On Canonizing Literature & Curating Anthologies
Kati Lewis
“There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. ‘Value’ is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare.”
Over the last year, I’ve engaged in debates about what is and is not canon in contemporary adaptations and extensions of the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Last of Us series. The concept of “canon” in this context refers to a representation of a story that is true to the original. I mention these three series because the debates around the adaptations and extensions of these stories have been anchored in the much more diverse casting of and changes to or expansions of beloved characters in these three series rather than complete faithfulness to the source material. We’ll come back to this discussion in just a bit …
In most U.S. college literature courses, students and professors will likely have a conversation about the traditional Western literary canon and likely read works included in it. “Canon” in this context refers to a collection of written works that have been deemed by literary authorities—usually publishers, critics, literature professors, and historians—as cultural “classics” and, thus, worthy of continued publication, circulation, academic study, and cultural elevation. This branding also endows works included in the canon with deep cultural, historical, political, and economic value.
For generations in the U.S., publishers, critics, and college professors were almost always white, Anglo-Saxon, straight, cisgender, upper income, educated men. Here race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and education made it possible for them to have much more access to the poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and essays available in their university curricula and libraries as well as publishing circles. This access also meant that these publishers, critics, and college professors had the most say in which works were considered worthy of study and their broader circulation via education and other cultural institutions.
Historically, the works included in the canon tended to reaffirm the cultural, political, economic, historical, and environmental ideological commitments of the time in which the “canon makers” lived, despite the fact that they argued that literature should be studied for its aesthetic value: the artistic, strange, and original ways in which language is used and stories, poems, and other forms of literature are structured. In fact, Harold Bloom, one such canon maker, asserted that literary works included in the canon must reflect aesthetic value while minimizing the ways in which literature is always-already situated in complex contexts of culture, politics, economics, history, humanity’s relationship with nature, language, and other ideological foundations. In fact, the standards devised to determine what is and is not aesthetically noteworthy are situated in those very same contexts.
Works in the literary canon almost always reflected white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant experiences and ideals even when those works were critical of them or when those works didn’t originate in Western Europe and the U.S. Examples of works included in the canon are Shakespeare’s plays and poems, novels like The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Abbey, and poetry by William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, who used to be one of the rare women writers included in the canon. Very rarely was a writer of color, immigrant writer not from Western Europe, openly queer writer, not formally educated writer, disabled writer, or another woman writer included in the canon. The extensive literary canon also excluded writers from the regions and peoples that European Empires and the United States colonized during and long after the Age of Imperialism.
Western colonialism and imperialism ensured that the literary works considered “great” and “with the most compelling ideas and aesthetic value” published, studied, and circulated throughout the world were those that came from the “best” in their own cultures. In inventing the idea that the “great” literary works only came from the “West” and ancient cultures, imperial conquest also took place in the classrooms often via the Western literary canon. These works were used to perpetuate the notion that Western philosophies, ethics, and beliefs were superior to those of their non-Western counterparts.
Supplanting Indigenous languages, genres, and storytelling aesthetics with those from the “West” helped ensure that the stories published, taught, and circulated were those of writers from the colonizing culture—those with the cultural capital. Colonizing practices such as these mean that a myriad of stories, genres, ways of knowing and being, and storytelling aesthetics outside of Western traditions have been lost. Those that haven’t been lost are frequently relegated to “special topics” literature courses such as “Women’s Literature,” “Black Literature,” “Postcolonial Literature,” “Indigenous Literature,” “Queer Literature,” “Disabilities Literature,” etc. as though these literatures are niche forms of storytelling separate from the literary canon and from what we might call the “American experience” as captured in Literature.
Writers exist and write at the intersections of identity, experience, culture, history, politics, aesthetics, environment, economics, language, education, religion, and much more. Yet, writers from historically, politically, economically, and culturally marginalized communities and backgrounds are expected to write almost solely about their experiences of marginalization in order for their work to have value. This has tokenizing impacts on writers and the ways in which readers engage with their work. It also belies the realities that writers from these communities and backgrounds have as many different kinds of stories to tell as writers whose works are in the canon and that they have many, many different ways of telling those stories.
Toni Morrison, one of the most celebrated U.S. writers, cultural critics, and activists, contends that literary canons are problematic because they are inherently contingent upon the dominant culture’s ideological commitments to the past and its attendant forms of erasure, domination, and tokenizing. While Bloom and others argue that the literary canon is a representation of timeless embodiments of the human condition based on artistic (literary) value, Morrison maintains that literature cannot and should not be entirely stripped from the contexts in which it is situated, published, circulated, taught, and discussed. As stated earlier, determining what is “literary” isn’t an objective process stripped of the contexts in which literary-canon makers are selecting what works and whose ideas will be represented in the canon.
In literature classes, the works that are assigned are symbols of what the professors view as good writing and, thus, valuable writing, which includes the economic investment we’re asking students to undertake by assigning works that students must purchase, rent, download, or check out from the library (since the library still had to purchase the work). Literary works assigned in these classes are often compiled in rather large books called literature anthologies. A literature anthology, often influenced by the Western literary canon, is a collection of a variety of different kinds of literary works by different authors. When professors teach specific works, we reinforce what we think should be interpreted and analyzed as worthy of academic study. Literature professors, in a very real sense, create their own literary canons for the classroom. In doing this, we’re demonstrating what kind of writing and books are valuable. What we choose to teach is also shaped by the cultural, political, economic, environmental, linguistic, and historical contexts in which we are living. Thus, teaching literature using any kind of literary canon does not exist in some transcendental realm beyond context and ideology. All literature and literary courses come about through material operations of publishers, teachers, students, and institutions that intentionally and unintentionally seek to reaffirm dominant ideologies about what stories and whose stories matter. Thus, material operations affirm and reaffirm the formation of literary canons as well as the anthologies inspired by and curated from them—the anthologies taught in literature courses. The attendant financial implications of what the culture deems “valuable” hasn’t only been about “what is good writing”; it’s also about what kinds of stories will sell well on the literary market, in critical circles, and in classrooms. Professors reify “what sells” in the decisions we make about whose writing and stories we will study with students.
