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Brooke Wonders's avatar

You might be interested in this oldie but goodie: Elif Batumen's review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, in which she argues that shame is a driving force in the academic study of creative writing. Reading your piece, I had to wonder why someone like Greenblatt would deny his own intellectual life, and I kept landing on shame as the answer (projection? perhaps). "Taught for too long and fallen out of love with the material" also makes sense, as Gnocchic Apocryphon writes below, though I find the Greenblattian attitude in junior faculty and graduate students, too.

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Joshua Doležal's avatar

I find that I can't resist your posts, which is a good thing! I paused at this line: "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." Because I think the essay conflates the Great Books canon with the canon represented by, say, the Norton and Heath anthologies. And there is something of a war between those two big publishers. The Norton has hewed a bit more to the conservative canon with a bias toward longer and more complex narratives. The Heath has been (or at least was during my tenure as a lit professor) the standard-bearer for the expanded canon -- Pratt's contact zone as against Crevecoeur's melting pot. The Heath is much more likely to privilege a fragment, for the sake of reading against the grain of master narratives, than it is to publish a classic text in full. Some of this is market-driven, with an eye toward undergraduates with waning attention spans, but a lot of it ties to the larger debates you mention.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there hasn't been a singular canon for at least twenty years. There are a few different canons, one might say. In the more liberal canon, Life in the Steel Mills and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are right up there with Rappaccini's Daughter and "Self-Reliance" (Moby Dick is omitted altogether). I taught the transcript of Anne Hutchinson's trial alongside Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity." Conservatives might teach Winthrop and Bradford with no competing voices, overlook the oral tradition that preceded European contact, and ignore the fascinating echoes between Margaret Fuller's "Great Lawsuit" and Emerson's essays.

I suppose even at a distance, nearly three years removed from my last American literature survey course, I think there is civic value in thinking about those clashes between different ideologies and different voices. I think even now I'm more with Pratt than with Strauss. And perhaps unsurprisingly I am a Democrat, although not in entirely predictable ways. I supported Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, who both speak to the disaffection among working-class Americans. And I'm vehemently against things like labor-based grading, which represent the most radical extreme.

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