At a English graduate student conference in 2015, the question, “Why dork around with books?,” was posed by a friendly audience member, a biologist by training, who was using the colloquial to sum up her genuine puzzlement about this field of endeavor. What she meant was: Why read literature? Why study or teach it, think or write about it, attempt to define it? These questions captivate me, and in contemplating them, I draw heavily on my own experience, both as someone taught to revere the capital-C Canon and someone who takes a decidedly anti-authoritarian view of most received wisdom. Those two states might seem contradictory and it is perhaps from the attempt to reconcile them that my perspective arises.

During the culture wars of the 1980s (and before, and after), the question of what constituted a “Great Book,” who got to sit on the high canonical shelf with the big (white) boys became a hot-button issue. In more recent years, as the primacy of the word has faded, as the visual more and more asserts its power, as digital-age attention spans shrink and shrink again, as an anti-intellectual wave sweeps the planet, anxiety has only grown. In the United States, conservatives in Congress attempt to defund the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, cash-strapped universities cut English majors and departments, even well-meaning K-12 educators and administrators dumb down their curricula in an attempt to “reach” their students (and it’s not as though I think the answer to the question of how to reach students is easy or evident). English departments, heeding the call to make themselves relevant, to display a teleological end in a world that increasingly lauds “evidence-based solutions” and “quantifiable” results, are giving themselves brand-new names such as the “Department of Reading and English” or the “Department of Digital Humanities and Literature.” (Do I need to point out that, um, er, reading has always been an activity central to – one might say, synonymous with – the activity of English departments? And what’s more, that any distinction between the digital humanities and that other kind, the analog, will fade away in the course of the next few years, just as MySpace gives way to Twitter to Pinterest to Periscope. In other words, as soon as the first delightful thrill of the digital humanities – the shock of the new, as the art critic Robert Hughes called it – wears off, the DH will become just another form of literary study.)

Lest anyone think I’m fetishizing the hard-copy, printed-out book – the material object – let me state that that is not my concern here. Whether a story, a tale, a work of literature (whatever that may be), is read on an electronic device or in a Norton Critical Edition is not what I am on about. Call it a “text,” call it a “book,” it’s all the same to me.

I grew up in a household full of Modern Library editions of Dos Passos and Dickens Zola and de Maupassant, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (Note the groupings: first, alliteration; second, national fraternité; third, brothers of the same era. Thinking in this way may give a sense of the kind of household it was.) Although there may have been a little Eliot and a tablespoon of Baldwin on those shelves, it was mostly a pale-skinned, vagina-less collection. The point is: the Canon was in the air, although such was never stated. Some of the names faded with literary fashion (Trollope, though recently given a spirited defense in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik[1], isn’t taught much these days); some have demonstrated their staying power (no one with half a literary or cultural eye open needs to be reminded of the galloping cultural cachet currently enjoyed by Jane Austen).

But then the world-smashing ethos of the 1960s rolled into town, and although I was only 10 years old in 1968, I caught on quickly. By the time I got to college, after some delay, in 1985, the civil rights movement, feminism, and the anti-war movement were cultural/political forces, and deconstruction had come to the academy. I spent my undergraduate years clutching a copy of the anthology New French Feminisms, which by the time I graduated had become tattered, frayed, and underlined almost beyond recognition; I was muttering “Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un” in my sleep. Trying to unpack and understand Derrida became as much fun as taking a Quaalude in school in 9th grade had been. (Perish the thought!)

But what of the literature to which one might attach all this theory? Aah! Good question. Because the college at which I was enrolled had very few requirements, there was no consensus text or texts that “everyone” (that mythical entity) had read. I well remember a professor asking for a show of hands in one theory class, so that we might have a mutually agreed-on, familiar text to use in discussing the theory we were learning. Shakespeare? Well, yes, but not everyone had read the same play. Woolf? Ditto. Milton? Fuggedahboudit. After endless discussion, Toni Morrison’s Sula became the text of choice. Suffice it to say, my undergraduate education did not involve much that was canonical. Which, at the time, was more than fine with me.

