blamebrampton | Cultural literacy, I likes it!

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postmodernism

Cultural literacy, I likes it!

I had a strange discussion with a person on the internet (god forbid!) over the concept of cultural literacy. Her thesis was that it wasn't important, that popular culture was more useful, and that no one could agree on what one needed to know to be culturally literate anyway.

We exchanged a number of comments, and she was a thoroughly decent person to argue with, but I can't help thinking that we come from opposing starting positions on this one. To start with, she's literally half my age. But she also went to school all through the period where one text was interchangeable with another, whereas I went to school in the days when you had to learn about great literature before they let you mess around with the other stuff.

And yeah, I do mean great and other. I know this will have some of you demanding I turn in my Credentialled Postmodernist badge, but some texts are better than others. They last longer, they impact more, they're Penicillin rather than Cialis, the Periodic Table as opposed to Phlogiston. To my mind, there are certain texts you should have a grounding in if you want to be a culturally literate person.

The problem is, of course, that the idea of their being 'certain texts', a canon, if you will, has become problematic. Harold 'Groper' Bloom's The Western Canon is often held up to ridicule by people who call it a roll-call of dead white men. But I think that's because they couldn't be arsed reading it. He talks positively about Austen and Woolf, Mary Shelley and not one but two Brontës (though how he could choose Emily over Anne is a mystery to me), among other women, and has a good set from the Ancient world as well as Persian and Asian sources. He is weaker on the Orient, I wanted The Tale of Genji at least, but when he sat down to think 'Who has influenced what we think about literature in the West', he genuinely seems to have done so on the basis of the works, not who wrote them.

To me, the idea that we should not privilege some texts over others is ridiculous. No one would argue that there is no difference between a Skoda Octavia and a Bugatti Veyron, or between salad cream and hand-made mayonnaise. It's fine to like and enjoy trashier texts, Skodas and salad cream, but to argue that they should be given the same weight as their opposing numbers is something I cannot agree with.

And the case is more certain with literature than with salad cream. If you only know salad cream, you don't know how delicious aioli is. But, to use an example given, if you are familiar with Harry Potter and not Hamlet, not only do you miss out on Hamlet, but you miss out on the myriad Shakespearean references and jokes within Harry Potter. And while I think it's certainly possible to enjoy Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire if you have no classical education, I suspect it is not possible to do so without a constant feeling that there are certain levels of the text that are passing over your head. Without the cultural literacy that allows you to do so, some authors are wholly unapproachable: Laurence Sterne, Jasper Fforde and the entire Monty Python output, to start with.

Some people have absolutely no urge to cultural literacy, which I can see as a valid choice, but it cuts you off from a lot of reading. I would argue that you cannot say that you are a keen reader or keen consumer of film and television if you are also avowedly against cultural literacy, because it is like saying that you are a biochemist who doesn't believe in valences. However, this could all just be another sign of me becoming an old fogey.

What about you lot? Especially you young folk? Do you still have that frisson of glee I used to have when I uncovered secret references in texts as I read and learned more and more? Or is that so appallingly 20th century that I should just dig out a corset and start worrying about those commies?

On a final pomo note, Happy 50th Birthday, Severus, and Happy 75th Elvis! May you continue to bring joy to your fans for many years! And happy Real Birthday to

tnumfive ! You're in good company ;-)

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I read your comment this morning and it kind of hit me in the face. I then decided to wait a little while instead of posting my first gut reaction and let it sit for a whole day. Re-reading what you wrote, I still find it more insulting than entertaining. But at least now I'm able to tell you this without insulting you back.

I'll try to explain what bothers me: We don't known each other. And yet you insult my friend to my face by calling him stupid, by expressing your hopes that he doesn't teach and by concluding that Education doesn't necessarily educate a person, offering me a grin. I assume that you thought it to be funny. I don't share this perspective.

I share your perspective that his approach towards interpreting the sculpture had been somewhat narrow, and I would have been fine had you worded it in a less hurtful way.

