PAPER
For first-time sufferers, canon-itis can be a traumatic
event, in particular when it occurs during a faculty
member’s probationary period. Long-time
victims of this chronic condition affecting the individual and collective academic
body know, however, to expect occasional but extremely painful flare-ups, in
particular during periods of acute identity crisis and intergenerational rivalry.
Widespread in United States foreign language departments, canon-itis outbreaks
can be severe in French faculty, where the general etiology of the disease,
i.e., anxiety over the scope and content of basic literary fields, their relation
to the non-literary and to the hyper-literary, and the purpose of literary
training in general, acquires violent characteristics due to interactions between
French intellectual centralization, American-based francophilia, and paradoxical
claims to universal values (Loucif 87-107). Canon-itis manifests paradoxical
symptoms: on the one hand, longing for the security of ‘known values,’ purportedly
timeless values, and French-styled knowledge, along with a possible sense of
loss over one’s own collective identity in favor of international “Frenchness”;
on the other hand, a refusal of strategies for imposing order on the realm
of literature and literary studies, especially when the beneficiaries of such
classifications appear to privilege one sex and race and New World sentiments
of superiority (Schor). The symptoms regularly form the basis for scholarly
and editorial-fashion articles on Franco-American culture, politics, and university
systems. Less often, however, do we think about the possibilities for eradicating
canon-itis or, barring that, for minimizing its symptoms and giving students
tools for understanding the place of this condition in the constitution of
our field. If left unchecked, canon-itis can indeed lead to bitterness, feelings
of futility, increasingly sectarian, professional behavior, and poorly advised,
public in-fighting. A series of experimental treatments, used individually
or applied in combination, may, however enable faculty to live a healthy academic
life with canon-itis. By recognizing the condition, articulating to students
the choices of particular courses, teaching the canon as a subject among others,
and exploring its historical manifestations, faculty can avoid the debilitating
effects of worsening canon-itis’ while enabling students to achieve a
fuller understanding of the field of French literature.
For
Classes of Difference
Academics seem sometimes to specialize in preaching tolerance to various social
and political groups, but intellectual openness within home institutions and
disciplines constitutes perhaps the greatest challenge to faculty. Appeals
to shared values such as rigor and opposition to intellectual laxism serve
to defend personal intellectual options and to justify self-reproduction in
hiring processes, graduate education, and publication decisions. In this context,
one of the basic questions that comes to the fore is that of the necessity
of faculty achieving any agreement on this issue. A truly open department could
easily house colleagues with radically divergent views on the topic, creating
an environment in which, through this very difference embedded in learning,
students would necessarily become more sophisticated readers and thinkers.
It is true that the stakes of reading lists and course content are particularly
high in foreign language curricula, since no assumptions can be made about
students’ previous knowledge and about the likelihood of their being
exposed to certain texts and ideas outside of class; however, this very urgency
should, in fact, lead professors to look provide different approaches in various
settings during the academic careers of their students. Not that professors
should purposefully teach against the grain, themselves, be it teaching outside
the canon for true believers or within its bounds for free wanderers; adhering
to the pleasure principle, as Charlie Stivale has written, is essential to
good teaching, but welcoming colleagues with different preferences prevent
this issue from unnecessarily acquiring characteristics of the main dividing
line between faculty.
Peaceful coexistence may seem an excessively relativist, overly soft, and insufficiently
analytical, and wholly unrealistic or even undesirable reaction to the depth
and breadth of dissent between proponents and detractors of teaching the canon.
Such an approach has nonetheless the value of reflecting the reality of current
practices, which are rarely as radical in their configurations as theoretical
pieces suggest. In her study of syllabuses provided from a few sample departments,
Sabine Loucif concludes that the overwhelming majority of faculty actually
do teach what we currently recognize as the canon to undergraduates and graduates
alike, reserving difference in approaches to research possibilities (225-307).
Loucif’s results, while not statistically significant, are interesting,
for they appear to correspond with anecdotal evidence witnessed in many institutions.
In fact, it may be that for many professors, not following the canon may often
mean little more than using less frequently taught texts by ‘classic’ authors – La
vie de Rancé in the place of René and Mémoires de deux
jeunes mariées instead of Le père Goriot or Eugénie Grandet,
and Horace rather than Indiana, and not the wholesale elimination of canonical
writers. Aiming for kinder, gentler behavior between professors might have
the added benefit of encouraging experimentation. I personally enjoy teaching
some classes with mostly classic texts, others weighted with less well established
ones; in each case, the mixing in of a couple of texts benefiting from a different
status than the others allows students to explore concepts of marginality and
centricity with more tools in hand. The goal in this is not to eliminate debate
but to create a climate in which there is more room for analysis and fewer
excuses for political grandstanding.
