The Canon is Dead. What's Next?

 In my English language arts methods class I continue to tell my students that the canon is dead. I give them articles, recent and not so recent to talk about the harm that the canon, especially for American literature has been made up of dead white men, with very few women and even less BIPOC authors. They seem shocked as guess what our university English classrooms are covering? Then when I go to the classrooms, I see that the bought curriculum by our HIDOE includes, drumroll, the same canonical authors that I refused to teach when I started in the early 1990s. 28 years later, we are still teaching Gatsby to our AAPI and BIPOC students in Hawaiʻi. I have nothing against Gatsby and I have taught Gatsby before. I even talk about how we can change the dialogue around Gatsby in this blog. However, spending all of 3rd quarter reading Gatsby and having the same lame conversations around the thug notes, spark notes, Googleable topics like the green light, the billboard, the summary of each chapter, UUUGGGHHHHH. 

I really am not trying to rant. I also am not saying that the canon pieces have no merit. I actually love whole passages of Paradise Lost by Milton and felt sad when we no longer taught that in senior English. But I think I loved Paradise Lost most for what reading it multiple times brought to my new understanding of Frankenstein and Grendal (the POV retelling of the even older Beowulf). Paradise Lost was a canonical work that actually brought me a certain kind of understanding of the "monsters" in many other books, including Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. 

Austin Kleon, in his post on "Books that Suck You In and Books that Spin You Out" was able to clarify my own thinking around my attitude toward the canon. For me, it is not black and white, but I fear that when I am trying to right the landscape of a systemically racist department of education, my words, to my students seem to read as black and white instead of rainbow striations of truth that is my intention and deep down belief. So I honor the canonical pieces like Paradise Lost as centripetal books, as books that suck me back in as other books seem to point back to them and my theoretical reading lens often calls me back to these works as a source blood and umbilical cord that feeds on other books. Read his post, it makes more sense than I do. 

But when I talk about source blood for fantasy books, I go back to JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings trilogy as the source blood and that cosmological goop that holds all life and no life. His ability to create a fantasy world is the rubric upon which I measure all other fantasy books. When Martin got stuck completing Game of Thrones my invested reader advice would have been to go back to the goop and the source blood. When I really like a fantasy series, I pick up The Fellowship of the Ring again just to see if I am accurate in my assessment. The fact that I must complete all three of the books before I read anything else is further proof that for me, LoTR is a centripetal book. 

His post also answers my question on why I gravitate so hard towards YA fantasy books. These are the centrifugal force books that spin me out LoTR (like for the 100th time) or make me think about the other centrifugal books that seem to also spin out and into each other. I think the idea of books linking on to other books in one centrifugal force field is called "reading ladders" (Terri Lesesne). For her, the idea of a reading ladder is that reading ladders are a way to slowly move students from where they are to where we would like them to be. She does this by starting with authors, genres, or subjects that students like and connecting them to book after book, each a little more complex or challenging than the last.  As a teacher, in order to do this (as I also do not believe in the idea that complexity of a book is equated by reading level --double barf ugh), I think understanding the connections between centrifugal force books is like understanding what books are on the ladder. The goal, though, would be to lead them to the source books and then back out again.  Perhaps for me, the centrifugal force books are books that I love but they are not books that I will return to for the rest of my life (centripetal books). I will book talk them, I will put it here so I remember them, but I hardly ever reread them. This is very different from the "rest books" - you know in the absence of force an object will remain at rest - after all there can also be books that do not move us and I abandon or do not write about books all the time - the "rest books." 

I think what this conversation with myself has really done is to soften my edges around the canon - not to say that this is what we need to spend our very little time with our students on, but more about relooking at how I play with the different forces as well as how we work on the destination of our curriculum just as much as we work on the bridges to that curriculum for our students.