I can't imagine that you tried to be insulting on purpose, and maybe I'm over-reacting, but I needed to get this off my chest. Thank you for hearing me out.

Best regards,
Cats

I apologise if you found my comment insulting I didn't intend to be hurtful, not did I intent to be entertaining.

Can I just point out I find that I said I find his attitude as indicated by the comment quoted 'stupid' not the person. How could I, I don't know him.

Again I intended no insult and clearly worded my comment badly.

Sorry this was me I forget to sign in.

Apologies again.

Thank you for explaining and for your fast answer. And apologies accepted.

Yes, I registered that you said "attitude". Maybe I was a little too thin-skinned. I'm sorry if I've been too harsh or generalising in my comment.

I hoped that this would turn out to be one of those situations that simply result from wording and/or understanding something the wrong way. I'm glad that it turned out to be just that. Things like that can happen.

I didn't think that you intended to be hurtful and I'm glad that we were able to clear this up so fast. No harsh feelings necessary.

Thank you again.

I was just wondering if you could recommend any of the "great literature" in particular? I have been reading almost all the time since I could read, but I didn't do English past GCSE so I have to educate myself, as it were. While I've tried to read all the classics I can find (Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Orwell, Wilde, Bronte, Du Maurier, Eliot, Twain, Nabokov, Dumas etc) I think there are probably huge areas of literature I haven't even realised should be read. I mainly read English and American classics but not much from other countries, for example.

In fact, this question is far too huge and general now I think about it. I'm terribly sorry. Instead, best 5 classics someone should read to enrich how they see the rest of literature? :D
(Now there's a question! Hehe. Pity the poor scientist!)

As there is no polite response to this puerility, we'll mark it as read, shall we.

- I'm afraid one really must know Cranmer's prayer-book, the Authorised Version, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Shakespeare. Possibly Milton in the fifth place. We really are quoting these every quarter hour even in everyday speech.

Ha! Damn that Wemyss shaking me from my 'I shall answer at leisure on Wednesday' position ;-) Shakespeare and Milton, I would agree on wholeheartedly, but the others on his list are better as an advanced serving, even though they actually are as crucial as he says.

So, let's say Hamlet, or King Lear or the Tempest to start with. Watch it first, then read afterwards. And don't choose King Lear if you're feeling depressed. The bloodbath that is Hamlet is a laugh riot by comparison. You could try Romeo and Juliet (though it's daft) or Twelfth Night (though it's mad) instead, too. Probably best to steer clear of Titus Andronicus for now, which is sort of Shakespeare's Terminator 2 meets slasher flick.

For Milton, it must be Paradise Lost to start, and it is heavy going to the naked eye. But if you read it out loud, all of a sudden it reveals itself as being surprisingly easy, and beautiful. Can't find a copy easily? You could substitute The Iliad here, but make sure it's Robert Fagle's beautiful translation, which you will want to read aloud for the sheer joy of the language.

Assuming you went with Milton, not Homer for number two, I'd recommend a quick step back in time for number three. Gilgamesh is the earliest narrative we have, and it is a bit fragmentary, which makes people think that it's the sort of thing you tackle only for classes. But it's FANTASTIC! It's an amped-up Boy's Own Adventure with homoerotic subtext and lions, all told in a voice that links us back to the days of people sitting captivated around a fire, waiting to hear what could possibly come next.

Dammit, down to two. OK, you need one of the greats of English comedy, and here you'll need to choose from a broader selection. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne is one of my absolute favourites, and has me in tears of laughter each time I read it. It's also postmodernism a few centuries before its time. However, it also needs to be read in a way that is somewhat divorced from the modern mind. Pick up a copy and see if your brain can naturally go there (many do, others need to warm up for it, it's the literary equivalent of a cartwheel), and if not, pop it back down, you can always come back to it.

Vanity Fair, by Thackery, would be my next suggestion to choose from, as Becky Sharpe is one of the most hilariously venal and unrepentant heroines ever to grace the page, and her victims are mostly so thoroughly deserving of her that you can't bear her any ill will. Except that some people just hate Becky, the same way I hate avocado. Again, try a few pages in a bookshop or library before you commit. It makes the list for its cheerful recognition that you don't really need a heroic character to tell a good story.

