This had me wondering about the ways "close reading" both overlaps and diverges from "reading like a writer," a frame which became very popular in creative writing circles, which requires close attention to text, but with a great focus on "how" it generates meaning or aesthetic response, rather than "what" a text means.
As an MFA holder/writer/writing teacher I've found reading like a writer a kind of natural state in that it privileges the initial aesthetic response, but then requires a subsequent close examination to understand its mechanisms of meaning. I will admit to sometimes being one of those people that rolls their eyes at some literary scholarship that seems like it pulls stuff out of thin air, but as I've gotten more mature I've better appreciated the skill, sensibilities behind this kind of reading.
Personally, I think that academic creative writing has gone much too far in the direction of privileging discussion of "craft," a byproduct of the fact that pulling out something like point-of-view or perspective and looking at it as an individual element is the kind of thing you can talk about in the workshop. Both as a teacher and student I sat in rooms where people were admiring "craft" elements while dodging whether or not a story was actually, you know, compelling.
I wonder if these things are always going to be in some measure of tension. Both the book and this review really helped me think about those tensions.
This is great, John. I don’t have an MFA, but as someone who writes both fiction and criticism, I often find myself reflecting on these modes in the way you suggest here. My sense is the both “close reading” and “reading like a writer” are practices that make most sense within a particularly institutional context, and may very well need to be rebooted as our institutions change. And yes, I think all such techniques run the risk of becoming stale and predictable if they don’t keep the larger purpose in mind (i.e. writing compelling interpretations or good fiction!)
That focus on the larger purpose is tough sometimes. I lost it for a while in grad school as I thought my route to success was impressing my “mentor” rather than, you know, exploring what I might have to say about the world in whatever way I could say it. It’s good to reminded that this is what that work of close reading is in service of every so often.
It’s an interesting bind. I defend close reading whenever discussions about it arise in my department. I teach (that is, model) close reading in the textbook chapters I write for the distance students who take our modules. But of the 30-odd articles and book chapters I’ve published, only 1 is straightforward literary criticism/close reading. And that was an analysis of some utterly forgotten 19th-century novels that I was confident no one had looked at seriously before (and no one would need to ever again).
I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that close reading is “just like, your opinion, man” and thus not something I feel confident placing in front of other scholars. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to book history and literary sociology, even before I was really conscious of working in those fields. One can write about literature, but in a way that feels more rigorous and less grounded in mere assertion and performance (“here’s my reading of X” when such readings are potentially limitless).
Yeah, I'm similar. I do lots of close reading in class and in my scholarship. But almost always within a broader sociological or historical framing. I also like for my students to think about narrative structure, which has its own vexed relationship to the verbal analysis typical of older close reading approaches. I see it as one tool among many, which I take to be your point as well.
I'm in furious agreement with everything you say here. I'm planning to write about Kanakia's book at some point alongside some of the Substack projects to ask: what alternative possibilities exist for organizing around literary culture in this brave new world; what do they assume and what do they entail.
I share your skepticism about close reading as the discipline's salvation (not coincidentally I see my writing as literary history, so I suppose I'm biased). As classroom pedagogy, i.e., as Dan Sinykin's using it... yes, sure. I still have to read his book but an earlier exchange convinced me it is definitely worth reading. But what's wrong with "interpretation," or something like that, which is flexible enough to encompass many approaches, and is the natural account of the range of activities we bring to understanding highly valued texts?
On the inclusive canon, I agree with you. Insofar as the history of culture is a comedic rather than tragic history (feeling pretty debatable at the moment) it's because the canon becomes more inclusive along lines of sex and race with time; I think this story is essential to what literature is and means. Hard to see how eg Toni Morrison isn't part of our canon on any measure. To see this, you actually have to be able to deal with an earlier more exclusive canon, though, which has made this story quite difficult to tell. For anyone who works on the entry of women into the canon (eg in the 17th c) this is very much in contention right now.
All of this is great, Julianne. I’m looking forward to reading the piece about the Substack projects. At some point, it would be cool to discuss canon plus alternative possibilities with Henry, since it seems like we’re all thinking along these lines!
