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Questions of literary canonicity have been stalking me for the past few months, mostly in relation to teaching. Some I began thinking about because I was designing a course called Currents in Global Literature, and when faced with giving English majors perhaps their only taste of writings from beyond the U.S. and U.K., I had to figure out my priorities.

One of the things I decided to do was try to provoke the students to think about why they have read what they have in school, why they have the assumptions they do about books and writers, and how they can learn more. So I had them watch TED Talks by Chris Abani and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, listen to Stephen Snyder on "The Business of International Literature", and read Dan Edelstein on "Gerrymandering the Canon", Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to Write About Africa", and Manijeh Nasrabadi on her experiences trying to write and publish a memoir. Additionally, our poetry textbook challenged the templates of Romanticism they had previously encountered in other courses and complexified their understanding of literary history -- not just the history itself, but how it got to be that way.

Global literature in our class, then, was presented not as some ethereal essence floating through the ether, but as a system of literary production, distribution, and reception. It's too easy to gain a feeling from our curriculum that U.S. and U.K. fiction, poetry, and (to a lesser extent) drama are Literature and everything else is some exotic offshoot. The department has done a lot to try to mitigate that, but there are huge disciplinary systems in place that make it difficult.

Last week, I was part of a panel discussion for English majors about canonicity. Various questions had been raised by majors this term about what they were learning -- particularly for the English Education majors. Hearing these questions, one of my colleagues decided to put together the informal discussion, and so a group of us created 5-minute statements about canonicity and education, then we had a free and wide-ranging discussion of all sorts of things related to it all.


In my opening statement, I tried to differentiate between the practical and the theoretical/ideal. After saying that canons are forms of discourse and not just lists, and that they are, at heart, expressions and codifications of power, I said that there is a canon of books taught in high school English classes in the U.S., and lists do a good job of showing us its borders and imperatives. For instance, the 1989 study reported by Arthur Applebee in "Book Length Works Taught in High School English Classes" (PDF) updates a 1964 study of the same thing and discovers that very little has changed. In my experience, those books remain common in high schools, though there has in many places been a strong push to sprinkle in more texts by writers who are not white men.

But for about fifty years now, the core books taught in most high schools in the U.S. have generally remained the same.  The high school canon achieved its canonicity mostly through inertia: these books were taught because they wer