Emma, by Jane Austen, should be the comedy go-to on this list as it has enough natural humour plus one of the most beautifully observed satires of polite living that can be imagined. But it is taught so badly at schools that many people are scarred for life. If you can pick it up without quivering, Austen is a great writer to read for economy of plot and cast, and her exceptionally fine use of characters as individuals rather than as just pieces to move about the board to accomplish the author's moral lesson. If you only ever read one novel to learn more about how novels are actually put together, this one, or Pride and Prejudice, would be a very good choice for such a thing.

Of course, the most comedy of all is to be found in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, but it suffers from the twin bugbears of being taught badly at school and not being in accessible English. Also, Peter Ackroyd has recently set about making it accessible, the result of which should be fled from at speed. You're a scientist, though, you're tough. If you're up for it, grab this one in an edition with good footnotes or a good transliteration and step back into Middle England for a bawdy, satiric, bum-obsessed look at the very basics of British comedy. And if you need something even bawdier to follow him up with, definitely the Earl of Rochester, whose prick we know altogether too much about.

And now, one slot left and about 9000 things to suggest for it ... bugger.

I should say Le Morte D'Arthur, by Mallory, except that you might well get the giggles, as I did, when great days of riding out and slaying one's enemies are stopped for lunchbreaks. And Gulliver's Travels is spectacular, but if you're not up to date with your history, about half of it will go sailing by and the rest will have you in mind of pantos.

You might want to give the fifth slot to a genre novel, as goodness knows that's what fiction has become mostly about these days. If you're a secret romantic and mediaevalist, you can't go past Scott's Waverley, or for the classic read, you would have to straight to Stoker's Dracula. But neither, to my mind, are as satisfying to read as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Hers has a level of writing and of pathos that the others do not hit, good as they are. Just make sure that you read it with the windows locked, I found it thoroughly creepy.

Or if you're more of a political bent, you could try one of the great journalistic novels: Mary Gaskell's North and South is a gripping read, and Dickens's Great Expectations is far less waffley than most of his (paid by the word) work. However, I can never go past Orwell, which I think means it has to be 1984: even scarier now than it was in its title year.

No, bugger it, if we're going to have only one more, let's go wild and say something that is both genre novel and journalistic commentary on the rights of women, at the same time as being feminist and most thoroughly queer. Virginia Woolf's Orlando would be my pick for fifth place, not because it influenced a raft of books that followed it, but because it is something strange and lovely and off to one side in the literary tradition, and yet for all that, it did change what we thought the novel could and should do. And it is a joy to read ;-)

A prayer book? Seriously? I didn't realise our linguistic roots were so religious :-S
I'm not just interested in English literature, since I tend to read more and know more about it, being english. I do love english literature, but I have a feeling my knowledge of russian, french, middle eastern and oriental literature in particular could do with a lot of work!

Thank you for the recommendations! I don't think I've actually read any Milton. That is shocking and must be rectified :D

Oh wow! Thank you so much for this long and very thoughtful reply :)

I was pleased to see I'd actually read some of the books on your list: Emma, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, North and South, Great Expectations, 1984, and some of the Canterbury Tales! (I am not a failure as a reader! Woohoo!)
I absolutely loved all of them (although Becky did get on my nerves a bit) so I will definitely be reading the rest of your recommendations. And if you fancy throwing any more my way, please do feel free. I mean that. Reading is a joy, especially when you know the book will be fantastic :D

Argh, this reminds me how I miss reading during term time. One day when I have a permanent home I will fill it full of books and it will be wonderful :) *sigh*

Do you still have that frisson of glee I used to have when I uncovered secret references in texts as I read and learned more and more?

Why yes, I do! Although I expect we are of the same generation so it is possibly to be expected. I find the structure of a well-crafted song or paragraph to be utterly delightful and even moreso if it contains a reference that I catch in passing on first hearing/reading and then have to stop and think over to understand completely. Absolute joy.

I think the 'manual' concept is an outmoded one, though. One of the reasons I make a point of saying that I like postmodernism as well as canon texts is that, since the mid 20th century, I don't think that you can make a legitimate case for 'X must be Y' anymore.

You're right that for much of history, art and literature were both taught in a way that gave you 'for distress, show twisted', or, in the language of theatre, 'for evil, show justice being meted out at the end'. The problem with this has always been that those ways of reading texts weren't about the texts (whether the text is a novel, play, sculpture, painting ...), they were really about the genres and people wanting to construct rules from them.

Great texts have always broken the rules. At the end of King Lear, Regan and Goneril are dead, but so is the virtuous Cordelia. There is no justice. Donatello's Mary Magdalene is tension filled and anguished and not the least bit beautiful, she doesn't even have an ointment jar, as Renaissance Magdalenes 'should', but she's brilliant (just as your composed despairing woman sounds brilliant, for myself, at the blackest moments, I always make jokes).

The big problem with the whole X means Y way of thinking about canon works is that it builds a prescriptive and proscriptive language out of texts that are really all about buidling fresh languages. Canon texts become canon texts because they build, or rebuild, the way that we think about literature or art. For the English canon, Gilgamesh tells us about the basics of story through the world of kings; The Canterbury Tales tells us that story can be about ordinary people as much as kings; Joyce's Ulysses shows us that you can take a story about kings and remake it for an ordinary man and lose nothing. Each of these things revolutionised the way we thought, and what we could do afterwards.

You're right that this is often badly taught: even when I was at school we had some teachers who wanted to push us into the corset you describe. But I think that this is a failure of teaching, perhaps even a political push to constrain and conform, rather than something that naturally arises from the study of the canon.

Looked at in themselves, canonical texts challenge and inspire, giving us access to language that makes other texts richer and more rewarding, while helping to give you the foundation that let you tackle anything. They're the sports bra, rather than the corset, if you will ;-)

I was linked to this post by a friend, hope you don't mind if I butt in with a few points.

I think you're ignoring on some points here, which I'll go through briefly because basically the last century of cultural analysis has already done this. I'm just flagging some key issues. Since you claim to be a postmodernist, I'm sure you know all this already. I just don't understand how you could know it and then ignore it.

1. The Canon
Who gets to choose the "best"? The most popular culture, reflecting the taste of the "masses", has endured a tradition of being academically devalued, devoid of cultural status. I have never yet found a single reason for this other than people, like you, who talk about "high" literature and say "but this is good, and that is bad". The evidence they produce is the exact same as yours: because "high" literature lasts. You don't see a certain problem with that? That people in positions of cultural power choose what "good" literature is, thereby ensuring that it is taught academically and in schools, allowing it to be read and reread, ensuring that it lasts? It doesn't last just because it is "good", it lasts because certain people say it is good, and the people who say it are people in positions of cultural power. It is important to interrogate how and why that cultural power is wielded, and to what end; it is naive to think that it is just in order to make sure people read good books. Cultural power occurs at certain intersections of class, race and gender. It is eternally struggling to maintain itself. This is why modernist writers felt embattled and besieged by the popular; this is why they saw the masses as threatening. (This is why people like Yeats supported eugenics and why DH Lawrence suggested gassing the lower classes in the Crystal Palace.) Power is and always should be contested, and the power to fix "taste" in literature is not exempt from struggle, nor should it ever be.

Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse are interesting in this regard: both were considered low literature at the time of their publication and are now considered classics. Conan Doyle refused to see "the masses" as indistinguishable and threatening--Holmes' ability to read distinct and unique aspects of people's lives from their clothing and demeanour was a political strategy on Conan Doyle's part to specifically counter the idea that people from the working class were indistinguishable; PG Wodehouse made literature out of slang. It does make you wonder what we might write off now as non-literature--and why we do so--which might be very much valued in the future.

2. Taste and Power
No one would argue that there is no difference between a Skoda Octavia and a Bugatti Veyron, or between salad cream and hand-made mayonnaise. It's fine to like and enjoy trashier texts, Skodas and salad cream, but to argue that they should be given the same weight as their opposing numbers is something I cannot agree with. - You might notice some issues here. The Skoda Octavia is an affordable family car; the Bugatti Veyron is an expensive sports car. Salad cream is affordable and easily available; hand-made mayonnaise is expensive to buy and time-consuming to make. Your parallels echo my point above: the expensive stuff, the "good" stuff, is aligned with those who clearly have financial power to purchase it; the "not good" stuff is for people without such power. So here, again, "taste" and power are clearly aligned. I think here it is important to remember that a Bugatti Veyron cannot fulfil the same function as a Skoda Octavia, so if I'm looking for a family car with room for the kids and some luggage, then the Veyron is actually not as good. You can't fix the meaning of "good" without answering the question, "for whom and for what purpose?".

(tbc, as I am apparently tl;dr.)

3. Cultural Literacy
if you are familiar with Harry Potter and not Hamlet, not only do you miss out on Hamlet, but you miss out on the myriad Shakespearean references and jokes within Harry Potter. - So what? If you are not familiar with Stargate: The Movie and Farscape, you miss out on a lot of jokes in the 200th episode of Stargate: SG-1. If you don't know Star Wars episodes 4, 5, and 6, you miss out on a lot of meaning in episodes 1, 2 and 3. Cultural literacy does not only apply to references to the classics; cultural literacy is contextual. So your argument that people should know the classics in order to understand references in other texts is rather hollow; continue along that argument, and you end up in a situation where you really should know every text ever, in case you miss a reference to something.

you cannot say that you are a keen reader or keen consumer of film and television if you are also avowedly against cultural literacy

You need to specify what culture. You keep assuming that "cultural literacy" refers only to "high" culture; it doesn't. Cultural literacy occurs in any form of culture. Therefore anyone who reads a lot or watches a lot of films will be culturally literate, just not necessarily in the texts that you decide are important. And why do you get to decide for other people?

Except that's just not the case.

The idea of 'canon' is one that necessarily cannot be contemporaneous because it is only defined in retrospect. Canonical texts are ones that have massive impacts on the ones that follow them, that shape the language after they are published (and yes, in this day and age there are whole other essays that could be written on what I mean by language and published, but I'll worry about them another time.)

You state that canon is divisive, yet not a paragraph later you are talking about Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, to whom I would du Maurier, Shelley and numerous others, all of whom are 'low culture' as you put it, yet all of which are absolutely parts of the English canon. Hell, Wuthering Heights is up there, and it's the Twilight of its day, but without it, we would not have had melodrama, nor, indeed, Twilight (DAMN YOU Emily Bronte!)

This is the essential point that you are missing. Canon is not a matter of high vs low culture, it is a matter of good works of art vs trash. A lot of literary fiction is trash, as is a lot of mass market fiction. What defines trash is not who wrote it nor what shelf it sits on in a bookshop (because publishers are often the worst judges of quality), it is the lack of substance in the text.

You are making the mistake that canon = high culture and trash = low culture, and I am not sure why you are making it when I expressly say that it does not, in either my definition nor Bloom's.

This is why the Octavia/Veyron comparison works, because people like to read crap fiction, whether it be Twilight or two thirds of Booker Prize winners. People also like to drive reliable family cars. That's fine, like is absolutely unrelated to to this argument. But no one goes to the Octavia to help them think about how to build a better car (market, perhaps, but again, a different discussion). What canon is, what the cultural literacy I argue in favour of is, is the equivalent of a Veyron's elegant engineering solutions. They spark new ideas and solutions and provide groundwork for new developments. The Octavia is a car that benefits from this evolution, but which is not integral to it.

And your argument that what you insist on referring to as high culture = power does not stack up to reality. Literary authors earn about 10,000 pounds per annum from their books if they are doing well. James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer and their colleagues earn that before lunch on a good day. And if you seriously believe the corridors of power are filled with erudite people judging you on whether you have read Proust, then I would contend that you may never have had a discussion with an actual politician.

Moving on to your next comment, as I believe I am about to run out of room here, too.

it is a matter of good works of art vs trash

But this is the central point that you are missing: who gets to define "good" and "trash", and why?

I would contend that you may never have had a discussion with an actual politician.

And I would contend that you've never encountered Pierre Bourdieu.

Edited 2010-02-12 14:53 (UTC)

No, that's pop cultural literacy, which has a halflife of about five years. Hang out with people who were teenagers in the 50s and see how many of their jokes you get. It's not possible to stay abreast of it all as contemporary cultures are as prone to movement and ephemera as slang. But since an enormous amount of pop culture makes reference to canonical texts, there you can invest your reading time and expect rewards for years to come.

As a middle aged Englishwoman in New South Wales (I admit a pop culture reference or two can be fun), I take it for granted that the people (my flist for the most part) I am conversing with on my own lj read my default as British culture with an occasional overlay of Australian. While I admit that in a perfect world I would have tackled this entry as a 50,000 word thesis, I am not going to start writing every entry with an eye to mass market audiences, because this is my lj, not work.

And again, you will not find a single reference to high culture in my post. It's an idea that you have brought to your reading, in such strength that it has actually overwritten the original text. That's your right as a reader, but I rather wish you had chosen to engage with my ideas rather than with what you thought they were.

What you are missing is the idea that to engage with literature at anything above a casual level, you do need a basis in canonical texts (even though few of us these days have the extensive coverage that someone like Bloom would argue for). It is the same as needing to be good at valences before you can become a chemist, or algebra before you can become a mathematician. In no other field than literature would people argue that it is a good and productive idea to dispense the basic language on which all else is built.

And I don't mind you popping in to argue, you are always welcome to. But could you be a little more polite next time? I don't believe it's reasonable to tell people what they need to do in their own journals.

The next generations of writers! The people who use the language! Canon is an historic document that is written based on the evidence that emerges over following decades. This is why no one would argue that Wolf Hall was essential to an understanding of English literary history, but it is now quite reasonable to say that The Handmaid's Tale is essential to understand North American literature as a whole.

I have, actually, but I far prefer Derrida.

Forgive me if I seem rude, I don't mean to be. But just a couple of final points before I quit bothering you, which I am about to do (quit, that is):

What you are missing is the idea that to engage with literature at anything above a casual level, you do need a basis in canonical texts (even though few of us these days have the extensive coverage that someone like Bloom would argue for).

I really can't see how that's true.

I think, to basically go back to my original point, it depends on the function of literature, and we have differing ideas of function. I think of literature in terms of how it works sociopolitically. So when you say, Canon is an historic document that is written based on the evidence that emerges over following decades, I see that as a very problematic statement. It's a sleight of hand. The canon doesn't emerge like something with its own agency; people decide, consciously and less consciously, what the canon will consist of, and there are many cultural pressures on these decisions. The investments and strategies behind those pressures are what interest me, and it always bothers me when I come across arguments like yours and don't see them interrogated, since you are claiming the authority to say what people should read.

Edited 2010-02-12 15:23 (UTC)

I am of two minds about this question. On the one had, I do get that "frisson of glee' whenever I notice high-cultural references in contemporary texts. I also can't read anything without contextualizing it historically, and I'm never going to be the kind of person who can forget who the author was and when he or she lived.

The problem is always the imposition of a single canon. I'm afraid I'll miss something. I'm relatively well-read, I guess, in the Western canon, sort of. At least I know the Hebrew scriptures and much of the NT pretty well. I read Rashi every week, and I read St. Augustine for school, and I taught Maimonides (ha! three pages ahead of the students, in translation, so lame.) I did a couple of courses on Japanese history so I've read some of the major works of Japanese literature. I put myself through a year or so of reading all the 19th century British novels I'd ever heard were important.

It's so difficult to get every joke and to set aside one culture's great works as "not mine" when everything seems to get pulled in somewhere and everyone is connected.

