In general, I’m in favor of the canon yet not in favor of English departments. I have kids and work full-time, and _time is precious_ so following the canon-my canon-is primarily a function of wanting to maximize enjoyment and learning before I die. I went to St. John’s College, so my idea of canon began with their Great Books curriculum. I loved it. The Great Books program is also why I lean more towards Greco-Roman literature. Later I read a lot of Bloom. I’ve never defined what canon means to me, but I know I don’t “wrestle” with the canon as much as the Great Books program expects, nor do I think the “anxiety of influence” is as prominent as Bloom asserts. In terms of who defines and drives canon, my perspective as a non-academic who loves literature, is that it appears that academics don’t love literature as much as I do. Or as much as academics of the past. This is merely my perception as an outsider. They write about it, talk about it, obsess over it, some treating it like a plaything, others like an unhealthy addiction. But do they dream about it? Do they yearn for it? I do. Maybe they do, too. Would they still read the canon if they were the last person on earth who could read? I would. Maybe they would, too. Yet when I read modern scholarship, I don’t sense the author’s love for the literature itself as much as when I read scholarship from long ago. They write so much nowadays, yet so little of it invokes any insight or feeling in me. Maybe it does in them. Literature can be magical, but I see no evidence they feel the same magic I feel. Just my perception as an outsider. Yet do I worry about any of this? No. I’ve learned that the canon transcends English departments and popular scholarship. The canon may change, and it may wax or wane in popularity, but it’ll outlive us all. The books are there to be read and enjoyed.

Thanks to the people who asked this question.

Germane to the subject: It's much easier to chat with people when there's some common frame of reference, like Shakespeare or the Bible. Sometimes students graduate with a background in relatively obscure works - perhaps fine works everyone should read - who are difficult friends because too much of what we say to each other requires explanation and context.

For me, the cannon represents the pinnacle of literately craft. It’s there to delve into deeply, or to dip your toe in from time to time. I love reading Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, Joyce. I also love reading Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, and sports biographies too. I see the cannon as a fascinating world that can be appreciated however deep you decide to venture, but it’s not my entire world.

@jamesduggan7200

9 күн бұрын

Oh yes, it's been a while but I used to really enjoy Elmore Leonard.

Thanks. I appreciate the context you provide for what happened in the 1980s and 1990s, when I happened to be in college and graduate school. I totally agree with the middle way you seem to be describing. I believe it is cultural suicide to totally throw out the canon. Having a canon gives us a common cultural memory. We need to be able to intelligently discuss, define, and describe what is "great literature" from the past, so that when excellent, new pieces are created, we'll be able to recognize their significance and understand why they may be considered great too. If everything is relative, and there are no standards or guiding stars to look up to, we end up with a pile of nothing.

For my part, I don't look at the Western Canon as a list of great works that should be considered to the exclusion of everything else, but rather as an introduction to everything else. But they do provide a benchmark and starting point for understanding the kinds of mastery and meaning that are possible in art. We have not discovered or produced all the great creators this world has known or will know - but having an experience of the wonders that are already present in the culture gives us an expectation and excitement of what to look for moving forward.

Exciting! I can't wait to hear your thoughts on how to make your own canon

In my Bookclub we read (among others) Tolstoy, Steinbeck, and Somerset Maugham. These are writers with profound insight into human nature. Though written ages ago Tolstoy’s insights into human nature (as acted out by his characters) is as relevant now, as then.

@closereadingpoetry

8 күн бұрын

Critical & theoretical trends come and go. The value of art will endure.

I'm just new in poetry. You are helping me a lot brother,

Cogently presented. Great content. Thank you!

Thanks so much for coming back to this! I learn so much from you and your videos have been a real inspiration to me as I try to lead my own students through either American or world Literature.

