History and the Canon

Abstract

History and the A decade ago these would have been dismissed among literary critics as the language of ecclesiastics or historians. Now they are heavy professional concepts, recurrent in forums and conferences-words with which to conjure status, to weave advancement. They are also concepts alive in the political world, the world engaged, for example, by the new National Endowment for the Humanities report on the humanities in higher education (To Reclaim a Legacy, November, 1984). As these ideas are absorbed into the literary profession and become part of the standard critical vocabulary, as they are debated in the academy and in the councils of government, we are forced to recollect the deeply political content of terms like and the The debate about the literary is not over terminology-a new way of addressing old texts. For the literary is, at its center, a construct, like a history text, which expresses what a society reads back into its past as important to its future. Concern for the developed, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Society and the Profession, 1958-1983, PMLA, Centennial Issue, May, 1984, pp. 414426), from outside the literary profession, indeed, from outside academe. It emerged from questions raised by the movements for social change of the 1960s. They asked, about curricula, textbooks, research: where are the blacks? where are the women? The canon, which had largely been a given, became over a decade and more a question. Similarly, the interest in history within the literary profession was largely sustained by some scholars on the left dissatisfied with examining the formal structures of literary works. They wanted to know about the impact of a work in the world, on the society in which it was written and on our own. These two concerns, for and for history, began to merge during the past decade, especially, I think, as feminist critics like Elizabeth Ammons, Joan Hedrick, and Jane Tompkins pointed to what we might call the dialectics of validation: that is, certain historical constructs gave importance to a body of texts, while the weight attributed to the texts sustained the very credibility of received versions of history. The search of the social movements for a useable past led outside this closed circle. Indeed, it has led to a sustained attack upon it, as was suggested more than a decade ago when some of us began to use the term canon in the more or less jocular phrase building a proletarian canon. We saw the construction of that weapon as part of an assault on the remoter spires of academe, a fact perhaps too easily forgotten when we hear the word canon echoed from one to another portal in those upper reaches of the academy. The search of the social movements led to