Who owns the literary canon? Does it belong to the left or the right?

It depends on how you define "belong"

Before I started research for my book, I didn’t seriously associate the right wing with the Great Books. When people called the books racist and said they encouraged regressive attitudes, I just thought the critics were silly and hadn't read them. Since looking for more commentators on the books I've definitely noticed there's a right wing contingent of Great Books enthusiasts, but I think it still wouldn't be inaccurate to say people who love these books skew more left of center.

As John Guillory noted in Cultural Capital, the natural home of the canon is the university. The canon and the university are linked almost indissolubly at this point: the literary canon is nothing more or less than the list of books that is taught in college.

And college English departments are pretty left-wing, by my standards. I don’t think I’ve ever met an English professor who voted for Trump. According this article from a conservative think-tank, in a survey of sixty liberal arts colleges, 39 percent of them didn’t have a single registered Republican. 78 percent of their academic departments don’t have a single registered Republican. In the humanities there were 31 registered Democrats to every Republican.¹

If the group of people responsible for stewardship over the canon has thirty-one Democrats for every Republican, we have to at least consider the question that reading and thinking about the canon is far more likely to make you support Democratic, rather than Republican, candidates.

But I’ve found that both conservatives and liberals tend to agree that defending the canon is a conservative phenomenon. This understanding stems in large part from the canon wars of the 1980s, which are ably summarized by John Searle in his article at the time for the NYRB. The government waded into the dispute at the time, and Education Secretary William Bennett—a Republican—issued a report, To Reclaim A Legacy, which recommended “The humanities and the study of Western civilization should be placed at the core of the college curriculum, intended for all students and not just for humanities majors.”

English professors went on the attack against Bennett, Allan Bloom, and ED Hirsch (the latter being two academics who recommended increased study of classic texts).² Mary Louise Pratt, an English professor, is quoted in the Searle article as writing:

Bloom, Bennett, Bellow, and the rest (known by now in some quarters as the Killer B’s) are advocating [the creation of] a narrowly specific cultural capital that will be the normative referent for everyone, but will remain the property of a small and powerful caste that is linguistically and ethnically unified. It is this caste that is referred to by the “we” in Saul Bellow’s astoundingly racist remark that “when the Zulus have a Tolstoy, we will read him.” Few doubt that behind the Bennett-Bloom program is a desire to close not the American mind, but the American university, to all but a narrow and highly uniform elite with no commitment to either multiculturalism or educational democracy. Thus while the Killer B’s (plus a C—Lynne Cheney, the Bennett mouthpiece now heading the National Endowment for the Humanities) depict themselves as returning to the orthodoxies of yesteryear, their project must not be reduced to nostalgia or conservatism. Neither of these explain the blanket contempt they express for the country’s universities. They are fueled not by reverence for the past, but by an aggressive desire to lay hold of the present and future. The B’s act as they do not because they are unaware of the cultural and demographic diversification underway in the country; they are utterly aware. That is what they are trying to shape; that is why they are seeking, and using, national offices and founding national foundations.

This was a national controversy at the time, but what was really at stake? Nothing. Very few colleges at the time had general education requirements that required study of the classics of Western literature. Even when a college did have a humanities requirement, it could usually be fulfilled by any English course. For those that had broader requirements, they usually amounted to two or three courses—maybe ten or fifteen books in all. The problem, such as it existed, could be solved (as indeed it was) by adding Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin onto the list along with Tolstoy and Herman Melville.

It’s true that Bloom et al proposed expanding these requirements, but to my understanding no college seriously considered this expansion. In part this was due to student protest, but the political economy of the question was by itself enough to sink the proposal. Distribution requirements are popular with professors, because they force every student to take classes from a given department. Since enrollments determine resources, this is a stopgap against losing funding. What’s less popular are core requirements, in which what the professor teaches what the university demands. Nobody wants to walk into work and teach from a reading list assembled by some blue-ribbon panel. Moreover, if everyone at the school needs to take a class on, say, Shakespeare then suddenly you need every English professor to be prepared to teach a class on Shakespeare, and most of them don’t study Shakespeare and don’t want to reread Shakespeare and think about Shakespeare every year. They want to study television shows and 19th century sensation novels and post-colonial Kenyan literature, or whatever else their specialty is.

At the same time, they also weren’t averse to Shakespeare. Colleges kept hiring Shakespeare and Milton specialists. The two most renowned English professors of the era, Stanley Fish and Stephen Greenblatt, were Milton and Shakespeare scholars, respectively.