The canon is a guide to a literary path, and generally a good guide as the works included have been selected by professional critics and public acclaim based on their literary (and occasionally commercial) merit. But sometimes it makes all the difference to take a road less travelled. Women and peasants and non-Europeans have traditionally had fewer educational opportunities than wealthy white European men, so it is natural that there are historically fewer top notch examples from these groups in older literature (plenty in modern and contemporary literature though), therefore it is important to champion those few who have made such contributions. It is also very important that our students, no matter their sex, colour, orientation, gender, social class, nationality, etc. can see something of themselves reflected in the canon. And it is equally important not to overplay such sensibilities simply for the sake of correctness. Balance is needed. Wordsworth’s ‘host of golden daffodils’ creates a universal sense of inspiration regardless of the fact that he was a middle class white man and regardless of the personal characteristics of those who read him. So, a canon has its uses, but a balance should be struck so that it remains a guide and not a law, and so individuals can navigate their own journeys with a suggested route map and the ability to make informed choices and the inspiration to experience fresh discoveries.

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

So well said, Robert.

great thoughtful video, as always!

I have thoroughly studied the literature on the canon debates, and it appears you and I agree a great deal about the utility and limitations of "a canon," and we both seem far more interested in the building of a "personal canon". Some of your favorite poets, you say, are non-canonical. All of mine are non-canonical.

Let's go for it!!! 😁👍

Idk if this is considered a canon but I am a huge fan of interxuality. I think it's pretty amazing that you can read the bible and Homer and unlock like 90% of western literature. To be able to trace ideas through 2500 years of writing is pretty sick. How they stay the same and how they change. How each new take on an old work is a snapshot into that culture at that time. It's also a great way to find out what's worth reading. If a genius artist vouches for a piece of work than it's probably worth reading.

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

Well said!

Why can’t we expand the canon, or have multiple canons? From multiple perspectives?

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

We can! And some have. I'm definitely in favor of multiple canons. In my video scheduled for next Monday I'll talk about how to build your own canon.

Happy Independence Day mr Adam. Thank you for your wonderful cultural literary channel. I gathered main information about topic you mentioned briefly here it’s canon is term derived from Ancient Greek word for measuring, or standard. Canon means too acceptable or rule . Literary canon is technical term used to describe set of texts that serve as recognized standard of stylistic quality, cultural or social significance, and intellectual value . Canon have great influence of formation of American canon autonomous traditions was exercised by critical career of willam dean Howells who supported many writers, - not only those we now consider traditional ( such as Henry James , mark Twain, Stephen crane ,Frank Norris). Book can be considered part of canon book has to be more them great and able to withstand test of time . Current canon has important themes and lessons, but from of these themes are uninteresting to audiences, because outdated they are . Poetic canon is list of authors works considered to be central to identity of given literary tradition or culture. Example of canon can also be body of work like Shakespeare canon which , includes all bard plays and poems. English canon poets such as Edmund Spenser, sir Philip Sidney, Christopher marrow, Ben Johnson, John Donne. Literary canon refers to highly valued , high cultural texts , it’s makes professors, famous authors , editors of prestigious journals have been canon determined by elite group of scholars and critics who embraced work of art , and sent defying realm . I hope you like my research. Best wishes for you your dearest ones .

Like most people, my thoughts on the canon are complex. I see the harm that it has done, where writers and texts have been excluded for arbitrary reasons like taste and morals or for more systematically harmful reasons like race and gender, and as a result the works are denied the wide readership that canonical literature enjoys. Because of the canon's exclusive nature, we miss on a lot if we limit ourselves to it, if we take the list and stick to it, if we come to believe that texts not on it are in some way less than. But... most of us don't do this. I love Dickens, I love Shelley, Frost, Austen, and Shakespeare, and I'm grateful to the canon for having made them so easy for me to find and approach. I'm indebted to these writers and I don't think I'd love reading as much as I do without them. But I'm also grateful that all a canon is, at the end of the day, is a list. A really good list, but still just a list. We're not beholden to it in any way, though some may act like we are. I like to think of it along the same terms I do my lit surveys. These courses are meant to be samples or tastes of what we'll ideally want to continue eating, and they're usually developed with a canon in mind. If the canon's the trunk, then surveys are their branches. And, as said, their purpose is to get us to want more of what they offer or to see where else they lead; what we get from them are the leaves and apples and whatever else they grow or we read. Canons introduce us to something that will be invaluable to us in our lives. I like the positive you mentioned, about how our time is precious. For me, literature and reading make my hours and my life more rich, and the canon is part of what helped me find this love and this richness. Do I think many of them are in need of reform? Certainly. Do I also think that, for all their faults, canons are necessary for what Wordsworth and then Helen Vendler called "what we have loved"? I do. Excellent think-piece, and I am excitedly awaiting your video on our own canons.