Thinking through the Canon
The
definition of the canon, its contours, formation,
and purpose are fundamental questions of and for
literature. In the context of nineteenth-century
French literature, we can teach the canon in the
same way that we as we speak of and analyze mal du
siècle; Realism, symbolism, the figure of
the flâneur, modernity, and decadence. Some
general areas to explore in this context include
the purpose of sacred books for a particular culture;
strategies and material means through which texts
achieve, maintain, and lose that level of collective
reverence; effects of an elevation relative to other
cultural products. More century-specific questions
may focus on the rise and fall of criticism as a
genre, the broadening of secondary education and
the reform of university structures as well as curricula
in Third Republic France, literature as a vehicle
for nationalism and its contestation, the complex
relationships between canon formation, monumental
culture, journalism, and erudition. The canon can
easily serve as an important angle from which to
approach nineteenth-century literature, in which
case our end-of-the-twentieth-century debates not
only may add to the students’ perception of
the pertinence of the topic but provide some useful
terms of comparison.
Engaging students in a comparative study of the debates occurring in nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century canon formation with those characteristics of more
recent disagreements over the purpose and content of the canon is a riveting
way for many students to enter into the factory of literature, into the material
process, not of creating works but of creating the wider product called literature.
Newspapers, literary journals, collections of articles by outdated critics,
and literary manuals are types of texts that many students do not read much
less analyze during their regular coursework. Requiring students to look up
the space and place devoted to particular works or authors in famous or less-known
manuals, for example, sometimes confirms long-standing classifications other
times points to the time at which certain ideas of particular authors changed.
In similar fashion, asking a student to study the criticism produced in particular
years in such periodicals as La Revue des deux mondes, Illustration, Le journal
des débats, Le temps or Revue d’histoire littérarie de
la France, brings the student from the position of a more or less happy consumer
of literature to that of an analyst in the general sense of the term, that
is, beyond the boundaries of a specific topic concerning an aspect of a book
on a professor-provided, naturalized reading list. Such an assignment can be
the subject of a long-term project, but it also works very well as a more limited,
short-term, even one-night requirement. In that case, the class can divide
up the different media that will be used to find information and attitudes
concerning one author or even work, and the bank of resources can include contemporary
academic journals.
No matter what author is selected, one of the findings tends to be that the
reasons invoked for appreciating or minimalizing particular works often involve
values that may no longer hold or prove points that no longer interest readers.
Philippe Montenon, for example, begins his 1862 work by citing what he considers
to be the three sources for good literature: religion, patriotism, and taste
(14-16). According to Ferdinand Brunetière, the likes of Lamartine,
Mussets, and Hugo have less of a claim to the status of classic authors than
Béranger. All of them live too long after the French language reached
its most perfect state but the first three authors were, in addition, excessively
influenced by foreign relative to the pure blood Béranger, “à peine
poète mais Gaulois” (Etudes 312). Elsewhere, he finds epistolary
writing, a genre that interests few specialists, to be the area of genius peculiar
to the French and the source of their literary greatness: “Il est vrai;
nous n’avons ni Milton ni Shakespeare, ni le Paradis perdu ni Hamlet;
nous n’avons ni Goethe, ni Kant; mais dans aucune littérature,
depuis que l’on écrit des Lettres, il n’y a rien de comparable à la
Correspondance de Voltaire ou à celle de Mme de Sévigné,
rien de comparable seulement à celle de madame du Deffand ou de Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse; et c’est bien déjà quelque chose” (Questions
50). The national function given to letter-writing speaks volumes for the possible
functions and limitations of currently held opinions.
The process, then, tends to result in the questioning of the self-evident superiority
of particular works and more broadly in the demystification of literature as
a natural and timeless, organic creation. This does not mean that the assignment
teaches students no longer to love the classics; it can, on the contrary, enrich
their understanding of them, but it does so in a way that is intellectually
more demanding than the simple reproduction of sameness. A class with a focus
on the canon can, therefore, gain greatly considering changes in the programme
de l’agrégation and, more generally, from exploring the deep ambivalence
surrounding the very public ‘universit-ication’ of experts in literature
(Prost 224-30, 245-61; Compagnon ; Charle ) . Brunetière and Lanson
demonstrate the divide between the waning dedication to “belles oeuvres” and
the new understanding of criticism as erudition (Compagnon 36, 82, 135) – a
distinction that is has its own resonance with the distinction that Sabine
Loucif identifies between the types of works privileged in undergraduate and
graduate curricula; it also shows the previous turn-of-the-century crisis in
the literary field relative to history and enables students to have a place
from which to think about the current disciplinary moves within literature
departments today. Such a class can also gain in context as well as in enjoyment
from considering these issues in relation to debates, in the nineteenth century
and in the late twentieth century concerning the expansion, during each period,
of space and access, in the Bibliothèque nationale. Vehement arguments
played themselves out in daily Third Republic newspapers over the consequences
of having a national library open to ‘anyone,’ over the characteristics
of people who would want to spend their days in such a place. Coppée,
for one, calls them “rats de bibliothèque” and “les
poux du papier,” and over the role that such individuals do and should
play in the life of nations. Studying such documents creates a better understanding
of the intellectual climate surrounding canon-formation a century ago and facilitates
discussions concerning the role of literary scholars today, in France as well
as in the United States.
