The Canon

[wreckofthehope]

Concerning less extreme expansions of the canon: keep Twilight out of it, for the love of god.  Some academics already take stuff like that seriously.

Oh noes, I'm in trouble... I'm part of the dismissive "some."

 

There's a bizarre idea in this thread that popular culture has no aesthetic value...or that people, academics included, get no aesthetic pleasure from reading popular fiction, for example. 

[wreckofthehope]

(i.e. gun, with occasional music is better if you're at least aware of pulp detective novels, but you can still get it even if you've got no idea who chandler is), & it works across canonical distinctions (stephen king's dark tower series draws on browning, eliot, spaghetti westerns, the sex pistols, the wizard of oz, king's own body of work, & on & on & on))).

 

[lisajay]

There's a bizarre idea in this thread that popular culture has no aesthetic value...or that people, academics included, get no aesthetic pleasure from reading popular fiction, for example. 

 

thank you.

 

after all, if pop had no aesthetic value, then the canon would only include shakespeare's sonnets, since that was the "art" he was banking on to save his reputation in the history books. the plays were "just" pop to pay the bills.

[TripWillis]

Rupert Pupkin basically summed up what I mean by doing aesthetics "first."  I'm just saying that we need to pay attention to aesthetics, even when we're doing socio-cultural work.

 

I do think that my being more philosophically/scientifically inclined does affect my views on these things to some extent.  I think cognitive and evolutionary psychological criticism is really interesting, whereas you seem to dislike it (or it at least worries you, as you mention in another post).

 

Concerning less extreme expansions of the canon: keep Twilight out of it, for the love of god.  Some academics already take stuff like that seriously.

I don't think we're talking past each other quite yet. I'm just still not sure I understand you. I looked for the Rupert Pupkin post that you said explains this process, but couldn't find it. If all you're saying is that we need to pay attention to aesthetics, I agree with you and we can be past this point. I just didn't get this idea of partitioning them off or using them as some kind of gatekeeping tool in determining the object of inquiry. I'm just not sure that's possible without divorcing oneself's inquiry from the analyses of material critique, which I don't think is possible in the first place. We're always already in hegemony.

Re: cognitive/evolutionary -- in a perfect world, I'd be all about these, but I've heard and a read a few papers in the past year written in this vein that left me feeling dirty (unchecked and unreflective eugenicism and gender essentialism were involved). Cognitive/evolutionary, because it is influenced by the epistemes of science qua science, does not promote a more valid truth, but I think are best as reflections on their own methods, as with any other form of analysis. They tell us some of the story, but not all of it. We have to get away from this "lens" model of criticism. We also have to put methods under the microscope as texts themselves. I'm hoping you can help with this (also, I think science and philosophy are socio-cultural; as such, beware motivation, dogma, and demagoguery. We can't be led so easily by textual authority, or our jobs are obsolete).

Re: Twilight -- you aren't going to like me saying this, but it's too late; Twilight is already in the canon, as are a great deal of dime novels and dramas through the history of literature. I don't like those books, and I'm not interested in them, but we're already responding to them via our suppression of them, and thus they are either on the margins of the canon or are fragmented and interspersed through the web-like shape of the canon (draw a dotted line between Stoker and Myers). The canon is a lot more organic and hegemonic than most of us are willing to admit because damnit we're supposed to be in charge! But, alas... teen vampire novels. The way I see it, 50 years from now, Twilight will probably only be talked about as being a mass culture fascination that influenced other writers, the way we talk about Melville and Hawthorne in light of 19th century dime temperance/vice novels. People still work on those novels because it helps them better understand Melville and Hawthorne. So, those books aren't at the center, certainly, but they're somewhere.

 

Let's back up and look at the canon the way Derrida looks at the archive. The archive involves impression and selection. It often involves depositories. But there are always radical remainders and present absences in the depositories. Anything we impress or select is a violence to the other. As such, those suppressions are involved in the act of archiving. When we make the decision to exclude Twilight, its being, style, form, etc. can be traced to everything we include. 

