Canonicity and an American Literature Survey Course

This term, I taught an American literature survey for the first time since I was a high school teacher, and since the demands of a college curriculum and schedule are quite different from those of a high school curriculum and schedule, it was a very new course for me. Indeed, I've never even taken such a course, as I was successful at avoiding all general surveys when I was an undergrad.

As someone who dislikes the nationalism endemic to the academic discipline of literature, I had a difficult time figuring out exactly what sort of approach to take to this course — American Literature 1865-present — when it was assigned to me. I wanted the course to be useful for students as they work their way toward other courses, but I didn't want to promote and strengthen the assumptions that separate literatures by national borders and promote it through nationalistic ideologies.

I decided that the best approach I could take would be to highlight the forces of canonicity and nationalism, to put the question of "American literature" at the forefront of the course. This would help with another problem endemic to surveys: that there is far more material available than can be covered in 15 weeks. The question of what we should read would become the substance of the course.

Canon? Balls!

This past term, the course I taught was titled "Introduction to Literary Analysis". It's the one specific course that is required for all English majors, and it's also available as a general education credit for any other undergraduates. Its purpose is similar to that of any Introduction to Literature class, though at UNH it really has one primary purpose: help students strengthen their close reading skills with fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. (We're required to include all four, though the nonfiction part can be smaller than the others.)

Next term, I'm teaching an American lit survey (1865-present) and have decided to focus it on the question of canonicity. So, for instance, we'll be using the appropriate volumes of The Norton Anthology of American Literature as a core text, but not just to read the selections; instead, we'll also be looking at the book itself as an anthology: what the editors choose to include and not, how the selections are arranged and presented, etc. We'll also be reading a few other things to mess up the students' ideas of "American" and "literature". For instance, I'm pairing The Red Badge of Courage (Norton Critical Edition) with A Princess of Mars (and Junot Díaz's excellent introduction to the Library of America edition). And then Octavia Butler's Wild Seed to make it even messier and more productive.

And so it was with special interest that I read two essays this morning in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The New Modesty in Literary Criticism" by Jeffrey J. Williams and "What We Lose If We Lose the Canon" by Arthur Krystal. The Williams seems to me about as good an overview as you could do in a short space; the Krystal seems to have been beamed in from 1982.

National Literature

From address given by Sema Kaygusuz, translated by Caroline Stockford:

If I were to have to talk personally of what drives my own writing I would quite naturally have to step outside the framework of national literature. In fact, all of the world’s writers are actually stateless. Like many of them, I too have a feeling of separation that cannot be alleviated, a deep feeling of exile and disquietude within stemming from feeling cut off from nature. I too feel the discord of not being able to conform to hierarchical time and the resulting sensation of innate fragmentation that comes from this. On the other hand, when, as a being endowed with memory, I try to create for myself an intellectual framework I find myself experiencing a narcissistically comforting feeling that comes from being an inhabitant of a geography that has deep historical roots spread from the Mediterranean basin to Mesopotamia and from the Middle East to Anatolia. In other words, thanks to something primeval I am able to confront the feeling of statelessness. This intellectual geography is, for me, made up of all the celestial religions, the Greek gods, the myths of Sumeria, the Persian poets and Arab philosophers, Jewish cabalists, Armenian legends, Kurdish dengbejs, Hellenic architecture, the horticultural skill of the early farmers of Rum who domesticated the vine, the traditional Shamanistic practices of the Turkmen tribes, Gypsy songs and the crafts and narratives of numerous peoples. But then the minute that I leave Turkey I am labelled absolutely and exclusively as a female writer who is Turkish and Muslim and I am only accepted by some literary circles if I bear these tags. The emphasis is always on these aspects.

Locus 20th & 21st Centuries Poll

Locus this month has been conducting a poll to find out the "best" science fiction and fantasy novels and short fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. Though I first suggested on Twitter that I would be filling it all in with Raymond Carver stories, I gave in today at the last minute and instead filled in the poll with some choices other than Carver stories (though I was tempted to put "Why Don't You Dance?" on there, since it has a certain fantasy feel to it, at least to me).

I'll post my choices after the jump here.

American Empire, Writing

At The Kenyon Review website, Hilary Plum has been doing some excellent blogging about questions of empire, writing, canonicity, etc. I left a comment on one post that was mostly just me giving a short version of my canonical nationalism schtick, not because I thought the post was bad, but because the article Plum used as a basis for her thoughts annoyed me. (I wish I had made my gratitude for her own thinking clearer, but I was in a hurry, and it's internet, so...)

