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 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005