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The True Mainstream in Exile

    "Changing the Literary Canon and Democratizing the Institution of Literature"

    That's the title of my very first M.Phil English assignment. Got any input I could brainstorm about? Current reading recs include Western Canon by Harold Bloom and Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton. Just looking for thoughts to munch on.

    It’s a large topic; I’ll very quickly recommend some essay-length treatments that might speak to whatever various sub-aspects of the topic you want to focus on; I assume most of these can readily found online, licitly or illicitly; I’m almost a decade out of grad school, and it’s been well over a decade since my coursework, so if you want more contemporary references, you’ll have to ask someone else.

    Eagleton’s book, especially “The Rise of English” chapter, is definitely a good first stop (though take his appalling glibness and snideness with several grains of salt and at the very least read Matthew Arnold’s “Function of Criticism at the Present Time” for yourself).

    For French Theory, try Barthes’s “Death of the Author” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “What Is a Minor Literature?” for the demotion of the integral, self-sufficient work upon which the canon is modeled and the elevation instead of the heterogenous and radically socio-political text, which can, implicitly, be any text (though Barthes’s and D/G’s examples are canonical).

    For the sociology of literature, there’s Bourdieu’s “Field of Cultural Production,” with its argument that the disinterested aesthetic posture on which the canon is based is a willfully exercised form of social power (skip the diagrams).

    For Anglo-American identity politics and its discontents, see Elaine Showalter’s introduction to A Literature of Her Own vs. Toril Moi’s introduction to Sexual/Textual Ethics for a debate over whether a female counter-canon and its attendant criticism should be humanist or anti-humanist; Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic” from Epistemology of the Closet for how to criticize the old canon itself from minoritized positions, African-American and queer respectively; and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” for a defense of the political necessity of open-ended (i.e., not theoretical) study and reading of contemporary non-white-male non-canonical literature, in this case late-20th-century black women’s fiction.

    For the contemporary digital humanities mentality, try Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature,” with its techno-polemic against close reading of canonical literature and recommendation of distant reading of all literature instead.

    For early versions of the pro and con stances re: popular culture as more vitally democratic object of study, there’s Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry” (con) and Fiedler’s “Both Ends Against the Middle” (pro).

    Irving Howe’s humanist and old left defense of the canon, “The Value of the Canon,” is finally well worth reading.