Most recently, she wrote a post titled "Writing American Empire" that collects a nice range of ideas about U.S. novelists and the lands the U.S. has been occupying, invading, bombing, etc. recently. Trying to summarize the different points of view would likely distort them, so I'll just exhort you to head over to the KR blog to see what it's all about. If you've ever felt either excited or queasy about the phrase "cultural appropriation", this is a discussion you should read.

Canonical Nationalism

Questions of literary canonicity have been stalking me for the past few months, mostly in relation to teaching. Some I began thinking about because I was designing a course called Currents in Global Literature, and when faced with giving English majors perhaps their only taste of writings from beyond the U.S. and U.K., I had to figure out my priorities.

One of the things I decided to do was try to provoke the students to think about why they have read what they have in school, why they have the assumptions they do about books and writers, and how they can learn more. So I had them watch TED Talks by Chris Abani and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, listen to Stephen Snyder on "The Business of International Literature", and read Dan Edelstein on "Gerrymandering the Canon", Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to Write About Africa", and Manijeh Nasrabadi on her experiences trying to write and publish a memoir. Additionally, our poetry textbook challenged the templates of Romanticism they had previously encountered in other courses and complexified their understanding of literary history -- not just the history itself, but how it got to be that way.

Global literature in our class, then, was presented not as some ethereal essence floating through the ether, but as a system of literary production, distribution, and reception. It's too easy to gain a feeling from our curriculum that U.S. and U.K. fiction, poetry, and (to a lesser extent) drama are Literature and everything else is some exotic offshoot. The department has done a lot to try to mitigate that, but there are huge disciplinary systems in place that make it difficult.

Last week, I was part of a panel discussion for English majors about canonicity. Various questions had been raised by majors this term about what they were learning -- particularly for the English Education majors. Hearing these questions, one of my colleagues decided to put together the informal discussion, and so a group of us created 5-minute statements about canonicity and education, then we had a free and wide-ranging discussion of all sorts of things related to it all.

Best of the Millennium!

The Millions polled a bunch of writers to come up with a fun list of really good books:

It’s a bit early, of course, to pass definitive judgment on the literary legacy of the ’00s, or how it stacks up against that of the 1930s, or 1850s. Who knows what will be read 50 years from now? But, with the end of the decade just a few months away, it seemed to us at The Millions a good time to pause and take stock, to call your attention to books worthy of it, and perhaps to begin a conversation.

As of this writing, they haven't revealed the top two, but numbers 3-20 are there, and it's a good list -- I'm amazed, actually, at how many of them I've read all or part of. There's not a book on there I would fight vociferously against including, even if novels like Gilead aren't really to my taste (though I've used that book in a couple of classes, so I wouldn't say I hate it ... I just don't see what it seems everybody else on Earth sees in Marilynne Robinson's writing). I wouldn't arrange the books in the order arranged in the list, and actually would probably not put them in any order other than alphabetical, but that's probably true of all the contributors as well -- it's a survey. I'd also probably choose Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners over Stranger Things Happen only because "Lull" and "Stone Animals" are my favorite of Kelly's stories.

Scott Esposito has posted some interesting thoughts on the choices, and I'm sure other people have as well.

I usually can't resist lists, but if I had been asked to "name up to five books available in English with an original-language publication date no earlier than Jan. 1, 2000", I have no sure idea what I would have named. I probably would have tried for some that might otherwise not get much mention because of the various voters' lack of familiarity with them -- books, for instance, by guys named Jeff (Shriek, The Empire of Ice Cream).

Or maybe I would have gone with books that always come to my mind when I think of recent fiction that has particularly impressed me (Oh Pure & Radiant Heart, People of Paper, Octavian Nothing 1, Dark Reflections [this latter book being one that is more impressive every time I return to it -- true of the others, as well, but Dark Reflections is one that it really took me multiple reads to fully appreciate]).

Or, well, I don't know.

I just looked up M. John Harrison's Light and Things That Never Happen, the publication dates of which I couldn't remember, and they do qualify (both 2002), so one of them at least should certainly be on the list. And probably a few things I've forgotten but will remember seconds after publishing this post.

But if you're looking for some good, serious reading, you could do a lot worse than to try out the books on The Millions list.

Update (9/26/09): And the winner is ... The Corrections. Huh. Well, it's a survey, and inevitably the item most common to various lists will be safe, solid, and underwhelming.