Edited March 18, 2013 by TripWillis

[toasterazzi]

Oh noes, I'm in trouble... I'm part of the dismissive "some."

 

There's a bizarre idea in this thread that popular culture has no aesthetic value...or that people, academics included, get no aesthetic pleasure from reading popular fiction, for example. 

 

Oh hi! I'm there with you. This is part of one of my many problems with the canon. What makes some book from 200 years ago better than a popular book from today besides the fact that someone decided one day it should be that way? I will always say that Twilight is badly written, but that doesn't mean that there's no value in studying the text and/or its impact. And even when a new popular text is decently written, there's this resistance to allowing it to have academic merit. That's never made sense to me.

 

[jrockford27]

I don't exactly have time to give a full blooded response to this just now, since I've been skimming the thread while at work, but I think the idea of aesthetics being the gatekeeper to socio-political inquiry is topsy-turvy.  The fascination with the aesthetics of sociopolitically irrelevant and inaccessible works is what, I think, has a greater chance of dooming English.  

 

Which isn't to say I wont call something I think is great "great."  I love your Prousts, your Chaucers and even (with some degree of diiculty) your Miltons.  However, I'm skeptical as to whether any culturally relevant work can be done on analyzing the aesthetics of these works in themselves.  At least, relevant outside of the subcultures and disciplines related specifically to their study.  Of course, maybe, for some, continuing to keep English "alive" means reaffirming the things that make the discipline insular and inaccessible to all but the most devoted nerds (that is, we, the posters here, and our ilk), but I don't think so.  If we're doing this for the sake of keeping our field pure, or just doing it because we think these subjects are fun and awesome, fine.  If we're doing this because we actually want to achieve an effect outside of the field, then we need to look at how texts function outside of the field!

 

I wonder though, how analyzing Milton's meter from a different vantage point is going to help keep English pure more than it would simply contribute to it becoming stale and distant.  I do think that you first need to explain why Milton is important in a cultural, social, political etc. context before you are going to ask someone other than a Milton scholar to read about it.  And, of course, there are a number of cultural, social, and political reasons why Milton is important; and why his work continues to live among us today!  I'd be more interested in something discussing his ideological lineage, or how the echoes of his imagery continue to manifest themselves in contemporary culture.  Not only is it a conversation in which we can continue to make "Great Literature" relevant, but it's a conversation in which people who traditionally might have difficulty accessing Milton's work might access it in new and exciting ways.

 

What is traditionally thought of as "Great Literature" is great, and often has fascinating aesthetic dimensions, sure, but it's increasingly marginal as a cultural force, and like so many other once great cultural forces it's unlikely to return.  I'd rather see the boundaries of literary study challenged and expanded, rather than cling to some nebulous and obscure idea of "what English is."

Edited March 18, 2013 by jrockford27

[Laokoon]

I don't think we're talking past each other quite yet. I'm just still not sure I understand you. I looked for the Rupert Pupkin post that you said explains this process, but couldn't find it. If all you're saying is that we need to pay attention to aesthetics, I agree with you and we can be past this point. I just didn't get this idea of partitioning them off or using them as some kind of gatekeeping tool in determining the object of inquiry. I'm just not sure that's possible without divorcing oneself's inquiry from the analyses of material critique, which I don't think is possible in the first place. We're always already in hegemony.

Re: cognitive/evolutionary -- in a perfect world, I'd be all about these, but I've heard and a read a few papers in the past year written in this vein that left me feeling dirty (unchecked and unreflective eugenicism and gender essentialism were involved). Cognitive/evolutionary, because it is influenced by the epistemes of science qua science, does not promote a more valid truth, but I think are best as reflections on their own methods, as with any other form of analysis. They tell us some of the story, but not all of it. We have to get away from this "lens" model of criticism. We also have to put methods under the microscope as texts themselves. I'm hoping you can help with this (also, I think science and philosophy are socio-cultural; as such, beware motivation, dogma, and demagoguery. We can't be led so easily by textual authority, or our jobs are obsolete).

