St. Jerome in his Study by Albrecht Dürer

The Slow Death of the Canon

Edward
Edward
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

The university is an institution of higher learning, but it’s also a center of culture and a keeper of tradition. But when it comes to the humanities, the values of tradition are clashing with intense political correctness.

A few years ago at Columbia university, a bunch of undergraduates protested against being taught Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the most important poems ever written. The reason being? It was too violent.

Further up north at the University of Toronto, the English department announced an even more lenient undergraduate program, one apparently designed to help students develop their skills. The consequence of this program, however, is that students will migrate from courses on canonical authors, ones that they would have been forced to pick, to — well, whatever they feel like.

Why is this a bad thing? Alan Bloom, who once even taught in the halls of Sid
Smith, referred to this sort of educational reform as a closing of the mind. Bloom’s key assumption, or rather, what Bloom’s key assumption should have been, was that a student’s encounter with difficult canonical works would be transformative. These works apparently hone a student’s critical thinking faculties. Responses to Bloom’s work were venomous. Noam Chomsky called it mind-bogglingly stupid, whereas others even labelled Bloom a reactionary — a damning epithet for an academic.

But there’s some truth in what Bloom said. Scholars generally agree that
Shakespeare is an irreducible author. A famous example of what I mean goes
something like this: where exactly can a reader find Shakespeare’s voice in Hamlet? The opinion of Twain can often be found in his prose, but you just can’t home in on the Bard of Avon. Shakespeare is diffused throughout all of his characters, even his villains. If you are tasked to translate his play into a single thesis, you will run into plenty of pitfalls trying to garner evidence for your argument.

That’s what happens when you try writing an essay on Shakespeare. You run into countless obstacles and attempt to reconcile them in your essay. Reading and writing on Shakespeare is basically a test of how well students can deal with often conflicting viewpoints and arguments.

Detractors of the argument I have set forth usually understand this unique aspect of Shakespeare as being constitutive of plays in general (ask any English Renaissance professor and they’ll tell you that Jonson and Marlowe are different). They label any pro-canon defender as a jaundiced reactionary attempting to keep dead white men in celebrated cultural positions.

If that were the case, then Milton, Chaucer and plenty of other canonical figures would not have the same irreducibility that Shakespeare has, but they do. Scholars are still arguing over the meaning of certain passages in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and probably will be for as long as they find such questions meaningful. These works are complex — often so complex that
scholars will come up with wildly different interpretations.

But that’s a good thing. The difficulty of interpreting a canonical text is part of the larger goal of university to hone a student’s critical reading and thinking skills. It’s difficult to impose your own political views onto an ambiguous text. Taking apart Hamlet and turning it into a social justice manifesto would seem like a work of violence, and your grades might reflect this too. The canon forces students to grapple with unfamiliar and often contradictory viewpoints — they can’t easily impose their own worldviews onto the complex worlds built by a Shakespeare or a Milton. It’s this act of grappling with rich and often contradictory texts that is the golden yolk of literary studies.

That’s the more obvious reason as to why canonical texts are taught, but there’s also the reason of a common tradition. Historically speaking, writers often respond to older writers in their work. Shakespeare to Chaucer, Milton to Shakespeare, and all to the bible. That’s what we call the literary tradition. Any informed education in our past cannot avoid these lightning rods of culture. It has less to do with the fact that these were European men or European women than that their eternal conversation is the result of our literary past.

Let’s think about the literary tradition as if it were a dinner party. This is a pretty straight-forward thought experiment, and it is by no means original. Imagine you’re going to a dinner party and you want to learn about absolutely everything that occurred, but here’s the catch: you’re six hours late. So, what do you do? Do you talk to the host along with the diners who arrived at the party’s inception, or do you first talk to the diners who arrived at the same time you did? That’s what our cultural past is like, except imagine if the party was over 2000 years long, and we are being told by educators that it is completely fine to talk to the people who arrived at the exact same time we did. What a beautiful confusion.

Of course, my intuition tells me that the department at the University of Toronto already knows all of this. That’s why there’s an important disclaimer on their website. Students are told that neither the specialist nor the major program are designed to fit the needs of graduate school. Maybe the English department is just acquiescing to uninformed students, and if so, I hope they’ll remind students that, as Milton said, to discard great books is to kill “reason itself.”

The Searcher

Thoughts on culture and politics.

Edward

Written by

Edward

The Searcher

Thoughts on culture and politics.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade