For Credit: Ready, Aim, Fire that Canon! (DEADLINE EXTENDED)

UPDATE (4/2):  After wallowing all this past week in the profoundly revisionist canon, we return on Monday to the world of white upper-class men.  The Bard is one of those canonical poems that has not survived.   One consequence of the end of The Canon is that when it disappeared it took with it the sense that there was a single, linear anglophone literary tradition that the educated person should be familiar with.  So long as readers shared a general knowledge of important key works and events of literary history, the Bard was a fairly accessible poem--it drew on a common body of familiar knowledge.  As readers increasingly have to rely on footnotes to make sense of its dense allusive weave, it ceases to be readable (in the way that say, Collier's poem is).

[The Bard is not the only significant poem to drop out of view in this way and for this reason.  Samuel Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, for example, remains in the Longman anthology of C18 Lit, but I suspect I am one of the few English instructors in the U.S. who has attempted to teach it.  There are a few egregious typos in the Longman version of the poem that have remained through three different editions.  If the text were widely taught by those who order the anthology, the errors would have been caught and corrected before the most recent edition was published].

The blog responses thus far to the changing canon have discussed what is gained as the canon changes.  What about what gets lost?  Or can we willingly part with The Bard?

Original post:

We spoke in class today (3/30) of "The Canon."

In fact, there are two canons.   "The Canon" consists of the white upper- and middle-class men who have been regarded as significant literary figures, and therefore been widely republished, anthologized and taught throughout the C20.  "The Canon Wars" were fought in literature departments through the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to expand The Canon to include women, non-white writers, and working-class experience, but they had the effect of exploding the notion of a Canon altogether.  The conflicting views of history, authenticity, literary value, and inclusivity that brought the Canon Wars about made it virtually impossible for scholars to agree on a revised broader list of works that every educated person ought to read.

But the idea of a Canon didn't disappear altogether.  After all, syllabi get written, important literary and cultural topics get taught, textbooks and anthologies get cobbled together to accommodate those needs...and inevitably some works emerge as being more helpful in those processes and others.  The list of texts that turn up fairly consistently in these ways have come to be known as "The Revised Canon."  It it a humbler and much more supple entity than the old Canon, with NO pretensions of being universally used and loved--but it does reflect the state of current college-level teaching.  It is under continuous revision, as particular texts get sufficient scholarly intention to make their way into textbooks, and others cease to be of interest and so get dropped.

The Revisionist Canon does not treat equally all of the authors neglected by the original Canon.  Ann Yearsley and Mary Leapor are considered part of the "Revisionist Canon."  There is either a scholarly biography or a scholarly edition of their works available, they have been the subjects of numerous essays in peer-reviewed journals, and their poems have made their way from specialized anthologies of women's writing to mainstream teaching collections like the Norton and Longman anthologies of C18 Lit.  Robert Dodsley has not fared as well.  There are books about him but he's been treated more as a key figure of cultural history for his printing and bookselling activities with Alexander Pope.  Dodsley's poetry has received little scholarly attention.

Stephen Duck and Mary Collier have seen their literary fortunes exactly reversed.  As the observations in class today might have predicted, Duck rode his literary talents to fame and prosperity, earning a college degree and a patronage appointment under Queen Anne.  Mary Collier remained a washerwoman all her life.  Duck has never quite been forgotten--he remained of interest as a minor literary curiosity throughout the C19 and C20.  Collier had to wait for the feminist scholars of the 1970s to rescue her from literary oblivion.  Since her rediscovery, however, Duck has become largely a footnote to her "Women's Labour."  It is difficult to find a complete edition of his poem (the one available in your poetry anthology is a rare exception), while Collier's poem appears widely.  And no one reads Duck anymore as a significant figure in his own right--to the extent that he gets read, it's to better understand Collier's poem.

One last case in point: Phillis Wheatley.  I don't have to make a point of including her in this course, because she is an author that most of you have already encountered and read elsewhere.  Forty years ago, her name would have meant nothing to you.

So here's the question--a refinement of the attendance question you had today.  What should warrant the inclusion of a working-class writer in the Revisionist Canon?

• His or her class consciousness (and what exactly does that mean in the C18 context)?
• The literary power of his or her work for readers today, independent of the author's class?
• The interesting backstory to the author's life?
• The degree of critical and literary attention the author got in the C18?
• The degree to which the presence of the author helps to sustain a balance of texts depicting a range of C18 life experience?
• ???

Post your thoughts (or respond collegially to a classmate's ideas) here.

Deadline: Monday (4/4), 1pm.