Re: Twilight -- you aren't going to like me saying this, but it's too late; Twilight is already in the canon, as are a great deal of dime novels and dramas through the history of literature. I don't like those books, and I'm not interested in them, but we're already responding to them via our suppression of them, and thus they are either on the margins of the canon or are fragmented and interspersed through the web-like shape of the canon (draw a dotted line between Stoker and Myers). The canon is a lot more organic and hegemonic than most of us are willing to admit because damnit we're supposed to be in charge! But, alas... teen vampire novels. The way I see it, 50 years from now, Twilight will probably only be talked about as being a mass culture fascination that influenced other writers, the way we talk about Melville and Hawthorne in light of 19th century dime temperance/vice novels. People still work on those novels because it helps them better understand Melville and Hawthorne. So, those books aren't at the center, certainly, but they're somewhere.

Let's back up and look at the canon the way Derrida looks at the archive. The archive involves impression and selection. It often involves depositories. But there are always radical remainders and present absences in the depositories. Anything we impress or select is a violence to the other. As such, those suppressions are involved in the act of archiving. When we make the decision to exclude Twilight, its being, style, form, etc. can be traced to everything we include.

Trip said just about everything that I was too lazy to type. I would add, however, that the opposite of "close" reading is "distant" reading, not careless reading as was mentioned earlier - this obviously has no place in academia. Distant reading, via the administrative darling DH (as it was dismissively termed) is doing the exact work being called for in order to reshape the canon. Through Bayesian modeling among other forms, DH are redefining the broad aesthetic movements that undergird the canon and which this thread, this far, has left fairly unchallenged.

[TripWillis]

Trip said just about everything that I was too lazy to type. I would add, however, that the opposite of "close" reading is "distant" reading, not careless reading as was mentioned earlier - this obviously has no place in academia. Distant reading, via the administrative darling DH (as it was dismissively termed) is doing the exact work being called for in order to reshape the canon. Through Bayesian modeling among other forms, DH are redefining the broad aesthetic movements that undergird the canon and which this thread, this far, has left fairly unchallenged.

I like DH's potential, don't get me wrong, but to what end is it doing what you described? And also, I'm wary about why certain people like it -- oo, numbers!   At the last DH lecture I went to, a professor had derived a statistical method to test Jameson's assertion that most major literature is now set in the future or past rather than the present. He found via statistics that Jameson was only sort of right. Afterward, I asked him, politely, what the point of his project was and he sort of sheepishly smiled and said, "I'm not sure. This is my first digital humanities-type project." I guess I'm puzzled about the exigency of some DH projects -- what's Henry Adams' term? Inert facts? If you can point out some DH work that has done more to challenge our methods, I'd love to hear about it. I guess I've had a bad experience with it so far. Then again, most new stuff stumbles out of the gate in praxis. Maybe I should be more patient. 

[Laokoon]

Check out Robin Valenza's work at UW-Madison. I'd definitely agree there are some serious issues with the digital humanities being occasionally used as a CV booster, though.

[jrockford27]

I like DH's potential, don't get me wrong, but to what end is it doing what you described? And also, I'm wary about why certain people like it -- oo, numbers! 

 

Funny you should mention it.  I was talking to my ex-girlfriend, who is a PhD student in Phylogenetics at a big time school, on gchat about this conversation.   

 

I briefly mentioned digital humanities, and she became immediately excited, she said, "Like Bayesian methods to determine authorship of an article?"

 

"Yeah, kind of."

 

"Cool!  I love that stuff!"

[Fishbucket]

It's not the popular culture has no value or shouldn't be studied, it's that it shouldn't be canonical. That's a big difference. Studying pop culture is already a thing.