This is where fannishness serves people. When you throw yourself into a single, perhaps completely inadequate, work of fiction or cinema or whatever, and plumb whatever depths it has, or should have had--you can be pulled into all sorts of directions.

people decide, consciously and less consciously, what the canon will consist of, and there are many cultural pressures on these decisions

That's true, but the cultural pressures aren't, as your first comment discussed, those imposing a 'high' culture from a position of power. They're the general users of the language. As an example, most Shakespearean works were performed most authentically as puppet shows touring the provinces in the centuries after his death.

The verve of Shakespeare's storytelling and the richness of his language was recognised by these audiences, many of whom were illiterate, and his plays, with most of their big speeches intact, were popular entertainments. In what you would describe as the bastions of high culture, whole plays were revised by people like Nahum Tate as they were seen as being in 'poor taste'.

This is one of the things that irritates me about the imposition of philosophies like Bourdieu's onto English culture. There is no Academy jealously guarding our literary history. It has been produced by audiences and marketplaces, not by a small number of men personified by Satre and to be reacted against. The model does not fit. (British culture is a more difficult question, as it can be argued that there are Academy equivalents for Welsh culture at the very least.)

Admittedly, many of the competing lists that seek to define the English canon have some works on them that have not been popular with audiences for years, or were never so in this country, but they earn their place through either massive impact at the time of publication (in the case of someone like Smollett (big general readership) or Woolf (taken to the breast of early twentieth century women across the country)), or in the revolutionary effect on writing and language following (the Genji writer, and, one could argue, Marlowe and Kyd (though you could also argue that those two were the James Cameron and Martin Scorseses of their day).

And I disagree with your assertion that I am claiming the authority to say what people should read: I neither do this nor claim the authority to say that 2 must be the number after 1. People can read whatever they like! My argument is that, just as we have a common mathematical language we use if we want to be able to do mathematics in a comprehensive way, so we have a common literary language we use if we want to engage with literature deeply.

Do you need any of this to be a successful barrister, accountant, sociologist, doctor or footballer? No. But to be a good writer, literary theorist or critic? Yes. And why? Because these are professions that engage with the art of words and how they work. To suggest that this can be done well with a background only in trash (which, as I keep saying, can as easily be literary fiction as mass market, in fact I have often thought the former genre more prone to innate incoherence) is to expect your barrister to argue effectively with no experience in torts.

A side note, as I'm not certain on one point, if you were talking about me recommending books when you say 'claiming authority', yes I do that a lot, mostly for YA or speculative fiction, and on the grounds of everything from 'this was really enjoyable' to 'this writer redefines the genre'. I would disagree that this is me imposing any authority, more doing what every keen reader does.

I rather doubt that the entirety of the last century has been devoted to anything so daft, actually. Let us assume however that the SCR of every redbrick-cum-plate-glass jumped-up former poly in Christendom (I am dismayed to see that you are apparently a TCD person, and thus want to know better) believe that critical judgments in literature and the arts are always all of them wholly and entirely a function of power politics, class, and All That. So be it. These distinguished academics may then leave their holes and gather at Avebury and Stonehenge on the equinox every year, in their sandals and hempen clothing, doubtless sacrificing muesli pigs and bulls made of soya-bean to the chthonic deity Postmodernismus, and chant that claim until they’re hoarse; they can all agree all the time about all of it – and it’s still utter balls.

Were one to name two tellers of tales – to use RLS’s formulation – who have had the deepest and lengthiest impact upon Western civilisation (we shall come to other civilisations in a moment), one would quite likely be forced to give the prize to a slave and to a blind bard living in primitive conditions. The figure of Æsop and the tales attributed to him live on, not because the maxims of his fables are universally ‘useful to the magistrate’ (a redaction of Gibbon, as I should hope you recognise): many of them are what you would doubtless seize upon with glad cries as ‘subversive, yay!’, but because they are in every sense popular: they are Hellenistic Hausmärchen. Homer (or of course another man of the same name) has eclipsed Hesiod, let alone Chersios, Theognis, and the rest, not because the powerful took up his poetry, but because the people did. The Hellenistic world quoted ‘the Poet’ – there was only one, so far as the people were concerned: rather as we speak of the Bard or earlier generations referred to Aristotle simply as the Philosopher – in season and out, with a saw or a tag for every occasion; they quoted the Poet rather as Americans quote the Authorised Version. As to why – well, wait for it: we shall discuss Shakespeare soon enough.

