What arts and humanities can mean to our living: a review essay

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2004 by Aquila, Dominic A

Typically the controversy over the literary canon in undergraduate education focuses on demands to include the literature of minorities in the list of Great Books of Western civilization. But, Guillory argues, a pluralist canon cannot bring about a pluralist university or society (Guillory, 5, 8). Underlying the exclusion-inclusion axis of debate is the assumption that books not included in a syllabus are intentionally excluded; but against this view Guillory argues that a syllabus is made through the process of selection using several criteria and not just that of exclusion (Guillory, 9, 33). Throughout his book, Guillory does not take a side in the canon debate but rather exposes the shortcomings in the arguments offered from both sides. For him, there is much more to canonicity than an author's social identification. For instance, it is commonly thought that female and minority authors were deliberately excluded from the literary canon. But Guillory argues that such exclusions were not primarily motivated by sexism and racism. Rather, such works were not included for particular social and historical reasons: minority groups had little access to literacy and therefore wrote much less in proportion to white males (Guillory, 15). Today, women authors have been discovered and inserted in the canon as a result of research programs that reflect more the interests and institutional concerns of today's academy than the actual historical significance of the works (Guillory, 15-16).

Guillory claims that both sides of the conventional canon debate agree on three points, each of which he calls into question. Both agree that "canonical texts are the repositories of cultural value." But, Guillory argues, the culture of schools and universities differs from and is isolated from the wider national culture (Guillory, 22, 38). Second, "the selection of texts is the selection of values." But a focus on value ignores other selection criteria, such as genre and linguistics, which may weigh more heavily in the decision for certain texts (Guillory, 23). Finally, conservatives and their multiculturalist opponents agree that an "interpretive community" assigns value to a given work and such value "must be either intrinsic or extrinsic." But such "interpretive communities" are largely imaginative, i.e., thought experiments. Guillory:

The scene in which a group of readers, defined by a common social identity and common values, confronts a group of texts with the intention of making a judgment as to canonicity, is an imaginary scene" and one that ignores the very real institutional context of the school with its own hierarchical ordering and special agendas. (Guillory, 26-27)

Despite the intractability of the conventional debate on the canon and the undergraduate curriculum, it seems an easier debate because its terms are familiar and resonate with the current political climate in which politics suffers a reduction to social identities. But as Guillory says, the conventional debate fails to address "the implications of a fully emergent professional-managerial class which no longer requires the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie." Literature no longer holds a central place in the enculturation of the American middle class; one no longer has to quote Shakespeare to be a banker. For Guillory "the decline of the humanities was never the result of the newer noncanonical courses or texts, but of a large-scale 'capital flight' in the domain of culture" (Guillory, 45). Students recognize this capital flight and make decisions against humanities courses in light of new economic realities. The question for most students is: "Will this or that course supply me with the cultural stock I need to succeed in the current administered society (45)?" "The professional-managerial class has made the correct assessment that, so far as its future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is not worth the investment of very much time or money. The perceived devaluation of the humanities curriculum is in reality a decline in its market value" (Guillory, 46).