized, perhaps nowhere more than in the United States. From
this position, are we prepared to reformulate a justification of what we
teach for the next generation? My colleagues in the preceding essays
have begun a dialogue on this issue that must concern us as we enter the
post-canon-war period.

North Carolina State University

NOTES

Pratt (14) cites Allardyce. According to him, the aim of the War Issues
course was "to educate recently conscripted American soldiers about to fight in
France [. . .] to introduce [them] to the European heritage in whose defense they
were soon to risk their lives."

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