File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 699


From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Critical Realism? Jumble on English Depts.
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 22:36:03 -7800 (CST)


Rob writes:

>>Death to all English Departments!

<<I suspect you won't have too long to wait, Ralph.  Whilst you deride
their use value (which was great before the pomos got there and threw out
a canon they'd never read so they could justify watching soap operas and
reading marvel comics), I fear it is their moot exchange value that will
kill 'em. >>

Rob, if you want to talk about English departments (or, rather, the "study
of literature"), you can't do it by merely citing (to reject or accept)
the *conclusions* of others, because the *same* conclusions (apparently)
can be reached for really opposing reasons, and the different reasons give
different content to the conclusions.

Now there are lots of things wrong with the pomos, but "throwing out the
canon" is not one of them, for a number orf reasons:

(1) "They" (and watch who "they" is here) have *not* thrown out the canon.

(2) The canon SHOULD be thrown out, thought parts of it can and will be
brought back in again.

(3) The traditionalists threw out the canon about 70 years ago.

(4) The traditionalists threw out the canon about 170 years ago.

(5) The traditionalists threw out the canon about 500 years ago.

(6) The traditionalists threw out the canon about 1600 years ago.

(7) The traditionalists failed to make enough copies of the canon about
2400 years ago and most of it burned up in the fires in the library at
Alexandria.

(8) What one might consider the core of the canon consists of three
works which throw out the canon (from this point on I'll stick to
the "canon" covered in English Departments):

	*Paradise Regained*
	*The Dunciad*
	*The Prelude*

What they all have (implicitly) in common is the (unadmitted) conviction
that there is such a flood of *good* books (Pope *said* "bad books") that
the concept of a good book doesn't hold any water any longer, because what
is the point of writing a great work if there is a whole mountain of
equally good works, all of which no one, not even a committee, can read. 
(One can see the same thread running through the essays and notes of
Whitman, Arnold, James, Pater, Eliot, Pound, ....) So the only way to
preserve a canon is by continually destroying it.

So you are really being silly when you write, "great before the pomos got
there and threw out a canon they'd never read so they could justify
watching soap operas and reading marvel comics)." First, I suspect Veblen
had English Departments (and/or classical departments) as much in mind as
other departments when he wanted to sub-title his book, *The Higher
Learning in America* "A Study in Human Depravity." 

Your "so they could justify watching soap operas" is reactionary nonsense,
and the main purpose of most people who make such slurs is to justify
contempt for the people who do watch them. (I continued to teach "the
canon" myself because it was all I knew -- and what with a heavy teaching
load, political activity, heavy reading in politics, economics, Marx,
Lenin, etc, battling clinical depression, I hardly had time or energy to
do my formal education all over again, but I regret very very much that I
have never read the scores, perhaps even hundreds, of marvellous writers
from just the last two centuries in the U.S. that were excluded from "the
canon" that I learned. I bought the collected poems of one great U.S. poet
in the last year (they aren't avaiable in hardback)--Langston Hughes, not
*one* of whose poems were on the prelim reading list at the University of
Michigan 40 years ago. I got my Ph.D. without reading a line of E.B. 
Browning and was absolutely astounded when about 10 years I found out how
really good a writer she was. (She wrote an astoundingly harsh poem on
slavery in the United States, which began with a demurral that, given the
sliminess of England, how could an English woman presume to attack *any*
other country.)

Carrol



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