Working Past the Canon: Thoughts on a Skills-Based Curriculum

Abstract

WORKING PAST THE CANON: THOUGHTS ON A SKILLS-BASED CURRICULUM K IM IA N M IC H A S IW York University I C a n we imagine a curriculum without a canon? If the canon is what gets taught, or if what gets taught rapidly becomes the canon, is there any point in phrasing the question?1 Perhaps opening up the canon, the catchphrase of earlier investigations, is the only way through the problems posed by our recognition of how much is excluded in the Norton Anthology approach to lit­ erary study. Perhaps, as Robert von Hallberg suggested in his 1984 collection Canons, “the prospect of teaching art without canons . . . is not altogether encouraging. Perhaps more importantly, we should recognize that, on this score, there is a danger of academic critics overestimating their own impor­ tance and autonomy in the process of canon-formation and wrongly thinking that they can choose to dispense with canons” (2). Von Hallberg packs a good deal into these tentative ponderings. He ac­ cepts the inevitability of canon-formation at least as far as teaching is con­ cerned: the canon is what gets taught. Then, in a nice evasive move, he displaces any responsibility for this inevitability from the professoriat. We couldn’t do anything about it anyway; and if we think we can, we’re enter­ taining fantasies of a power that we don’t have. The implication is that we, as teachers, inherit the canons formed by others and can do little more than to extend invitations to some of those who have been left off the guest list. We are in the position of good bourgeois liberal club members who discover, to our surprise, that the club has discriminatory policies in its constitution. We can’t abolish the club—what on earth would we do then?—but we can loosen up the rules a bit. But if professors merely custode and transmit, who does create canons? As Richard Ohmann has demonstrated, even in contemporary fiction, all the publishers, reviewers, publicity machines, and purchasing public can do is to elevate a work to pre-canonical status. Any further establishment is left to the academy: “It is hard to think of a novel more than twenty-five years old, aside from specialist fiction and Gone with the Wind, that still commands a large readership outside of school and col­ lege” (Politics 75). English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, 4, December 1991 Accordingly we ought to have doubts about von Hallberg’s consolations and to face the possibility that we do, en masse, assemble and disseminate the canon or a set of homologous, overlapping canons that look very like assertions of a cultural heritage or a tradition. No more truly consolatory, or justified for that matter, are the options of opening the canon and/or of teaching the canon critically. Opening the canon is a classically liberal strat­ egy that, when armed with Bakhtinian notions of the dialogical struggles to control the means of signification or marxisant narratives of disenfranchise­ ment, serves to create a suppressed pluralism for the past. This strategy presents a comforting contrast between an agonistic, culturally tyrannical past and an improved tolerant today. Among more politically astute in­ structors the paean to the present may be bracketed and projected into a possible future, but the opinion, pandemic among students in historicist courses, that things were really much worse back then is not, I think, a complete misprision. Moreover, opening the canon in no way explains why this set of texts, however much enlarged or enriched, should be taught when another set is not. A more sophisticated version of flinging open the club doors is the dialec­ tical or contestatory model proposed by John Guillory and Gerald Graff. In Guillory’s phrasing, “this opening does not mean simply a larger canon, that is, one with greater powers of co-optation but multiple, conflicting canons” (362, n. 33). Parallel is Graff’s curricular suggestion that courses taught from differing, conflicting perspectives be paired to expose the student to the disputes shaping the discipline and to oblige instructors to bring their own differences out into the open...