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??? COHPAnATIST ALIGNING CURRICULAR CANONS WITH ACADEMIC PROGRAMS Wendell V. Harris In 1991 an essay ofmine entitled "Canonicity" appeared in PMLA amidst what had become an increasingly complex, emotional, and ideological debate on a variety of questions about Uterary canons. The canon debate began quietly enough and gained prominence rather slowly: in Jan Gorak's important study, 77ie Making ofthe Modern Canon, he dates the beginning of the controversy to the programs organized for the 1979 EngUsh Institute meeting by LesUe Fiedler and Houston Baker, Jr., and published as English Literature: Opening Up the Canon.1 One can of course find precursors, but major awareness offeminist concerns about the canon probably should be dated only slightly earlier with the publication ofElaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977); 1979 was the year in which Mary Jacobus's Women Writing and Writing about Women and Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic appeared. At the time I wrote "Canonicity," I assumed that within a few years the issue would be sufficiently settled, one way or another, to lose its prominence; after a dozen years the controversy seemed to have reached its height. In fact, 1991 did turn out to be an important year in the canon debate: not only Jan Gorak's 77ie Making of the Modern Canon but the collection of essays edited by Virgil Nemoianu and Robert Royal, The Hospitable Canon, appeared that year, the two books being, in my judgment , among the most useful contributions to the canon debate. Also published in that year was Paul Lauter's influential but predictably Marxian Canons and Context; and two years later came John Guillory's yet more influential Cultural Capital which combines keen insights and sophisticated analysis in the service of Marxist oversimplification. (While I will be citing several of Guillory's salient points, his book has become so central in the canon debate that I feel I must devote an appendix to a brief critique.) If the early nineties marked a high point in the debate, interest in the literary canon question has not in the least abated in the course of the decade. Even so, I was surprised to find when I searched the word "canon" in the CD-ROM version of the MLA Bibliography that 1,153 entries were Usted for the period from 1991 to mid-1999, including more than 100 dissertations. A number ofthese items focused on the canonical status of a single author: why an author was, or more often, why an author had not been, recognized as a significant contributor to the literary canon. Other articles and books were devoted to such literary-historical questions as dating the beginning of a canon of English literature.2 But to judge both by the titles and considerable sampUng, the majority were Vol. 24 (2000): 9 CURRICULAR CANONS AND ACADEMIC PROGRAMS arguments either for or against expanding or remodeling the canon; questioning or defending the existence of an objective standard of value against which the canonical worthiness of a Uterary work can be judged; debating the degree to which a literary text can be understood by readers of a different ethnic background, gender, or socioeconomic status; taking one of a variety of positions on the question of whether the canon has been consciously or unconsciously created and maintained by those whose value system is that of the dominant white, patriarchal, capitalist culture; arguing the case for either a pluralistic multiculturalism or a particularistic one;3 or debating the related question of whether literature should be employed in the service of giving greater power to specific groups or developing the peculiar strengths ofeach individual regardless of ethnicity, gender, etc. Too often the term "canon" appears without definition or qualification ; when an individual writer's use of the term is examined, it at times turns out that it fully corresponds to no other writer's use. What is generaUy at issue, however, are the official, the curricular, and the critical canons. The official canon, in Alistair Fowler's words, is that "institutionalized through education, patronage, and journalism" (98-99); the curricular canon consists of those works frequently taught in classrooms (at any level); the critical canon...

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