Comments on the canon
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs & Gitlin, Todd
The following responses are to David Bromwich's article "Notes on the Future of the Humanities," which appeared in the Fall 1989 Dissent. It is argued that normal science grows...
...It is also true that life and the syllabus are short, and for every book added, something must be subtracted...
...254 • DISSENT Communications American parochialism could do with plenty of challenge...
...to tease out their logics, underscore their beauties, interpret them—but most of all, to make them available...
...One suspects that many who get fired up about "the canon" — as if it were cast in bronze—think it has to be drilled into the dullards...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...The motto of humanists ought to be (to paraphrase Trotsky), You may not be interested in great books, but great books are interested in you...
...The "classics" have fueled our imagination, but they have probably also led us astray...
...Television should be analyzed across disciplinary lines, as a social fact, asking all the questions Bromwich raises...
...Without this procedure, even the best wines go bad...
...Those who would have us turn our backs on the black experience or feminist thought are content to leave a large gap in what Western civilization has to offer in the way of enlightenment, a comparative perspective, and the respect for fact over illusion...
...Plato's questions, and Dostoyevsky's, are at work in the world...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Either de Beauvoir or Wollstonecraft would have informed her of a lack of originality on the part of Derrida (although the point is well made again...
...Authority has to give an account of itself...
...The cultural conversation is thereby impoverished...
...Indeed, we would have no science without attention to the accumulated wisdom of our predecessors (leaps of imagination notwithstanding) leading to paradigmatic changes...
...But, I would argue, cautiously, that, at least in Western society, there has been "progress" toward greater humanity and that reason does develop from reflection on the classics and the debates of the past about the good society, justice, and rights of individuals...
...If Professor A chooses to teach Moby Dick alongside Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, fine...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...In the wake of the sixties, "institutional radicals" in literary and media studies are especially drawn toward such notions: they allow one to have one's "subversion" and eat it...
...Thus all knowledge provides a basis for both the improvement and the impoverishment of life...
...With battle lines drawn by the Bennett-Bloom right, what is loosely speaking the academic left has at times been drawn into a defense of the shopping-center university...
...The humanities do not "grow" in the same way...
...Notice that William James, in the quotation with which Bromwich closes, wants us to "see how diverse the types of excellence may be...
...a little new wine is poured into the bottle to top it off and replace what has evaporated, and a new cork inserted...
...If Professor D wants to teach Moby Dick alongside King Lear and C.L.R...
...There were very few responsible classics on the issues of race and sex, and though such works (by Mary Wollstonecraft, for example) exist, they are not represented in the contemporary civilization textbooks that guide the syllabi of many college courses...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Which books, then...
...Literal reading of the Bible has pitted "creationists" against "evolutionists" with serious consequences for the teaching of science in some states...
...No one wants to have to reinvent the wheel, the engine or the computer...
...SPRING • 1990 • 255...
...Of course we rely on the guidance of professors to note that while Rousseau raised new perspectives on education while focusing on Emile, the education of Sophie would plunge girls into the kinds of derivative lives that Simone de Beauvoir objected to...
...What should it mean to "teach great books...
...James, fine...
...The pristine classics often serve with authority gospel that is hard to dislodge...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...What this amounts to, essentially, is the less-than-noble proposition, laissez nous faire...
...Indeed, in feminist scholarship today (as in other "hot" fields technically proficient but literature poor) scholars often seem unaware of work done in their fields of interest even fifteen years before, much less those written fifty or one-hundred-fifty years before...
...Three decades after being "taught" The Republic and The Brothers Karamazov, I have forgotten the trappings in which the professor wrapped the books when he "taught" them...
...The finest old wines are periodically opened...
...Unforced reading—for pleasure, reflection, communion in solitude—has lapsed into a quirky hobby, like windsurfing...
...An entirely legitimate question...
...No year can be chosen as the cutoff point for the classics...
...Only recently I was appalled to read an article by a major historian whose scholarship on women workers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is well respected, but who has become a "postmodernist," in which she claimed to be enlightened by the view of Derrida that women might be regarded as "other" to men...
...so does revision...
...This cannot be done in the spirit of the Popular Culture Association, which takes consumability to be the criterion for worth...
...This is the flip side of the ethic of suspicion—the ethic of indiscriminate celebration of the popular...
...The central question remains: Which works should be assigned so that our students will emerge from the university with common points of reference...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...A few works have been republished, such as that of Charlotte Perkins Gillman in economics, but the focus on the here and now is a form of academic "glitz...
...We cannot wave them away...
...But because I have read the books, there is a continuing, ever-renewable cultural conversation open to me about human situations, societies, and natures...