Comparison over time can be fruitfully complemented with comparisons in space.
A fundamental issue for United States-based professors of French is the importance
of imitating the French rather than exploring those works, whether in the canon
or not, that examine topics that resonate with our own. Excellent arguments
exist for both approaches, and if students as well as faculty had more time
and desire to read, the debate may not have taken on the virulence that it
acquired in a late-twentieth-century context. To broaden the framework for
such a discussion and create a little separation between the professor’s
views and the topic, it can be helpful to give students, as a small assignment,
the task of using the internet to find reading lists for English and American
literature classes offered in foreign countries. The results range, as can
be expected, from the predictable to the surprising, and the process enables
students to think and to think through the disagreement at hand.
Literature
as Law
Underlying all of these treatments, however, is an unexamined assumption, that
is, that the canon is naturally and necessarily the list of literary works
that students are supposed to read in order to be considered culturally literate.
In our field, however, and at least as important as the list of more or less
chef-d’oeuvres is the list of critical theory texts that we use as tools
in our trade. Indeed, if we consider that “canon” refers first
to ecclesiastical and secular law, it would make more sense to consider that
these texts be considered the canon, since they provide scholars with the ‘law
of literature’ and the ‘laws for literature,’ that are applied
to understand and judge individual works. It is doubtlessly too late to operate
a wholesale change in the usage of the term, but again, asking students to
compile ‘top ten’ lists of what they think the canon of theory
and the canon of critical studies are today. Students can enrich the discussion
by studying old issues of literary journals for comparison and thinking about
the publication vehicles through which discussions and changes in the configuration
and application of ‘laws’ take place today.
Incorporating questions concerning the canon into classes with other centers
of interest is another way to nourish the ability of students to think and
to think through the canon, in particular in relation to the social functions
expected of literature. Toward the end of a series of classes on George Sand’s
quasi-canonical Indiana, a useful assignment involves having students read
Sainte-Beuve’s 1832 article on Indiana and Zola’s 1876 article
on Sand’s work as a whole. Sainte-Beuve praises the author for speaking
to contemporary readers and presenting them with ‘real’ people
who spoke, dressed, thought, and worried the way they did over issues that
were of concern to them (270), but Zola faults Sand for propagating lies and
dreams as if they were truths. Beautiful and seductive, such works lead readers
into serious errors – egotistic behavior and adultery --, and Zola indicates
that literary as well as social and moral progress will be found in the writings
of those who, like him, have followed in the footsteps of Balzac. These readings
open up onto a whole series of discussion topics, such as the evolution, over
a 54-year period, in the meaning of “realism,” in the connotation
of feminine writing styles, literary subjects, the cultural function of authorship,
the interests and needs of the reading public, and, finally, the forces behind
the inclusion and exclusion of particular authors and works from those considered
canonical. In this regard, references to other historical trends, completely
unrelated to women’s writing or class discord helps students to separate
their own views from the phenomenon they are studying; a large variety of books
on other authors, such as Noémi Hepp’s study, Homère au
dix-septième siècle, provide helpful examples of the literary
ups and downs of authors considered, literarily speaking, unassailable.
The common thread running through all of these symptomatic treatments is the
presumption of value in the talking cure, more specifically in a framework
that provides a little critical distance for faculty and students alike and
encourages reflection on the law of the canon without necessarily rejecting
it wholesale. Debates over the canon are perhaps so emotionally charged because
faculty serve as multi-faceted, frequently paradoxical agents of that law,
acting both as petitioners and protesters and as local lawmakers, police officers,
and judges. Faculty should come out from behind the heavy curtain that is the
canon as either absolute law or complete evil and explain their the various
reasons for specific choices. Students deserve to have a fuller historical,
ideological, comparative, and cognitive appreciation for the field that they
are studying, and they can only gain from knowing the various roles that their
professors are playing in this domain. Canon-itis may well be an incurable
condition at the very center of our identity, but it need not be a debilitating,
degenerative one. By recognizing own symptoms, analyzing manifestations of
it, and teaching students to do the same, the constituted body of literary
scholars can learn not only to live with canon-itis but to incorporate it into
the textual play that is a professional source of joy as well as a core function. |
