The American Literary Canon - What It Might Be

 From The Times Literary Supplement, What should we read? The American canon today by Gordon Fraser addresses all but the one question I have about a literary canon.

Discovering what has happened to the literary canon, ultimately, leaves us with the same questions the canon always posed. Should our relation to fiction be idiosyncratic? In other words, should we merely ask ourselves if we find a novel entertaining or moving or beautiful or just plain good? Or, instead, should cultural institutions collectively decide on a shared body of texts to which we turn for a shared understanding of the world? We have made neither choice. Instead, we have produced an orthodox canon of historical fiction that is read by a small, highly educated but under-capitalized segment of the professional class.

The central failing of the old canon was that it allowed members of a powerful, predominantly white middle class to imagine themselves as the inheritors of an invented, western tradition. I suspect the failure of the new canon is that it will divide segments of the professional class. One segment will take in a version of world history as filtered through literary fiction that is empathetic and intimate, if ultimately unsystematic. We can expect future professionals educated in this way to look on history with guilt, shame, compassion and outrage. And we can expect that they will regard with incredulity their many professional colleagues and fellow citizens who simply do not read literature of any kind.

The review goes on to discuss the rise of historical fiction as part of the canon. It is a discussion about the canon as a cultural edifice.

What interests me about a canon is as one trying to improve his writing. I want to see what encompasses the best writing.

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