Paul Lauter (1932–) from “Canon Theory and Emergent Practice,” Canons and Contents (1991)

Abstract

This division between the concerns of what I have come to call “canonical criticism” and those of what is called “theory” is, I think, one fact of current literary practice in the United States. In another chapter I have attempted to trace the very differing histories of canonical and academic criticism since the late 1960s; I do not wish to pursue that story here, except to underline the fact that canon criticism was initially an effort to carry the politics of the 1960s social movements into the work sociallyengaged academics actually did, especially into our classrooms. Consequently, canon criticism first influenced curriculum and thus gradually the margins of publishing and scholarship. Somewhat later, it came to affect the selection of texts about which graduate students and critics write; more slowly still, which works became sufficiently revered to find their way into footnotes, indices or other measures of academic weight. More recently, it has begun altering the “mainstream” of publishing as well as generating wide public debate. Such has been the history of books like Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or, more recently, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In the most recent stages of this process, as I shall point out below, some of the concerns of canonical criticism have converged with those arising from academic “theory.” Even so, this division is only one of those that need to be explored. If one were at a convention of educators, one might be struck by the conflict between those advocating and those denouncing the canonical proposals of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and Lynne Cheney.KeywordsLiterary HistoryCanon TheoryCultural LiteracyAcademic CriticismCanonical TextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.