Teaching Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues

Among the results of the recent (and ongoing) upsetting of the canonical applecart, perhaps the most worthwhile is the general sense of "permission," for lack of a better word, teachers at both the public school and college levels have acquired to offer contemporary texts to their students. Not only do we no longer feel compelled to wait until the author's corpse is cold; we no longer even feel obliged to wait until he or she has hauled in a major prize (a Pulitzer or a Nobel). This opening up of the canon, however, is accompanied with certain perils. After centuries of conceding that the primary test of any writing's supposed literary merit was that of time, we teachers, critics, and scholars now find ourselves thrown back on our own resources. Are we up to it? How confident do we feel when it comes to the prospect of jettisoning Matthew Arnold's "touchstones" ("The Study of Poetry," in Culler, 327), presumably because those touchstones are an assemblage from a canon that has been argued to be everything from patriarchal and ethnocentrist to out-and-out racist in nature? To be replaced with what? we might ask ourselves. With our own sense of literary value, presumably, but what exactly does that amount to? Are we up to the task? Are we now to trust publishers and book reviewers more than we once did? Are we to run to Amazon.com and trust to the tastes of anonymous readers from the public at large (five stars good, two stars bad)? How capable are they, or we, of adhering to Arnold's most challenging rule for the critical reading of any text: disinterestedness? By which he meant keeping aloof from what is called "the practical view of things" and "steadily refusing" to yield to "any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas" we find in a literary work that we might find either very attractive or very repugnant ("The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Culler, 246, 257). How often do we hear our students complain that they "don't like stories about X" or "stories with Y kinds of endings"? (Over the years I've observed that all literary texts, from plays to novels, are transformed in my students' writing to "stories.") The values of X and Y in the equations above vary with the student and other factors: this is hard math; this is calculus. Maybe Arnold was wrong when he said that "for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics, even, goes a long way" ("Literature and Science," in Culler, 389).

Certainly, I step up to the plate with care when I approach contemporary writers at the end of my surveys of British, American, or world literature, and even when it comes to courses I teach frequently, like modern poetry or contemporary Northwest writers. Maybe this is because I was educated as a seventeenth-century scholar, and I still teach courses that include Donne, Marvell, and Milton on a regular basis. Much of what emanated from their pens would now be categorized as "privileged texts" with a sort of built-in immune system. W. F. Jackson Knight concludes the introduction to his translation of The Aeneid with a cautionary tale to the effect that it is not the text, but the reader who is on trial under such circumstances. My students may not gravitate toward Paradise Lost as readily and naturally as they do toward Sherman Alexie's stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but I feel a sort of burden of responsibility has been lifted from me when those dead white males are on deck. I mean these guys are not just dead; they've been dead for some three hundred years! I can call in backup if I need it, everyone from Samuel Johnson and John Keats to Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Stanley Fish. There are...