I mention these two names, because although these professors built their careers on the canon, they were and have been very suspicious of the idea of the canon. As Stanley Fish puts it in a witty and remarkable 1993 paper:

The (perhaps counterintuitive and certainly anticlimactic) conclusion is that none of the answers one might give to the key question of the canon debate - where do canons come from? - would have any appreciable effect on canons, which will be just as constraining (and/or vulnerable to challenge) as they were before we put the question. Whether canons have their pedigree in divinity or in the labors of men and women like you and me, they will continue to shape the background conditions within which we go about our business, including the business of interrogating canons.

This is an extremely post-modern answer. He's saying regardless of whether the canon deserves to exist, it clearly does exist, and there’s no point conjuring up a pretend world where it doesn’t exist. I’ve given answers like this myself, when the discussion is transgender people: regardless of how and why we are, we clearly are. But there’s something very frustrating about this answer when it comes from this particular mouth. As an English professor and Milton specialist, it’s Fish’s appointed social role to defend the worth of the canon, and he ducked it. If the high priest of Milton can’t explain why we should worship Milton, then the religion is in serious trouble!³

Similarly, Stephen Greenblatt in quite a real way determines what is in the canon: he edits the Norton Anthology of English Literature. If someone asks, “Why is this in the canon?” Greenblatt could say “It’s my job to select works that belong in this anthology, and that professors can use to teach their classes, and this text is good for that purpose.” But he shouldn’t say that. He should say this work is excellent and of enduring value. And yet, in a recent article in The New Yorker on the end of the English major, Greenblatt provided one of the more shocking sections:

Stephen Greenblatt, one of the highest-ranking humanities professors by the stripes and badges of the trade, told me that he’d come to think that literary students had a future somewhere other than the page.

“It happens that we do have a contemporary form of very deep absorption of the kind comparable to literary study,” he said. We were sitting in his paper-piled office. “And that is long-form television. ‘The Wire,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Chernobyl’—there are dozens of these now!” He rocked back to rest his feet on the edge of his desk. “It’s a fantastic invention.”

Greenblatt popped open a green egg of Silly Putty and began to knead it vigorously. For a moment, he seemed lost in thought.

“ ‘Better Call Saul,’ ” he added.

He liked to think of Shakespeare reading “Don Quixote,” in 1612, and marvelling at this new narrative form: the novel! So it was today, with “Better Call Saul.” He wondered whether literature departments should do more with TV.

This is absolutely demented behavior. The world’s foremost Shakespeare specialist should say more about the subject than “maybe Shakespeare is obsolete.”

It’s not that you can’t find straightforward defenses of the humanities from a left-wing perspective: there are tons of books and articles saying, from a left-wing perspective, that without the humanities we will be doomed. If you’ve ever talked to a lefty English professor, you’ll have heard them say, “The problem is those (i.e. the right) people don’t know how to read or to think! They’ll just believe anything.” The professoriate is willing to defend the humanities in the abstract, it’s only when it comes to the content of the humanities that they fail. From one perspective, television is a legitimate field of study for an English professor. But it’s not Stephen Greenblatt’s job to make way for television, it’s his job to maintain our faith in Shakespeare.

Nonetheless, the canon wars receded! Shakespeare and Milton are still taught! There was some very overwrought rhetoric at the height of the canon wars, as Searle describes in his essay: some professors claimed the very concept of the canon was hierarchical and oppressive. But they didn’t win.

Even the French literary theory that allowed them to say that stuff—to deconstruct the notion of the canon—that too has receded. There aren’t a lot of theory jobs in the US now. It’s all straightforward New Historicim. Sure, you might be doing Edward Said style contrapuntal readings of Henry Fielding, tracing the influence of colonialism on the composition of Tom Jones, but it’s grounded in historical research: you’re not engaged in a ruthless skepticism that undermines the very concept of value itself.

So what’s the evidence that the canon is associated with the right? Yes, the right has a fixation on a few of the Great Books, stemming, it seems, from Leo Strauss, and his enlistment of Plato and Aristotle into the conservative cause. More recently, the Catholic integralists have used Aristotle and St. Augustine to support their call for a theocracy. And neo-reactionary writers like Curtis Yarvin and Bronze Age Pervert seem obsessed with Nietzsche and with Classical Greece. And if you open any conservative paper or website (seriously, try it), you’ll find a stirring defense of the classics against the woke hordes.⁴ And Hillsdale College, which doesn’t accept federal funds at all because they want to retain the ability to discriminate against trans people, teaches on a Great Books model that they’ve farmed out to Christian k-12 charter schools—the governor of Tennessee contracted with them to open fifty such academies. And the number of “Classical Christian academies” has grown exponentially in the last thirty years, with 100 opening every year for the past few years. And the manifesto of the right-wing authoritarian National Conservative Movement says, explicitly:

For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike.