[TripWillis]

It's not the popular culture has no value or shouldn't be studied, it's that it shouldn't be canonical. That's a big difference. Studying pop culture is already a thing.

I think a lot of pop culture already is canonical (Mark Twain's novels, Shakespeare's plays, Uncle Tom's Cabin). I'm not sure I feel comfortable being as absolute about this.

[Bennett]

At the risk of repeating myself: aesthetics can be (*is*) something more than dry, formal, irrelevant and a-political metrical scansion. If this is what people think "aesthetics" means than we're obviously failing to do/teach it properly. For an example of how people do excellent political/economic analysis while still taking the characteristics of art/aesthetics seriously, see: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, György Lukács, and Ernst Bloch. To name a few. 

 

Sorry, I'm just really frustrated at the terms of this debate, and the (false) opposition between "caring about art" and "being politically engaged." I think it's total bollocks. I also think it's important to examine art's own internal categories and forms, for the same reason that a musicologist should look at rhythm, tonality, etc. That doesn't mean we look *only* at these things, and it doesn't mean "aesthetics" can be walled off from politics in some pure realm of the ether... no more than any other phenomenon can be taken in isolation. What it means is that we look at how art interacts with politics as art--or, again, that we take art seriously. Bertolt Brecht was obviously an incredibly politically engaged artist; he was also incredibly engaged with aesthetics, with the politics of form and the form of politics. Same thing with Walter Benjamin: look at his (wonderful) analysis of how the workings of commodification can be discerned in the most formal stylistic elements of Baudelaire, or for that matter at his analysis of the Trauerspiel. This is great stuff, with tremendous political resonance; it is also phenomenally good aesthetics.

 

 In short: art is a praxis, with its own immanent laws and lines of development. This matters.

Edited March 18, 2013 by Bennett

[midnight]

I think a lot of pop culture already is canonical (Mark Twain's novels, Shakespeare's plays, Uncle Tom's Cabin). I'm not sure I feel comfortable being as absolute about this.

 

Funny, I was nodding my head in agreement with Fishbucket's post, but then I realized that much of what's now considered "the canon" (or at least "classics," if there's a differentiation) was essentially pop culture when it was first published--Dickens, London, anyone?

[Fishbucket]

Funny, I was nodding my head in agreement with Fishbucket's post, but then I realized that much of what's now considered "the canon" (or at least "classics," if there's a differentiation) was essentially pop culture when it was first published--Dickens, London, anyone?

 

For everyone who is making this point: those things didn't join the canon overnight. They joined it because of a certain critical consensus, over generations and generations. CONTEMPORARY Pop culture (which is what I was referring to in my post) cannot be canonical for this reason. There are things that are popular now that will eventually be taught and read in the same way that the canon is today. But that doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't.

[antihumanist]

. I do not believe that we must have separate canons for separate mediums of expression, for the simple reason that medium-specificity is dead. Gone. The digital has erased that. In this context, you should definitely read Rosalind Krauss on the "post-medium condition." Medium specificity is not tenable in an era when letter, sound, and image can all be collapsed to binary bits of data. 

 

But can the embodied nature of experiencing these works be?  There's a phenomenological difference between reading a novel and watching a film or participating in a theater (or participating in a film/novel or reading a play).  To imply that medium specificity doesn't matter anymore is even more reductionist than the reductionism that you're arguing against!

 

Not that things like automatisms can't inform our understanding of the similarities between different medium, but to imply that just because we have digital transfer that suddenly there aren't phenomenological and even ontological differences between different forms of text is maddenlingly simple.  Not to say anything of the material conditions in which texts (digital and analog) are created.  The difference between a PS3 video game and Angry Birds is also a distinction in medium that the "digital collapse" completely elides.  Sorry, I just cannot get behind sidelining media specificity at all.