@closereadingpoetry

7 күн бұрын

Beautifully said!

@nostraa6125

5 күн бұрын

I would add that a lot of what is "excluded" is excluded because it's just not well written.

Please do make a video about how to create your own canon!!!!

Hi. Could you list the authors you mentioned, not included in the Western Canon?

If we were immortal, we wouldn't need a Canon. We would have all the time in the world to read everything and form our own individual canon, but as mortal beings, we need the assistance of other humans to select what is probably more worth it of our little hours. Being the product of our limitation, the canon couldn't be anything but limited, imperfect, but nonetheless, in my opinion, indispensable.

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

So true... Ars longa, vita brevis

If I may, I'd like to suggest that perhaps it would be great to do a video or write an article that focuses particularly on wonderful authors whom may be hard for the layperson to learn of otherwise because they're left out of the canon.

Well the whole concept of a canon is that it’s widely recognized and taught. You can have your own favorite works, of course, but within any one culture, there can by definition be only one canon - unless there is no canon. You can’t just have your “own” canon (and therefore an infinite set of “canons” across society) because then there wouldn’t be any widely taught and discussed body of work (and therefore there would be no canon). I would say now that we are clearly losing the canon or have lost it. Many know vaguely what it is but people are not usually teaching to it. If you look at the faculty of the American Studies Ph.D. program at Harvard, for example, maybe 2 of the 16 core faculty work on any canonical American texts.

@closereadingpoetry

5 күн бұрын

The problem is there is no canon that is widely recognized and taught. People gesture towards a widely recognized IDEA of a canon, but no on one can point to one canon list and say that this is the widely recognized list of the canon. As far as I'm aware, the American Studies Ph.D. program at Harvard can overlap with, but isn't apart of, its many literature departments.

If you want to understand what underpins the canon wars read the other Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind."

“Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range… is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.” - Toni Morrison

I participated in a book club, a couple years ago at a pub in St. Louis, run by a Doctor of American literature. It was high level stuff. We had several graduate level participants. Canon or no, what struck me was the general lack of a general understanding of literature in general. What I mean is an academic over specialization that led to a kind of myopic insanity, an inability to be able to contextualize. I'm basically a working class kid of 66 years, and think I may have been spared by getting out of school before 1980. Adam sir, you are blesséd exception to what I perceive as this disturbing trend. But I find the whole bloody project, top to bottom, to have gone to bloody hell. God save the Queen 👑 feels me?

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

Thanks for the kind words. That's a problem I have noticed, too. James Engell's work represents a nice balance. He critiques academic overspecialization in his book The Committed Word. I hope the tides are changing.

@thomassimmons1950

9 күн бұрын

@@closereadingpoetry Cheers!

