Do we have to, and should we read canonised books? And perhaps most importantly, who should have the power to determine what works of literature are worth reading?
Writers whose works are generally considered part of the Western canon include well-known names such as Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Pieces of literature may also belong to more specific canons, categorised by country or period. Since the s though there has been a shift in opinion towards the canon.
Postmodern studies in particular have argued that canon is inherently biased as traditionally the main focus of the academic studies of history and Western culture has been primarily on Europe and men. A reassessment of the literary canon began as various literary and social movements pushed to the forefront literature that had previously been underrepresented. The impact of the civil rights movement was reflected in recognition given to black authors such as in when Gwendolyn Brooks was the first black American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature and Toni Morrison was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in Significantly, the canon also expanded to include literature from Asia, Africa, the Middle East.
Recently, the wife of the Victorian Premier Catherine Andrews called for increased gender equality in the selection of texts for inclusion in the VCE. In , Last year, it dropped to 61 percent.
A swift study of high school literature curriculums undertaken in the same year revealed that many other Australian states and territories had published high school English curriculums featuring up to 70 percent of texts by male authors. This is not the intellectual legacy of the historical fact of patriarchy. While male writers made up 67 percent men in an earlier curriculum they comprised almost 70 percent in the one most recently published.
This reflects the material reality of a literary sphere in which — as successive Stella counts have shown — books written by men get disproportionately more reviews than books written by women. As Leavis wrote,. The blunt instrument of the Stella text count may shed some light on the problem of gender relations, but there are more difficult issues at stake when it comes to questions of ethnicity and race.
Anita Heiss , for example, has written about the Indigenous writers who ought to be studied in the school curriculum but currently are not. Which merely leaves one wondering how on earth the great women writers — from Toni Morrison to Alice Munro — failed to make the cut. And what of the universities that were responsible for their education?
It is not just a question of what to read, but also how to read — of teaching students to read critically and carefully. Of course the canon should be taught. It is not the function of a university to foster ignorance in the name of politics.
Like it or not, the canon is part of our cultural heritage. It is a powerful, and culturally influential body of work. In choosing not to teach it — or, rather, in refusing to critically engage with it — you are actually disempowering students. I do not teach the canon. But this is not because I do not want my students to read those books — indeed, I actually do. I do not teach the canon because I am not a teacher of English, let alone English Literature, but a teacher of writing. Where another lecturer may see a canon in need of fortification or demolition, I content myself with a single passage.
New York: Oxford University Press, Kirby, John T. London: Routledge, , — Beijing: Renmin wenxue. Moretti, Franco. David Damrosch. Oxford and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, , — Saussy, Haun. Haun Saussy. Soothill, William Edward and Lewis Hodous. A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, [].
Trivedi, Harish. Harish Trivedi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, C. Vijayasree, and T. Vijay Kumar. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, , ix—xxxii. Young, Robert J. Reference Works. Primary source collections. Open Access Content. Contact us. Sales contacts.
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