That all sounds good. The part about Shakespeare and all the other white guys not being in the canon if we started from scratch seems empirically implausible though. It takes a lot of privilege to have the time, space, and resources to be an author (see: Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”). So the canon can be overwhelmingly white for most of history AND be full of books based on merit BECAUSE of white male privilege.
As that privilege becomes less prominent over time, the canon will become more diverse.
It’s a mistake to try to make changes at the wrong level. We diversify the canon by making participation in art more accessible NOW, not by trying to pretend things were different in the past and changing the historical canon. That would be denying the impact of racism and sexism on the canon, not ameliorating it.
Wat. We are at an impasse, Doc. I’ll side with Woolf on this one.
eta: to be clearer, sure you don’t need fancy pens or a trust. That was you exaggerating. But you absolutely need money, space, quiet, and lots and lots of time. These are things white men had a lot more of than non-white men.
I generally agree with this, but I also think there have been additions of meritorious works that were previously excluded from the canon because of prejudice
No one wants to kick Shakespeare out of the canon, but maybe some of the more marginal dead white guys.
The idea behind the literary canon is that there should be some shared frame of reference that educated people should read and be familiar with, so that we can talk to each other using shared references, not to generate a reading list if decent books. If the canon is determined by old white guys with a preference for dead white guys, that perpetuates white culture as the ideal even though those books may all have literary merit. If you want to keep some version of the canon manageable so that an intelligent person has time to read most of it by a certain age, then you have to consider getting rid of some dead white males if you have enough non-whites and women to add.
Trigger warnings, within reason, are fine. I tend to think they interfere with one’s authentic interaction with art, but the positive of reducing trauma probably outweighs that negative.
A similar sentiment, however, that animates one to “prepare the reader” could very well lead one to just take out the issue altogether. If the concern is protecting from trauma, then knowing something bad is coming doesn’t really eliminate the traumatic exposure.
I don’t think anyone thinks that the canon shouldn’t evolve to include artists like Baquiat, and Morrison, and Achebe, and Baldwin, and what’s your point again?
Nah, you have an extremely wrong idea of who wants Huck Finn banned and how many of them there are
And you continue to make extremely silly conflation between teaching high school kids Huck Finn with plenty of historical context, and choosing to assign Chocolate Factory as whimsical breeze with no context
