"Broadly Representative"? The MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series

The Modern Language Association's (MLA's) Approaches to Teaching World Literature series began in 1980 with the publication of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." According to the MLA's "Guidelines for Editors of Series Volumes": "Each volume is divided into two parts: 'Materials' and 'Approaches.' Volumes are broadly representative in the range of their contributors, in the critical orientations presented, and in the types of schools, students, and courses considered" (Gibaldi 1998). Since "the series is intended to serve non-specialists, inexperienced as well as experienced teachers, graduate students as well as senior professors" (Gibaldi 1998), and each volume editor summarizes surveys of members of the field, the series provides an excellent opportunity for interrogating what the teaching of literature looks like at different types of institutions and proves useful in graduate student training. It also invites us to question what it means to be "broadly representative." The series' seemingly democratic nature, both in the way that individual volumes are generated and in the way that they seek to represent a plurality of shareholders in literary studies, itself prompts a critique of its ideology, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988: 118) describes the term:

Ideology in action is what a group takes to be natural and self-evident, that of which the group, as a group, must deny any historical sedimentation. It is both the condition and effect of the constitution of the subject (of ideology) as freely willing and consciously choosing in a world that is seen as background. In turn, the subject(s) of ideology are the conditions and effects of the group as a group. It is impossible, of course, to mark off a group as an entity without sharing complicity with its ideological definition. A persistent critique of ideology is thus forever incomplete.

The Approaches series addresses such a group and, in so doing, constitutes that group; it is "ideology in action."

How does one fairly represent the broadly representative while subjecting it to critique? Because the series contains seventy-three volumes as of this writing, I have narrowed the focus of this review to twenty that are suggestive of the series as a whole. My criteria include the historical range of the series (1980-2002) and its literary texts; the range of genres and modes (fiction, poetry, drama); the range of national literatures; and the gender, racial, and ethnic diversity of the authors covered. Chronologically, this discussion covers the series from the volume on Dante's Divine Comedy (Slade 1982) to the one on shorter Elizabethan poetry (Cheney and Prescott 2000) and from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible to Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Chinua Achebe. Juxtaposing Wordsworth (1986) with British women poets of the Romantic period (1997) and including Morrison (1997) and Atwood (1996) provide an indication of gender issues. The volumes I have selected also include British, American, African, Canadian, and European works in addition to those already mentioned.

"The issue of value," Spivak (1988: 154) argues, "surfaces in literary criticism with reference to canon-formation." Responding to John Guillory's (1993: 30) argument that the canon itself is "an imaginary totality of works" and that "what does have a concrete location as a list . . . is not the canon but the syllabus," Susan VanZanten Gallagher (2001: 54) observes: "I will call such a concrete list the 'pedagogical canon': texts that are taught in college and university settings. . . . The wider pedagogical canon is made up of the most frequently taught texts, a list that is empirically verifiable." Since "the primary objective of the series Approaches to Teaching World Literature is to collect within each volume different points of view on teaching a literary subject . . . widely taught to undergraduates" (Gibaldi 1998; my emphasis), the series clearly contributes to the pedagogical canon of "most frequently taught texts." But, as Guillory also emphasizes, the imaginary canon is further constituted in institutional structures and practices. A syllabus is much more...