...We might want to read Kepler, but surely we wish to include the more SPRING • 1990 • 253 Communications modern Newton...
...Nor can it be done in the spirit of those who indiscriminately find vast reserves of "resistance" in such cultural trophies as The Beverly Hillbillies...
...The important thing is to read books that display the powers of language and also exercise cultural power (whether deservedly or not is a legitimate question that ought to be addressed, too...
...Some of the ideas seem stupid and silly and others are surely as sagacious as those of Locke, Hume, Mill, Rousseau, and others who probably were regarded by some as upstarts in their time...
...to make a case for what is worthy in them and what is not, and why...
...If Professor C wants to teach Moby Dick alongside "Mario and the Magician," fine...
...I am for amending the taught tradition, then, to take account of excluded (not necessarily mediocre) voices, but against dissolving the common tradition altogether...
...At least teach Moby Dick...
...In every age there are and will be new competitors for the places in the curriculum...
...I don't much care in what department these questions are asked, but they need to be asked...
...I appreciate David Bromwich's concern about the substitution of rock-rap for literature or the contextless perspective in which deconstruction of texts is to be the sole approach to analysis, and the revelations of the French structuralists are regarded as the most convincing canon...
...It is argued that normal science grows incrementally, each development building on that which came before...
...Bromwich is right: a tradition has to be known before it is renewed...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Just because I am in sympathy with much of David Bromwich's argument, I wish to add and argue a bit...
...Although much of what the great philosophers had to say has clearly become part of the tradition of Western society and ought to be studied, some of what they said was silly and wrong and deserves proper comment and correction, much of which comes from comparative analysis and the viewpoints of those outside of the elites...
...But we of the left, feminists, and people of color should thrive on renewable tradition...
...And now we are challenged to weigh and accept new ideas about human nature and society that some think should be made part of the great debates...
...When it becomes necessary for professors to dissolve the bands that have connected them with the Western Civ curriculum, a decent respect for the opinions of the humanities requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to revision...
...As for which gardens to cultivate, more than a few flowers should (no pun intended) bloom...
...We ought to lay claim to our inheritance...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Common reading has gone by the boards...
...Freud, after all, led generations of psychoanalysts into using Greek myth as model and metaphor for human development and experience, and though many people still subscribe to the idea that "Oedipal" attachments govern children's development, there is considerable evidence that not all societies (or people) are affected by the process...
...It is we, not Allan Bloom, who are the legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment ideals of equality and human rights...
...And Western civilization does not crumble if works from the non-West are moved into the curriculum...
...Both traditionalists and modifiers have to give...
...Television should not be "appreciated," it should be criticized—and detoxified...
...Ask the same hundred to name a book they have recently read, outside class, and you read a couple of Stephen King titles and a list of ninety-four different others...
...If Professor B wants to teach Moby Dick alongside Capital, fine...
...We dare not yield the republican ideal of a common discourse in the name of diversity, just as we dare not yield diversity in the name of some totalist conception of the Enlightenment...
...How many years must pass, therefore, before The Second Sex might be declared a classic...
...Students read little outside (and sometimes inside) the classroom...
...How much time must pass before a work of thought becomes part of the canon...
...The classics, the traditions, need periodic topping off too...
...There is good reason to open the canon to the world—to women, nonwhites, non-Americans...
...If we disregard all "feminist" or "Third World" or black studies works (quite a broad range of work to wave away), this generation of students and young professors may in their turn do violence to the classics of the past...
...After all, the forms of social life that we in the West enjoy are based on the ideas people have had about the "right way" to live...
...After all the smoke of debate has cleared, it may be that the important thing is to make the books available and not to drive students away from them...
...If Professor E wants to teach Moby Dick alongside one of Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women," fine...
...When one considers, for example, issues bearing on race and sex, the founding philosophical fathers in their reflections on "human nature" were particularly foolish...
...I think we need to have it both ways...
...Not "teach television" in the sense that one "teaches" Shakespeare or Emerson...
...Like it or not, "the tradition" has shaped how we think of ourselves, our reason, our vision, our feelings, our prospects...
...Ask a hundred students which movies they have seen recently and you learn of six or eight that more than half have seen in common...
...For there is another general calamity that needs to be taken seriously by all the humanities...
...I bequeath shares of stock to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Which means that it is urgent to teach about television...
...Perhaps it is little more than the hubris of academics to think that the framework for teaching is all-important...
...But commit ourselves to some reasonable and tolerant pruning and open the courses to present varied views on the same subjects and the dialogue continues...
...To make them available...
...One reason for the collapse of common reading is, of course, television...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
