11/18/07

Dealing with the Ever Expanding Cannon

After our discussions on curriculum and cannon, I cannot help but to think about (as well as critique) the formation of curricula in any school. Should high schools better prepare students to encounter diverse literature? It seems like many, and I do not have an amazing knowledge to base this on, read the "classics" and not much else, i.e. you read a new Shakespeare play each of the four years you are in high school. I know one of my best English classes in high school included Plato, Thucydides, Johnathan Swift, and Thomas DeQuincey. While we did encounter Shakespeare, we read a text which would not seem to be the appropriate play to use--Titus Andronicus. Other English teachers were taken aback by what we read--and I am aware that this may just be the experience of my high school. All this to say, that I actually enjoyed a kind of opening up of the cannon in my very "safe" high school curriculum. Although, I know that at least one of the four mentioned has to be in that acceptable cannon, at the time it was amazing to read them.
All this to say, how can we make the cannon inclusive? What is "enough" to satisfy that inclusion? For the most part, we seemed willing to throw everything into the cannon, I just don't know how can ever cover everything or even do it justice. I can't help but to think including works earlier in the educational system would help greatly. Still, we would get nowhere near to reading everything, but I think it helps to bring in "challenging" works that might be "better-suited" in a college setting into high schools. Enough rambling. What do you think?

7 comments:

Emily D. said...

I agree with Jackie that it is beneficial to bring a diverse collection of more challenging works into the high school setting. But this does pose the problem of which works to choose and how to choose them. My high school’s curriculum did a good job of narrowing the canon down, but still trying to be inclusive. Each year of high school, the English curriculum had a certain theme. For example, freshmen classes had a theme of self-discovery. These classes read books from multiple time periods, ranging from Shakespeare to more contemporary works. However, the books all had a common motif of struggling to find one’s identity.

I’m not sure if all high schools would benefit from including more difficult works in the curriculum though because many schools do not have the resources or staff to teach these in the way they should be taught. Also, high school English is there to provide a basic foundation of critical thought and analysis for students, so that may be why most schools stick with the standard “classics.” It gives students a common background of knowledge. Also, there are certain general pop culture references and specific storylines that are recreated in our current culture. For example, “Romeo and Juliet” is a story that has lived on, and in our society today, there are countless references to this and many of Shakespeare’s other works. Therefore, it is important for students to read these “classics” so that they can understand these frequent references. Then again, I suppose these references are so popular because so many people had these stories engraved in their minds during schooling. So I guess it could just be a big cycle that is difficult to escape.

amygrelck said...

i'm also torn on this subject. part of me celebrates teachers who try to include the more obscure texts that are designed to expand students' minds and get them to think about different things (whether or not these texts are part of the canon). for example, one of my high school teachers, while still sticking to names that are (mostly) in the canon had us read texts that most other classes didn't. for example, we didn't just read Hamlet, but we also read Kafka, Camus, Sartre...i felt that i really benefited from reading these texts instead of the ones the other senior classes were reading, since the goal my teacher was trying to accomplish (getting us to look more closely at ourselves and the ways we were living our lives) was better served by reading these books than, say, the scarlet letter.
however, part of me really does regret that i didn't read macbeth in high school. i've thought before that it is probably something i should read, seeing as most other college juniors have read it by this point. but i wonder why it is that i feel this way, and also wonder if it's for reasons like these that we stick to the classics year after year. and again i come back to the thought that there simply isn't enough time to read it all.
plus, when we spend so much time on literature of the past, not only do we not have time to look at what's being written today, but students don't usually have time to spend investigating these works on their own and reading them on their own time.
i haven't really gotten us anywhere as far as this discussion goes, but i definitely understand why it may be that we keep reading the classics-it's simply too tough to choose what else to read, and to reconcile with the fact that if we leave the classics behind, our students may find themselves lost in discussion when others who have read those bring them up.

renee said...

The real problem with the "ever expanding cannon" seems not to be the idea of expansion, nor in fact the ideas of either bringing into the cannon more "obsucre," "modern," or untraditional texts or the alternate view that teaching such text is somehow stepping away from cannon; what we're really not convinced of is what we want the cannon to accomplish.