About 25 years ago one of my college friends recommended I pick up Harry Potter, which he was reading to his kids. I was wrestling with some conceptually difficult questions that arose around the transition from medieval scholasticism into modern philosophy specifically related to the question of Universals as defined by Origen and Hume's problem of induction and thought some light fantasy reading would make a nice break. In the first chapter, Dumbledore is asked if he can erase the lightning bolt scar on Harry's forehead and responds, "Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground." I may be the only person who ever made an immediate connection to Eliot's East Coker, where the London Underground is used as an image of the Nigredo in the esoteric 4 Quartets. Dumbledore had previously consulted his watch which had no hands or numbers, only planets circling the dial, an image that appears in Burnt Norton. Eliot famously rode the Underground to think and clear his mind. Was Rowling in her YA storybook really riffing off casual allusions to TS Eliot? A few chapters later, in a very model of childhood wish fulfillment, Harry acquires an owl, a beautiful white snowy owl he christens Hedwig. Hedwig is the protagonist in Ibsen's Wild Duck (not the duck), another widely recognized esoteric work of significance to the Western Canon. These are not just name checks, over seven novels, Rowling develops the connections in deep and thoughtful ways so that reading intertextually allows a richer understanding of both the referent work and her own. Clearly Rowling is writing in a literary tradition which arises in Renaissance NeoPlatonism and is echoed by many canonical writers since. Should we know this when we read Harry Potter?, or perhaps return to the books later to glean the benefits of intertextual reading as I did, using Rowling as a map to esoteric writing from Ripley to Eliot. It seems to me the notion of canon is closely tied to the traditional hermeneutic circle. Just as the interpretive horizon is an extension of the natural processing of language, the notion of canon emerges from conscious and unconscious references by authors to the works they know and expect their readers to know. Writers working within the "Canon" reinforce it, their writing benefits from the richness that comes from resonating against a wealth of literary legacy, and curious readers are led back to the sources with a renewed interest. There are many self referential "canons" defined this way. Certainly non Western cultures exist which are not rooted in the Bible and ancient Greece but have deep and thoughtful cultural and philosophical traditions of their own. I find it difficult but rewarding to grapple with those literary traditions, and invariable understand them through a lens formed in the Western Canon. I have grave doubts about the wisdom of asking young people to construct a basis for deep understanding of abstract concepts which is not rooted in a coherent canon. And I would argue that at least the core of the Western canon is multicultural, expansive and progressive, that the best route to expanding the canon is building on those foundations. I think Martin Luther King's approach that seemingly revolutionary ideas are often overlooked but integral to our core principles and just need to be understood and reconciled is fundamentally the right way forward..

@HakuYuki001

10 күн бұрын

I see no intertextuality but merely superficial references, if that.

My thoughts on a canon? There's a story about Ben Franklin preparing for war but doubtful he could get money from the town launched a drive to upgrade the local fire department, explaining to a friend in a letter that surely a cannon is a true fire engine.

@Laocoon283

9 күн бұрын

This was particularly funny for me because I just finished reading his autobiography and remember that part.

But does this rather egalitarian/epicurean view - that literature should be for pleasure - account for the commercialization of literature? I, too, struggle with this idea of to Canon, or not to Canon? Yet, I also fear that making literature too utilitarian will strip some fundamental characteristic from what we define as “literature,” which takes as a fundamental part of its definition something exclusive. I have spent a good portion of my life working in factories and rubbing elbows with blue-collar workers (in fact, in between semesters, over the summers, I still work in one), many of whom could care less about “literary value” and “canons” and “literature,” seeing it all as an ivory-tower sort of practice. So, I also wonder, if, in a move towards a kind of equitability, “literature,” itself, needs to change? Because, while there is the Garnderian idea of being the torch which lights the way - a sentiment shared by Bloom in his How to Read and Why and Dickinson in her poem “The poets light but lamps” - if that torch is being ignored, only followed by those inclined to follow it, aren’t we just arguing for the survival of our own exclusive discipline? And, if so, how are we to promote the necessity of literature (in its elitist definition) without devaluing it to something commercial? Or, is that the greatest irony of all: that literature, in a pragmatic sense, is valueless and that is its greatest quality? This, of course, circles back to my original question of commercialization: what would be lost without the specialized study of literature? The intensity of being moved rather than just having an emotional response? Is literature - Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, etc. - just about the same kinds of pleasure we can get from, say, Marvel movies? Or, is there something about the difficulty of the pleasure that separates it (a separation that would inherently led to a certain elitism)? Is that what makes something Art (i.e. THE canon) rather than mere entertainment? And should there be a distinction between the two? As stated, this is a question almost perpetually on my mind and I appreciate and enjoy your articulation of it. Yet, as most of life seems to be throwing language at a thing until it makes sense, or “clicks,” I could use some more volleys.