Cut to many years later, when I returned to graduate school at mid-life. After a career and life that included book reviewing, reading the New York Review of Books, from time to time, seeing a lot of experimental theater, and hanging around a bunch of academics and intellectuals, I had developed a bit of a complex – all those references to Molly Bloom and Ivan Ilych, the Great White Whale and free indirect discourse, the Dons Juan and Quixote: what did they mean? I didn’t want to fake it, pretend I knew. I wanted in.

Of course, I had friends whose idea of beach reading was Anna Karenina or David Copperfield, but owing to a condition that made reading laborious for me, I knew that salt and sand would never grace my copies of such loooonnngg works. Short New Yorker or NY Review of Books articles might be learned and dense, but they were limited in pure avoirdupois. Contemporary novels of 250 pages or less took me inside the heads of women (my con-soeurs!) or into the developing world or the experience of immigrants in the US. I gobbled them up at a great rate. Give me Rebecca Goldstein, Meg Wolitzer, Lorraine Adams, Dinaw Mengestu, Nell Freudenberger, Gary Shteyngart, Justin Torres, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Karen Joy Fowler, no problem. But the canonical authors? Scary.

Was this purely a question of my condition ­(call it a learning disability, although strictly speaking, that’s not accurate) or some deep-seated psychological issue relating to those parental Modern Library shelves? I didn’t know, and didn’t think it mattered. All I knew was that in order to read these books, I needed – wanted – a structure and a format. And so I hit on the idea of graduate school.

However, once inside the front gates of Georgetown University, I found that those canonical works remained elusive, hard to catch within my grasp, for reasons having nothing to do with anything mentioned heretofore. The concerns seemed faraway, the language impenetrable, the historical allusions rife and difficult to decipher. I read Moby-Dick – the whale itself! – and I confess with some chagrin that the process took me eight months. On hearing this, you might say: Well, clearly, she didn’t actually want to read this novel; she didn’t enjoy it; why should is she bothering? But I found that, after finishing the book, it stuck in my cranium, it resounded, it echoed. I enjoyed thinking about it. I was glad that, at last, I knew who Queequeg and Ishmael and Ahab were (if anyone can ever truly know who they are). And not only in the FOMO[2] sense, so that I’d be in the know at the next cocktail party where those guys were mentioned en passant as someone reached for a canapé. No: In the really and truly sense.

But my Georgetown grad student colleagues, my 24- and 26-year-old peers, did not share my reverence for and patience with the canon. When we would gather in the grad lounge and discuss our course choices for the coming semester, they (or the vast majority of them) would dismiss courses on Milton or Austen or Dickens with a disparaging: “Oh, the old stuff.” The old stuff! Yes, indeedy, the old stuff!

I remained the same fan of theory that I’d been as an undergraduate, and relished seeing the avatars of feminist theory from my college years were now held up as sainted foremothers, joining forces with queer theory to produce disability theory, which I took to like some sort of (admittedly crip) duck to water. I began to develop a gospel in my head that the canon was worth trying on for size – in words echoing the children’s book Pat the Bunny, I wanted to say to my grad student peers: Now you try William Thackeray. My thought was that they should give the canonical authors a whirl, see who they liked, apply the lenses of contemporary thought (ideas about the anthropocene, ideas about postcolonialism), decide for themselves who they wanted to throw out. But not to read Junot Diaz and only Junot Diaz! (Much as I love and adore Diaz, I deplore the way he’s become contemporary students’ Morrison, the one canonical, agreed-upon author for this generation of students.)

All of the above – what my long-ago editors at the Washington Post would have called “throat-clearing” – brings me to my thoughts on teaching canonical writers – Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, add the name of your favorite here. I want to acknowledge that these texts may be difficult or off-putting for contemporary students, in much the same way that they have been for me. (I personally found The Age of Innocence easier to access than Moby-Dick, but of course, every student will have a different reaction.) I want to help my future students find entry points – history, customs, mores, language, culture – and I want to try to figure out (with them, not for them) why they might be reading this particular book, why the difficulty may be well worth the journey, may in the end bring actual pleasure. And indeed, why we are dorking around with books in general.

 

[1] Gopnik, Adam. “Trollope Trending: Why he’s still the novelist of the way we live now.” The New Yorker, 4 May, 2015. Web.

[2] Slang: Fear Of Missing Out