Or, again, the search for the roots of the novel as a form has in the West gone back to Egyptian tales and Chariton’s Chæreas and Callirrhoe; yet beyond that close horizon, it can only be concluded that it emerged fully formed, as from the brow of Zeus, in the work traditionally attributed to a woman often called ‘Lady Murasaki’; and her tale of the Shining Prince is more mature and better realised than anything of far later date in the West. Sir Willoughby Patterne, Pamela, even Mr Datchery, stand in the shade when seen beside Hikaru no Kimi.

And this raises a point I made earlier in another thread: that it is simply false to assert that the canon, whatever that may be when it’s at home, is not populated by what one commenter listed as ‘women, people of all colo[u]rs, people with disabilities, and queer folks’. In fact, it always has been. As I noted,

There’s the Analects, and Lady Murasaki, and Mary Shelley (three works and we’ve already ticked two boxes each for, firstly, women, and, secondly, non-Western / non-‘white’); Apuleius, Augustine, and possibly Terence were of part, or wholly of, Berber descent, so far as once can determine, and Tertullian and Macrobius both seem to have been North African; Pushkin and Dumas should be considered by academics as people of colour today, I think (odd how modern bien-pensant liberalism has readopted the ‘one-drop’ rule); Homer and Milton were blind or partially so, as, in later years, were Borges and Aldous Huxley; most of the Greeks and some of the Romans on the Usual and Customary List were bent as a nine bob note – and did we mention Sappho, who ticks two boxes here? – and I suppose most people had put either Wilde or Housman on the list if not both (and Byron, to be sure).... I rather think the list that gets reeled off has always included people in your various categories.

When we speak of Homer and Hesiod, and still more when we come to Vergil, we are of course dealing with what has survived. I would maintain however that the brute fact that Homer and Hesiod, Sophocles, Æschylus, and Aristophanes, Menander, Vergil, Ovid, and Horace, say, did not come down to us (as others have done) as three dubious fragments apiece, is itself a measure of their popular influence: their influence with the people. Certainly, Vergil is uncomfortably celebratory of the Augustan Settlement and the schemes of that gangster Octavian, and was rather by way of being a court poet. But the works of court poets do not survive their political circumstances unless those works are able to stand on their own, by giving pleasure. And that the authors whose works survived the cataclysms of the post-Hellenistic and Roman worlds, the several crises of the Roman principiate, the fall of Rome, and the Middle Ages, were popular with a significant number of all who could read them – and more to the point, who could copy and thus preserve them, and chose to preserve these works and not others in transmissible quantity – is proof enough that the work was accounted good by the reading public as a whole. (It must never be forgotten, although it all too commonly is, that the mediæval Church, that preserved and transmitted these works, was the most meritocratic and democratic of institutions, in which the ploughboy and the villein’s son, simply by getting his letters at the abbey, could rise to be a professor at university, chancellor of the realm, or indeed the pope, so far as his talents could take him.)

By surviving, these works have informed and permeated and inspired all the works that have come after, as Homer fathered Vergil; yet it is equally true that it was because these works influenced the works of later writers, the originals were made newly popular or popular anew, contributing to their survival. The means whereby older works were preserved for most of human history, by the way, puts paid to the puerile and ahistorical assertion that ‘people in positions of cultural power choose what “good” literature is, thereby ensuring that it is taught academically and in schools, allowing it to be read and reread, ensuring that it lasts’, I may add.

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Cultural literacy, I likes it!

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Brammers is by way of being a friend, and I don't wish to wreck her salon.

Well, if it's English literature -

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Re: Well, if it's English literature -

Re: Part 3

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That ‘the last century of cultural analysis has already done this’ is hardly encouraging, is it.

Part 2 of why that analysis is utter balls.