These cultural, political, historical, and economic realities not only left the voices, experiences, and ideas of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), queer, poor, non–Western European immigrant, disabled, and women writers out, it also left out numerous genres, styles, and structures of writers from the cultural traditions of marginalized communities and popular genres because they weren’t deemed “literary.” Most speculative fiction genres, poetic forms, hybrid structures, and stories based on Indigenous oral traditions have been excluded from the canon due to their classifications of “not being literary” and being popular amongst the masses, which creates a distinction between literature of the upper and educated class and that which more people might have access to and enjoy.
Additionally, many writers from marginalized communities take up popular genres and forms because these have been used to demonize and stereotype them. Diverse writers frequently use genres and forms to re-imagine them and invent new ones as acts of historical reclamation, unerasing the stories of their experiences and communities, and so much more. Popular genres have always-already represented the fears, desires, anxieties, hopes, and realities of cultures and countercultures in ways that “literary” fiction sometimes fails to do. For example, Octavia Butler anchors while blending and blurring her Parable of the Sower series in the elements of science fiction, climate fiction, postapocalyptic, and dystopian fiction genres to provide readers with an illuminating exploration of destructive and constructive human responses to a changing planet in the face of climate disaster.
The series also examines how social inequities heighten when ecosystems and infrastructure, as a result of human behavior, fall apart. Butler uses critical elements of these popular speculative fiction genres to poignantly and pointedly illuminate that survival and living require interdependence, empathy, and community. It’s one of the most striking considerations of the human capacity for cruelty under violent systems and its capacity for re-imagining a better world. The Parable of the Sower series does exactly what “canon literature” does—it critically and creatively interrogates human behavior, what it means to be human, and relationships to the land and each other. It creates and invites conversation in connection with other literary and cultural works about all of those human responses to a dying world.
And yet there still remains a very real social status that comes with having focused on the “classics” that examine those same themes, which frequently limits interacting with and taking just as seriously other forms of storytelling like Parable of the Sower. Consider whose stories remain hidden and erased when we devalue the importance of popular genres and traditional storytelling outside of Western “classics.”
All literary, film, television, video game, and other canons cannot be firmly fixed in place forever; they are “loose,” changeable, and malleable because cultural ideas and values about storytelling change over time, expand, shift, and are re-imagined most often by writers whose voices have been excluded. And this brings us back to the conversations I’ve been having with people about what is “canon” in popular series …
The writers of HBO’s The Last of Us crafted a more deeply connected, visible and relevant relationship between the characters Bill and Frank, giving them an interdependent life and death that the game failed to do. It’s canon that they were a couple in the game; however, players never got to know their relationship in the game—just the horrific aftermath of Frank’s death after being bitten by one of the infected. The tv series affords them a richer story arc filled with context for their relationship and their choice to die together. The deeper relationship building here makes for salient connection-making in contrast with the relationships Joel, one of the protagonists, had with other survivors and the one he builds with Ellie, a teenager immune to the effects of the zombie-making cordyceps fungus. It’s Bill and Frank’s story arc in the series that makes more powerful the major themes of the game, which are the power of connection and found families in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
In Andor, a recent Star Wars series, viewers are placed in the center of the bureaucracy of the Empire and the direct, cultural, and structural violence in the everyday that compels people to rebel. This series moves us beyond legacies of the Skywalkers, the Jedi, and the Sith while still maintaining a conversation with the legacies of justice and injustice, oppression and rebellion, and the costs of conformity to the system and choosing to rebel as represented by those iconic characters in the original series. The Skywalkers aren’t going to bring the Empire down on their own—it takes the sacrifices of all the named and unnamed masses who chose to rebel in order for them to engage meaningfully in their own acts of resistance. Moreover, Andor provides much more complex character motivations within this universe and moves us past one-dimensional heroes and villains to where the lines between light and dark can be very thin.
This discussion on how these two forms of canon inform our thinking about what is valuable isn’t just about what is included and excluded. It’s also about seeing literary works in connection and conversation with each other as well as in conversation and connection with us as readers living and reading within cultural systems. The examples above demonstrate that it’s more useful to think about these forms of canon (and anthologies) via the connections we make or fail to make in what we choose to include and accept as part of a canon—as part of what is worthy of our time, attention, and cultural study. Finding connections and seeing the relationships between literary works from across genres and across the human experience is fundamental to the study of literature and other cultural texts. Being open to discovering those connections and making new ones between classic canon works and other equally important works invites us to explore and expand those continued conversations about humanity and the world we share with others (human and nonhuman) with more depth, breadth, empathy, and interconnectedness.
Any discussion on canon, whether it’s about a faithful representation of the original or the literature that is worthy of academic and cultural study, requires that we—professors, students, the public—think about who is being represented, who is being left out or mischaracterized/stereotyped, whose values and ideas are being centered and whose are being othered, and whose stories are worthy of telling and retelling when we talk about these so-called “canons.”