Do we form a cannon in schools, as Emily suggests, to "provide a basic foundation of critical thought and analysis for students," or do we form cannons for some other reason? Certainly literature classes have the ability--and we might hope the goal--of encouraging this kind of critical thought. But these courses, like schooling itself, also serve the function of socialization: we read the materials we do, at times, for the simple and rather ridiculous reason that others have read them before us. I know it sounds too simplistic, but THE CANNON is just that--what has been read over and over again before to such a degree that it has become in some way central to the cultural base that unites all consumers and promoters of THE CANNON.

"What should we read?" is an interesting question, but one which we will never sufficiently answer, if only because we are too preoccupied with what we BELIEVE we are EXPECTED to read.

Kristen said...

Jackie writes, “How can we make the cannon inclusive? What is "enough" to satisfy that inclusion?” This may sound a little pessimistic of me, but I have given up all hope of ever being able to attain a “proper” inclusion of works. First of all, who is it that can determine what a “proper” cannon is? Secondly, even if we knew what the right mix was, there is WAY too much literature out there to be entirely properly inclusive. One will ALWAYS be excluding something worthwhile, at least that is my viewpoint. I think that Renee came to the same conclusion that I have—that we will never be able to answer the question of “what should we read?”

However, I recognize that SOMETHING must be done to put together a set of literature for the purposes of education. We must do what is “good enough.” So then, how do we find what is “good enough”? I think that what is “good enough” depends on what we want the goal of any cannon to be, like Renee says. Perhaps there is/should be a special cannon for high school English classes. Perhaps there is a different set for college level students. The main point, as Amy also states, is that there simply isn’t enough time for what is “proper.” And I think that I agree with Amy in that we choose the classics since “it's simply too tough to choose what else to read.” If classics have been tried and found true, maybe, even though it is not a perfect system, we should stick with them BECAUSE they are “good enough” and maybe allow teachers just a little leeway to add in more modern or out-of-the-cannon books to stir things up—but only every once in a while.

~ Kristen

Marcus Mitchell said...

This discussion reminds me of one of the ten tenets of liberal humanism that we studied at the beginning of the semester: "...good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in..." (Barry 17). While this is just one of many theories about literature, it may be particularly useful in explaining why the "classics" continue to dominate high school English courses.

As Renee said, "...we are too preoccupied with what we BELIEVE we are EXPECTED to read." I think many educators and students believe that we should read Shakespeare, for example, because themes throughout many of his plays are applicable to life today. Then, we're compelled to consider other "classics." What about Jane Austen? The Brontes? Chaucer? Joyce?

By the time we study the "classic" literature in countless English courses, it's almost as though we shy away from more contemporary, lesser-known authors. Until we take the time to determine whether or not contemporary literature is also timeless significance (worthy of being a "classic," perhaps), the tried-and-true works of Shakespeare, Austen, and others will continue to reign.

Brian C. Egdorf said...

Reign, that is, in the anglophone world. Oh yes, there is another world outside of the "I love Hobbes and I love order." We (probably) read Shakespeare to indoctrinate our young high-schoolers with the "correct" ideas of kings and queens, of dying for honor, and homosexuality. Wait. Scratch that last one. But in all seriousness, it seems the more globalization takes over our lives, the more we cling to our national literatures in hope that they will survive. Texts by "Kafka, Camus, Sartre" ARE huge parts of the canon in at least Western Europe (and definitely beyond). They are studied with just as much scrutiny as our Shakespeare-Austen-etc greats. It would be good if we could read all of them and could cross-analyze all of their...analysis. In a long-tail internet world, however, everyone is reading everything. Suddenly everything has social and cultural value, even the obscure "X" poets from the "X" era. The "basic foundation of critical thought" that "Emily D" speaks of is just a part of the long tail as all of the other "X" literatures of the world. Why we read them reflects the political and social movements towards them (such as favoring order) rather than their inherent "classic-ness."

Katie said...

I'm not sure if it was a general trend in most highschools, but I know mine was separated into different "tracks" and it seemed like the honors classes read more of the "classic" books that I've encountered again in literature classes and discussions whereas the other classes read some of the classics but incorporated more modern literature and "genre fiction" into their curriculum. I don't think that that is a good way to be separating literature, especially in an environment where students are supposed to be gaining a base of knowledge and I think that when schools divide what the classes read in that way it perpetuates the stereotypes of "classic" literature being "harder" and more valuable than others, which is not always the case.

I'm not sure what to do about expanding the cannon, on one level I agree that we've stuck with the classics because they provide a good base, but I definitely feel that it is important to incorporate more diverse literature into the classroom.