Narrow-minded Collectors

[Huysmans]

Originally Posted by todeen

I'm an English literature major, and we call the top 100 books the canon. Generally it is represented by dead white guys, who were chosen by old white guys. But over the last 20-30 years, more open minded academics have started to change the canon by broadening and redefining what's important. It looks a lot like NET54 organization as they break it up into groups. Post Colonialism. Feminism. Realism/Naturalism. Contemporary. Poetry. World Lit. Victorian Era. Elizabethan. African American Lit. It's a glorious time to be alive if you're a reader as the canon has grown to adopt diversity.

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Not everyone shares the changing of the canon as something positive, Allan Bloom, in his highly influential The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987) argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture. His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored by cultural relativists.

Additionally, defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has written:

"There is a certain irony in this [i.e., politicized objections to the canon] in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked." (this was taken from online)