 

--------

 

Ironically though, I totally agree that a canon as such is totally meaningless.  This isn't to say that a general knowledge of different historical epochs isn't valuable or useful.  An understanding of how certain cultural movements react to previous epochs is important - both in an aesthetic and materialistic sense.  But, to imply that from following a series of dialectical shifts, picking the "best" from medieval, renaissance, 18thC, Romantic, Victorian, Contemporary we can somehow arrive at a "canon" is both futile and pointless.  What does it even accomplish to pick out authors from their historio-economic contexts into a sacred space anyway?  This isn't to say it's not useful to give students great works of art - but within any given class shouldn't you have to justify WHY you've picked any given work in some way beyond "it's the canon."  (and along with that, shouldn't any study of Renaissance literature somehow speak to current and modern political concerns, rather than simply being a "course on Renaissance literature")

 

For the record, I picked option 5 - I think it's more that there's an infinite slippage from "canonicity" into "non-canon" that's simply untenable.  This isn't to say we shouldn't argue for the cultural and political relevance of works, but that all works have these potentials in some context, and that context is what matters more than an absolute "these works are the great works."  Aren't the great failures as interesting as the great successes?

 

<edit 2>  I totally agree with everything jrockford said.

Edited March 18, 2013 by antihumanist

[bluecheese]

[midnight]

For everyone who is making this point: those things didn't join the canon overnight. They joined it because of a certain critical consensus, over generations and generations. CONTEMPORARY Pop culture (which is what I was referring to in my post) cannot be canonical for this reason. There are things that are popular now that will eventually be taught and read in the same way that the canon is today. But that doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't.

 

I get what you're saying, but I don't think the elapse of time really matters if a work is well written and meaningful (however we define "meaning," of course).

 

Consider contemporary authors like Rushdie, DeLillo, et al. who are often considered part of the canon (or at least part of the "postmodern" one). I mean, The Satanic Verses is only 25 years old, White Noise 28. That's just one generation.

[TripWillis]

For everyone who is making this point: those things didn't join the canon overnight. They joined it because of a certain critical consensus, over generations and generations. CONTEMPORARY Pop culture (which is what I was referring to in my post) cannot be canonical for this reason. There are things that are popular now that will eventually be taught and read in the same way that the canon is today. But that doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't.

 

Scratching my head here. I now understand that you meant contemporary pop culture, but now it seems you're saying that things can't be canonical until 100 years passes. There are things written within the last 5 years, pop culture texts, in fact, that are already canonical, some of which we like and some we don't.

 

Edit: I'm done here, btw. Another time... the thread is drifting away from my initial point of interest.

Edited March 18, 2013 by TripWillis

[toasterazzi]

It's not the popular culture has no value or shouldn't be studied, it's that it shouldn't be canonical. 

 

Why?

 

CONTEMPORARY Pop culture (which is what I was referring to in my post) cannot be canonical for this reason. There are things that are popular now that will eventually be taught and read in the same way that the canon is today. But that doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't.

 

Again, why? Who says? If something is "good" and/or resonates, then why wouldn't it become canonical regardless of how new it is?

[Fishbucket]

Just to qualify my statement, the canon as I understand it starts with Homer and ends with Modernism. 

[thestage]

Ehhh, too many authors after modernism have undergone some or another process of canonization. You would be hard pressed to leave out Beckett or Morrison, for instance. Nabokov to a somewhat lesser degree. Pynchon, Ellison, Wright, DeLillo, Roth, Pinter, various other odds and ends.

Edited March 18, 2013 by thestage

[Fishbucket]

I really don't think Toni Morrison is a good writer at all.

[TripWillis]

I really don't think Toni Morrison is a good writer at all.

1) 

2) 

3) What does this have to do with the conversation besides trololololololooooooooooooooooo?

 

Another Don't Hate Classic ©.

[midnight]

I really don't think Toni Morrison is a good writer at all.

 

She's no Charlaine Harris, that's for sure.*

 

*Is this snark contradictory considering my above pop culture comment?