8:45 you mention a literary critic who has been overlooked, what this guys last name? Robert Laufe?

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

Robert Lowth. Sorry about that!

@andrewpodolio59

9 күн бұрын

​@@closereadingpoetry thank you! there's not enough vowels to ground it. he probably should've picked a better name if he wanted to be canonized.

Those who pushed for theoretical polemics won the war. But they didn't defeat exclusivity as promised. That was the lie. They simply substituted one exclusivity for another.

The cannnon wars?!? Oh right...the canon wars.

Although I agree with you that literature should not be assigned the role of 'changing' society, I find assigning it the role of the cause of 'pure' or 'mere' enjoyment similarly reductive. Aren't you denying the powerful capacities of literature actually asking important political, social, philosophical questions, questions that will in fact shape society's thought? Is there really one role of literature? Are we even capable of assigning this role to an organic and everchanging body of texts? Although I very much agree with you that the idea of the ivory tower of 'high literature' is no good, In my view, the idea that all can enjoy literature and the idea that literature in fact can have a role outside its own sphere are not mutually exclusive. Thus, we should not force a 'morally superior' cannon only representing authors from social minorities, nor should we act that the inclusion of such authors in the 'canon' does not affect the way society's view on these minorities might change for the better. Neither the critical function nor the "hedonistic" function of literature will ever exhaust the possible functions of itself. What I am trying to say regarding the role of literature is what Derrida elsewhere says quite aptly: "First of all, it [assigning a critical function to literature] would limit literature by fixing a mission for it, a single mission. This would be to finalize literature, to assign it a meaning, a program, and a regulating ideal, whereas it could also have other essential functions, or even have no function, no usefulness outside itself." (Derrida, Acts of Literature, p.38) At last, I want to add that I don't think that books are often for enjoyment. Books force us to think, and this is something that can be hurtful. It forces us to change opinion, views, etc. I want to end my somewhat pretentious and overly lenghty comment by quoting Kafka: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

@closereadingpoetry

9 күн бұрын

Really great question, and I'm glad you mentioned this along with those quotations. I'm not at odds with you here. I consider enjoyment not just in a mere epicurean pleasure but rather as a form of thought. Enjoyment is not the role. It's the essential form of knowledge by which those other power capacities may be opened up and by which those greater roles may be assigned. In reading, enjoyment is the prerequisite for all political, social, and philosophical questions. That's why literature can be enjoyed by all AND can have a critical function or role outside its own sphere. To prioritize enjoyment as I do is not to prioritize it to the exclusion of other important functions literature can and should perform. And the enjoyment of literature does often involve a pain or violence. Aristotle's catharsis -- a purging of toxic emotions through our enjoyment of tragedy -- is also a psychological "enjoyment" that involves unpleasant emotions and provocations. It is an experience more complex than superficial happiness. It's the painful and fulfilling experience of growth or curiosity. The passage from Kafka is so apt for this. Enjoyment of reading literature often involves receiving a wound that never heals.

@tommydebruin2949

9 күн бұрын

@@closereadingpoetry thank you for your response and clarification regarding your use of the word "enjoyment". I could not agree more! One could perhaps say that there can be no critical function without a certain aesthetic seduction. This would explain the need of for and use of rhetorics in politics and political activism.

This video and Adam's opinions remind me of Nicanor Parra's poem "Young Poets." A short, beautiful piece encouraging artistic liberties and innovations. I'd recommend a brief Google search to read the poem! :-)