Nuanced and thorough -- appreciate this immensely. I was going to say that I was glad that Austen, the Brontes, and Cather made it into your list of Old White Guys, but I see that you've qualified that :). I agree that one can't simply ignore these works, given the imbalanced methods of textual preservation. However, when I taught American literature, I preferred the Heath Anthology model of expanding the canon. For instance, it's true that many of the voices of colonial America were white and male (Winthrop and Bradford), but it's also true that there was a rich literary tradition in North America long before European settlement. My objection with some approaches to literary studies now is that they tend to replace Winthrop and Bradford entirely with voices that formerly were marginalized. To me it's much more interesting to place Genesis 1:3 alongside, say, the Seneca tale "The Origin of Stories" or the Lakota story, "Wohpe and the Gift of the Pipe." And I also enjoyed teaching non-traditional texts like the transcript of Anne Hutchinson's trial, which is the only record I know of that preserves her inimitable voice, alongside classics like Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity." It's unfortunate that our current culture wars often pit zero sum arguments against one another. Mary Louise Pratt's idea of America as a "contact zone," where competing ideologies clash and grapple for power, is still useful, IMO.
There is definitely room for us, as a people, to start dismissing some of the Classical and British and Russian authors and focusing on American voices, which then would give more room for a more expansive definition of what's a text and of which voices should be heard. I love that you taught so many pre-independence texts! I haven't read many of those! I'm gonna buy a copy of that Heath anthology
As someone who loves weird platonism and whose primary non-novelistic/literary or 19th-20th philosophical readings from the GB tradition is the Platonic corpus I've always been fascinated that they included an abridged Plotinus in the 50s/60s edition of the great books. I guess it had to be there for completeness sake but it always raised the (to me comedic) image of some upper middle class brat having their mind blown by the undescended soul.
Nuanced and thorough -- appreciate this immensely. I was going to say that I was glad that Austen, the Brontes, and Cather made it into your list of Old White Guys, but I see that you've qualified that :). I agree that one can't simply ignore these works, given the imbalanced methods of textual preservation. However, when I taught American literature, I preferred the Heath Anthology model of expanding the canon. For instance, it's true that many of the voices of colonial America were white and male (Winthrop and Bradford), but it's also true that there was a rich literary tradition in North America long before European settlement. My objection with some approaches to literary studies now is that they tend to replace Winthrop and Bradford entirely with voices that formerly were marginalized. To me it's much more interesting to place Genesis 1:3 alongside, say, the Seneca tale "The Origin of Stories" or the Lakota story, "Wohpe and the Gift of the Pipe." And I also enjoyed teaching non-traditional texts like the transcript of Anne Hutchinson's trial, which is the only record I know of that preserves her inimitable voice, alongside classics like Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity." It's unfortunate that our current culture wars often pit zero sum arguments against one another. Mary Louise Pratt's idea of America as a "contact zone," where competing ideologies clash and grapple for power, is still useful, IMO.
There is definitely room for us, as a people, to start dismissing some of the Classical and British and Russian authors and focusing on American voices, which then would give more room for a more expansive definition of what's a text and of which voices should be heard. I love that you taught so many pre-independence texts! I haven't read many of those! I'm gonna buy a copy of that Heath anthology
As someone who loves weird platonism and whose primary non-novelistic/literary or 19th-20th philosophical readings from the GB tradition is the Platonic corpus I've always been fascinated that they included an abridged Plotinus in the 50s/60s edition of the great books. I guess it had to be there for completeness sake but it always raised the (to me comedic) image of some upper middle class brat having their mind blown by the undescended soul.
I know, I am blown away by that pick in particular. Utterly bizarre