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The Canon and tertiary education
May. 18th, 2007 10:15 pmThere's currently a debate, or set of debates, triggered by the ACTA report on teaching Shakespeare in university (see, for example, Timothy Burke's comments at Easily Distracted).
The issue as posed seems to me to be just wrong. First of all, the implicit subtext -- that all university students need to take any core parts of a canon -- seems to me to be misguided, because the role of a university education isn't that of a secondary education. It's specialization, not being a generalist. If you're a Chemistry major, or for that matter a Classics or Philosophy major, there's no obvious reason for you to have to take parts of a core common understanding at that level; that should already have happened at a secondary education level. (This gets us into a different debate, about the effectiveness and function of a high-school education, though.)
For English majors, of course, it's a different question. There's a good argument that you can't consider yourself to have a grasp of the field of English Literature in any real sense without Shakespeare under your belt, as it were. The problem is, the same statement can be applied to Milton and Wordsworth, and probably Pope, Joyce, and Jane Austen; and there are no departments I know of which require a genuinely thorough grounding in major authors; at best, that's required for Comprehensives, and frequently not even then in certain areas of specialization.
The debate also points us in the direction of thinking about what we mean when we talk of a canon. My immediate urge is to identify the major writers who have an unchallenged high rank and without whom modern culture would have developed differently in a significant way. Thus: Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid (maybe), Augustine (maybe), Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Milton, Camoens, Cervantes, Goethe, Joyce, Proust (maybe), the Bible. (Note that the list excludes, e.g. classical Persian or Chinese literature not because it isn't great but because those works help define other cultures: whereas you can make a good argument for the cultures of Western Europe and North America to be branches of a single culture with much intermingling, and within which we live.)
But while that list (or a variant of it) is defensible along one line of argument, it becomes far more problematic if we think of a canon as something to be taught: for no imaginable curriculum will teach all those authors, certainly not as they deserve to be taught (i.e. in their own languages). (The Harvard Classics approach can take a poor stab at it, but it's a very poor stab.) A canon that is taught in schools --particularly if we identify the appropriate arena as secondary school -- is going to include only a subset of the authors above, and is likely to include other works by conventional agreement: Pride and Prejudice is not only likely to be more accessible to a Canadian student than Gerusalemme Liberata, but it's far more likely to feed directly into a good chunk of the cultural references the students will end up deploying and having to understand others deploy (whether it's Helen Fielding's works or the modern Regency romance).
The whole thing is a reiteration of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes, and about as fruitful on either side; and in fact, it's actually worse. The Anciens were actually talking about an entire set of authors in various areas; taking Shakespeare as an isolated idol is pure bardolatry. (My high school had plenty of Shakespeare; but no Marlowe or Spenser or Sidney, and nothing that I can remember from the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Centuries, either.)
The issue as posed seems to me to be just wrong. First of all, the implicit subtext -- that all university students need to take any core parts of a canon -- seems to me to be misguided, because the role of a university education isn't that of a secondary education. It's specialization, not being a generalist. If you're a Chemistry major, or for that matter a Classics or Philosophy major, there's no obvious reason for you to have to take parts of a core common understanding at that level; that should already have happened at a secondary education level. (This gets us into a different debate, about the effectiveness and function of a high-school education, though.)
For English majors, of course, it's a different question. There's a good argument that you can't consider yourself to have a grasp of the field of English Literature in any real sense without Shakespeare under your belt, as it were. The problem is, the same statement can be applied to Milton and Wordsworth, and probably Pope, Joyce, and Jane Austen; and there are no departments I know of which require a genuinely thorough grounding in major authors; at best, that's required for Comprehensives, and frequently not even then in certain areas of specialization.
The debate also points us in the direction of thinking about what we mean when we talk of a canon. My immediate urge is to identify the major writers who have an unchallenged high rank and without whom modern culture would have developed differently in a significant way. Thus: Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid (maybe), Augustine (maybe), Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Milton, Camoens, Cervantes, Goethe, Joyce, Proust (maybe), the Bible. (Note that the list excludes, e.g. classical Persian or Chinese literature not because it isn't great but because those works help define other cultures: whereas you can make a good argument for the cultures of Western Europe and North America to be branches of a single culture with much intermingling, and within which we live.)
But while that list (or a variant of it) is defensible along one line of argument, it becomes far more problematic if we think of a canon as something to be taught: for no imaginable curriculum will teach all those authors, certainly not as they deserve to be taught (i.e. in their own languages). (The Harvard Classics approach can take a poor stab at it, but it's a very poor stab.) A canon that is taught in schools --particularly if we identify the appropriate arena as secondary school -- is going to include only a subset of the authors above, and is likely to include other works by conventional agreement: Pride and Prejudice is not only likely to be more accessible to a Canadian student than Gerusalemme Liberata, but it's far more likely to feed directly into a good chunk of the cultural references the students will end up deploying and having to understand others deploy (whether it's Helen Fielding's works or the modern Regency romance).
The whole thing is a reiteration of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes, and about as fruitful on either side; and in fact, it's actually worse. The Anciens were actually talking about an entire set of authors in various areas; taking Shakespeare as an isolated idol is pure bardolatry. (My high school had plenty of Shakespeare; but no Marlowe or Spenser or Sidney, and nothing that I can remember from the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Centuries, either.)
