Introduction: “The Canon Brawl: Arguments over the Canon”

Abstract

In Beyond the Culture Wars (excerpted in chapter 32), Gerald Graff claims “what first made literature, history, and other intellectual pursuits seem attractive to me was exposure to critical debates.”² Reflecting on his own experience as a student, Graff argues persuasively that we ought to aim to generate discussion in the classroom so that all involved might realize that we already represent a range of critical positions, and that, by extension, we are already taking part in an extended, critical debate, even in ways we are not fully aware of. Graff calls the process “teaching the controversies,” and it can make for an exciting classroom. It is also, though, an excellent description of the dynamic of debate that is embedded within literary traditions, and of how the influential texts of those traditions can shape the terms for subsequent participants. Indeed, traditions are made up of debates, diachronically (as past addresses present, and present the past), anachronically (as something ancient seems to matter for the present, and vice versa), and pluralistically (as an extraordinary range of voices make up a tradition, and the readings of that tradition). Like Graff, I too believe that we ought to “teach the controversies,” although to Graff’s sense of critical debate in the classroom I would add the importance of heightening awareness that such debate is also central to the texts we read and discuss. In this sense, “we” are no longer teachers and students, but the larger community of readers and writers involved in the discussion.

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”¹