The Right is very invested in the idea of the Western Culture as a concept. As “Western Culture”(tm). But the left-of-center world, while they might not use terms like Western Culture or Western Civilization or The Great Books, isn’t nearly as dismissive of these books as the right would like to insist it is. I mean you’ve got Merve Emre gushing about Ulysses in the New Yorker. You’ve got Biden supporter Ryan Holiday turning Stoicism into a cottage industry. You’ve got the wildly popular Revolutions podcast, in which almost all the revolutions are left-wing ones, and which is created by the guy who did the History of Rome podcast. Maybe he’s conservative, but I certainly can’t tell after listening to his voice for four hundred hours. You’ve got the Jane Austen phenomenon. You’ve got the spate of self-help classics books that came out a while back (the most famous being My Life In Middlemarch) which got plenty of mainstream media coverage.

It seems safe to say there’s not that much animus on the left side of the spectrum against the books that make up the canon. If a college stages a Shakespeare play, it doesn’t arouse protest. If a kid has to read Romeo and Juliet in school, parents don’t call the principal. The idea that these books are reviled or detested by the left is silly.

Moreover, to the extent that these books exist as cultural capital, that capital is also deposited in left-wing accounts. It is left-of-center college professors who get to decide what books belong in the canon and what those books mean. In fact, every time some right-wing person says some shit about Nietzsche, there is always a center-left writer who pops up and says, “Well actually Nietzsche hated fascism”. And that center-left writer is an expert in Nietzsche—they have the chair of Nietzschean Nietzscheanism at Nietzsche University. They teach Nietzsche, they opine about Nietzsche, they attach Nietzsche to every trend and phenomenon. They argue that Nietzsche gave birth to modernity.

But if you were to ask them, “Is Nietzsche important? If someone is seeking to understand the world, should they study Nietzsche?” they’d be like, ummm, maybe they should watch TV instead.⁵

Whereas if you asked the Christian theocrat whether people should study Nietzsche, the man wrote The Anti-Christ and detested Christianity, they’d say, “Of course.”

It’s an utterly bizarre state of affairs.

This is why I keep talking about the spiritual bankruptcy of our most prominent writers and thinkers. Their entire profession is predicated on the idea that certain texts are important, but they’re unwilling to say, “These texts are worth studying.” Even though, deep down, they know the texts are important, beautiful, and very meaningful!

So, when it comes to who ‘owns’ the canon, the left or right, it’s a mixed question. If we’re talking about who owns it in any real sense—which class of people draws rents from it—then we must conclude it is owned by the left side of the spectrum. And yet all of the rhetorical defenses of the canon, and most especially of the specific content of the canon—the actual authors upon which the Fishes and Greenblatts make their living—is comes from the right side of the spectrum. If the canon was a lost walley, the right-wing would be the only person stepping up to the counter to claim it, which has created a situation that is equal parts dangerous and ridiculous. Everyone who’s read them knows these books are too important to be left in the care of the ignorant and the malicious, but few are willing to do the hard, boring, and very unglamorous work of defending them.

1. I can’t imagine anyone disputes the notion that universities departments have 10x as many Democrats as Republicans, but in case you don’t like the fact that this survey was by a conservative or that it just included liberal arts colleges, you can look at this survey showing something like 12% of faculty identity as right-wing or far-right. I preferred the other survey because it was more recent and it disaggregated by department

2. ED Hirsch’s position was more nuanced, and his views were kind of silly and really more oriented towards k-12 anyway. Also, he wasn’t a conservative, and he seemed to come increasingly unraveled as the controversy continued, until he began recanting some of his views.

3. On the other hand, one thing intellectuals tend to like about the more organized religions is that personal belief is less important. My favorite part of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory was that the dissident priest wasn’t a very good priest: he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. But his position ennobled him. Because he represented something the people thought was important, he became a hero. But would Fish and Greenblatt be willing to die for their respective faiths? I suspect the answer is yes, but can we say the same of their students? And their students’ students? Could the Church survive if every priest was a whiskey priest?

4. When I scrolled to the bottom of the article about the partisan affiliation of professors, I was greeted with this neat illustration of my point:

5. If you don’t believe me, google top Nietzsche scholar Brian Leiter, a left-of-center academic, and try to figure out where he stands on any question of education or culture. All of his papers are thought experiments like this one. Or parse this blog post to figure out what he thinks should be taught in philosophy departments. If a person can’t even stand up for their own life’s work, how can anyone else take it seriously?