Considering the Canon, Part III

In “Considering the Canon Part II” (I swear this is the last one!), I wrote about a friend who hated Henry James. I made the point that one problem with the canon is how subjective it is, but another thing to be taken out of the conversation was the relevance of the canon today. Because, the thing is, my friend didn’t just hate Henry James—he had no idea who he was until this second semester of sophomore year of college.

I brushed away my friend’s opinion because he’s a computer science major and hates reading (basically), but his lack of knowledge really surprised me. Maybe I’m just weird and like English a lot (cough cough), but I thought everyone had at least heard of Henry James and knew he was a famous American writer.

I’m studying abroad in Ireland this semester at the same university James Joyce went to—and no, it is not Trinity College, thank you. I was talking to an Irish student the other day here at University College Dublin, and naturally we got on the topic of James Joyce. And… apparently they don’t read Joyce in high school. And since this student wasn’t an English major, he would probably go his whole life never reading Joyce.

What? An Irishman—a Dubliner at that—who hasn’t read Joyce? Isn’t that illegal or something?

And finally: The kid drinking beer in my living room at this moment asked me what I’m writing, and I told him that I was writing about the relevance of the literary canon. He responded with, “What the fuck is the literary canon?”

All of this brings me to a point that has been made by others regarding the relevance of the canon. Is it still relevant?

Most literature and general liberal arts scholars would argue that yes, it is. Our literary history can tell us as much about ourselves as a people and culture as other academic areas, art is valuable in our development and culture, etc. In the olden days when rich white boys went to Harvard or Oxford because they were basically the only college around, a solid understanding of the literary classics was a very strong part of any education—no matter what field you were going into.

But today, we have people who haven’t heard of anyone besides Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and only maybe they read them, because who reads books assigned to them in high school? or, people who haven’t read the most famous artist to come out of their entire country (unless you count Bono…). Does this mean there’s something wrong with our culture, or is this something educators should pick up on—does this mean the canon is not as relevant to today’s generation as it used to be?

The world we’re living in today is vastly different from the one of Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, or Ralph Ellison. Technology is evolving at a scary-rapid pace, changing not only the literary scene and the way people interact with literature, but the world as a whole. Our generation faces a future of a global identity, in the context of a world being simultaneously defined more every day by corporations instead of borders, and yet wars are still being fought over said borders. The economy is in the shit, and our generation is slowly being lost as we move back in with our parents and work at coffee shops—if we’re lucky. The environment is something we can no longer sit by idly and praise, but instead it is something to be argued about and hopefully saved before its too late. Where does the canon fall into this new age? Sure, people went through hard times before—there were other economic recessions and depressions, other lost generations, other political crises. But it’s the same. It’s not the same voice and not the same time.

There’s also the aspect of popular culture. Back in Shakespeare’s time, Shakespeare is what they did. Shakespeare was popular culture, and everyone, the poor, the young, the old, the rich went to his plays. Of course, he wasn’t considered a “classic” at this point in time, but this makes one think about today’s popular literature and drama, and whether we should not be spending our time studying them.

Most important, people these days appear to be just fine without reading the classics, or, apparently, even knowing what the canon is. Why read them when you can learn everything you need about culture and history from reading magazines and popular fiction, if you’re going to read at all? The world has a focus on science, math, and business. It’s generally known that those who know study literature don’t make any money and don’t necessarily do anything important. To top it off, books don’t tell us anything that movies, TV, or the internet can’t. Information isn’t even tangible anymore—it’s something on a screen.

I’ve heard other students—usually not English majors—say that they want to read more modern work, if anything. They’re not going to enjoy anything they have to read for school, but at least it would be something they could relate to, then. Contemporary books depict a world students can relate to now. And if they are going to read some Hemingway, it’s just so that they can say that they’ve read Hemingway.

Of course, I disagree with all this. In fact, those past paragraphs were nearly impossible to write because I kept disagreeing with myself over and over. It’s hard to write something like that when you don’t believe in it. No matter how much I think about it, I still think the classics are completely relevant, it just may take a few minutes to think about it and make the connection.

It really starts with creating an interest and appreciation in literature in the first place. Students will never think literature is relevant to their lives if they have no interest in it in the first place. That’s just the way students are, and it would take an entire change in culture to increase interest.

But I believe that introducing more contemporary work could help to develop better citizens of today’s global, rapidly ever-changing, and generally rather screwed-up world. Because the fact is each aspect of technology contributes something else to one’s knowledge; movies aren’t the same as TV, TV is not the same as the internet, Twitter doesn’t replace the telephone, and books are not like any of the above. The discrepancies may be hard to spot, but they are there. Books will always be relevant—but to what extent is the past and to what extent is the present? We prepare students with knowledge of the past with a canon they could care less about, but what about knowledge of the present?