What stood out to me in the chapter “Author/ity” was a distinct distrust of the notion of the Western canon. Obviously the writers think much of Foucault’s hegemonic conception of discourse, as the chapter seemed to be largely founded upon its implications. While I don’t feel as though I have any right, having never read him, to comment on Foucault—beyond the acknowledgment that his theory seems as though it must be true, though maybe trivially so—I do think it’d be worthwhile to air a few opinions on the canon. That the writers of The Theory Toolbox are overly hostile to the canon, to the point of excess, I think is clear enough when it is considered that they remark of the canon that it is “based on honor and reverence as opposed to critical questioning and challenge” (11). It is certain that honor and reverence are an element to the canon, but is it in fact based on it? Is it at all fair to claim of the canon that it is antithetical to “critical questioning and challenge”?
It seems to me that these judgments by the writers are indicative of a broader trend. In the 21st century, the canon is hated; it is contrasted with multiculturalism and progress, becoming the unfortunate symbol for the elitist institutionalization of certain cultural ideals at the expense of egalitarianism. This is an attitude which—I wouldn’t even hope to deny—has an element of truth to it. Because the canon is necessarily a part of the conception of what is socially prestigious, it is an unavoidable byproduct of this that it would contribute to the marginalization of certain cultures and peoples. What concerns me is not denying this proposition, but rather trying to restrain it from clouding over the whole canon as if the best choice were to garbage the entire thing all at once.
I’ve noticed that many people take an inordinate satisfaction in insulting the heads of the canon. I remember recently a friend telling me with relish of his thought that James Joyce is drastically overrated, a specimen of writerly self-indulgence run rampant. I asked what he’d read of Joyce, and the answer was one of his short stories along with a couple chapters of Ulysses. Another classmate complained to me of our being in a course on the history of Western Civilization. Her objection to the course was that she “didn’t want to hear any more about the history of white people.” She did not, however, explain if the reading selections were poor, or if the history was misrepresented, or if the whole course was somehow useless.
A conception of the canon as defective has transformed into the conception of it as arbitrary, useless, and pernicious. This, it seems to me, has resulted in the exchange of an attitude of patient humility in approaching “great” texts for one of immediate rejection and condemnation. Whether or not these texts are worth our patience certainly is open to debate, but the only way to intelligently undertake such a debate is to begin by attending to these texts patiently. And even if the canon as a whole promotes cultural hegemony, that does not mean that each of its texts do individually, nor that they are empty of value. I suppose my point is that there is a definite value to approaching Shakespeare with a kind of reverence, so as to constrain our dismissiveness, to force us to thoughtfully engage with our culture before we decide if and how to change it.
Great meditation on what is perhaps undue ire directed towards the canon. The authors, I think, offer a cautionary tale about casting the canon up there in the realm of those transcendental signifieds, those concepts that remain somehow untouchable and not in need of explanation. Their way out of this predicament is, of course, to be “skeptical” and to start putting words like “great” and “genius” in scare quotes, strategically distancing themselves from their power. And I think you do a great job of questioning what can seem a rather aggressive, and a rather close-minded, discussion of this topic, reduced, as it is, to binaries of “reverence” and “skepticism” as though something like reverential questioning can’t exist.
But their point, stripped of its more aggressive aspects, is simply that we need to make such concepts and the things they hold a part of an ongoing negotiation about what is culturally important and why. And it should go without saying, as you note, that we should “thoughtfully engage with our culture before we decide if and how to change it.” I think approaching the written word (or film, or whatever) with a sense of reference is a great place to begin, and I don’t think it precludes more careful scrutiny rooted in a curious questioning of how a certain text is read or interpreted or taught. In practice, this has not meant a wholesale rejection of the canon, but an ongoing revision of it, making sure it is inclusive and represents not some universal idea of human experience, but many embodied experiences. That seems necessary. But it does not discard the necessity of engaging all manner of works.
Joyce, you might have told your friend, as an Irish author is actually a postcolonial writer. And the Western Civ class you describe also include non-western voices even if it hasn’t shaken that distinctly 20th-century title.