Very interesting review, Jeffrey, thanks for writing this. I'm not totally on board with the immersive versus close reading framing, however (I realize this is your gloss on Kanakia's introduction). As someone who participated in a "Great Books" program my first year of university, the reading experience WAS immersive; the idea was to read a ton and then discuss the books with the other students. Yes, we took notes and wrote essays, but the experience was not that dissimilar to a book club. I believe our program was based on the University of Chicago's program, which was founded on open ended inquiry around the texts in question (very free form, curious, not prescriptive at all). There was never any mention of "close reading" as a method, although we did that as a sort of osmosis because that, to my mind, is just the natural outcome of reading and being interested in something (I'm thinking of the way Guillory basically says close reading is "paying attention to the words on the page" and then Kramnick writes about how close reading is really a form of writing). I think you can make the case that immersion is actually the first part of close reading.
To my mind, the more accurate distinction between a sort of autodidactic, library card reading and what happens in academia is in relation to the Theory that is taught in grad school. The idea that there is a meaning in the text that doesn't "really exist" is representative of the paranoid style of criticism; you think the book is about one thing, but then you learn, via Frederic Jameson or someone, that it's really about sexism, or racism, or colonialism. And, to be sure, maybe the book IS also about that, but when viewing a text in this way, everything is backwards--rather than starting from the book and moving out into these broader discussions, you start from the broader discussions and then investigate the book for evidence to support your preconceived notion. Obviously, I'm painting with a broad brush here, and the best Theory will feature close readings that pay attention to the text, but too often Theory is a sort of crutch used to avoid the encounter with the text, which can and should be troubling, disconcerting, wondrous.
As far as I know, the Great Books programs that happened or still happen in universities usually take pace in the first year of undergrad study and don't feature literary theory. The whole idea is to encounter the foundational texts of western civilization. Then, you can deconstruct them later if you want, but as Justin Smith Ruiu often mentions, you can't deconstruct and tear down before you actually have the base!
A few books we read in my program: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, History of the Peloponnesian War, The Aeneid, Inferno, Anna Karenina, Frankenstein, The Birth of Tragedy, a bunch of Greek tragedies (I can't really remember if we made it to the 20th century, I've been trying to dig up a syllabus from back then...)
In one of the talks he delivered to the English student society at Oxford (if memory serves), C.S. Lewis explained that they don't include modern books because people don't need help understanding something written in their own time, unlike books from the past which are less immediate to us; I don't think this is entirely convincing, but it is somewhat the reason why more traditional lists of Great Books persist, I think. The argument about which of the books you propose to add will finally be worth adding will take a long time, and the fact of that there is a filter of "greatness" is what makes the argument matter, to some extent.
Yeah, I agree, and I get why Naomi made the decision not to make a new list on those grounds. The only thing is that, if I followed her account correctly, the original list she used was compiled in 1960, meaning that there was only a decade gap between its composition and the last text it included. So it seems to me there's a bit of a tension between the list itself and that claim about the passage in time. In any case, when I say that it feels like a missed opportunity, it's mostly because I would have liked to have seen what her list through 2000 or 2010 would be.
Thanks for this, Jeff. Maybe inevitably, I'd quibble with the portrait given of the close reading champions. I'm fully for new strategies, plural approaches, and so on. And as you hint, I don't see much *new*, however valuable, in Kanakia's argument as you present it. I think immersive reading is great: in fact, arguably a necessary or valuable prerequisite for close reading. (We say you ideally learn to read immersively WHILE observing your own reading experience at a second order.) What such close reading hopes to achieve is the marriage of the drama of lay reading with the aesthetic, epistemological, and maybe even ethical demands of university education.
Yes, that seems totally fair as far as your scholarship is concerned. I do think that Kramnick has far more of a commitment to close reading as THE technique that gives coherence to the discipline. And I got the impression from Johanna's presentation at CUNY of Close Reading in the Twenty-First Century that she also shares that sentiment to a degree (though I could be mistaken there). I'm also responding here to the sheer amount of attention that close reading has received in recent years, which I take to be its own form of evidence about institutional and scholarly priorities. That said, I'm a proponent of close reading exercises in the classroom, and I think you and Johanna did a real service to all of us with that intro, which I'll use with my students when I get back to teaching next semester. Mostly, I think we need to recognize that justifications for what we do inside the classroom will not be a substitute for making broader claims about the values of reading, literacy, etc. in the public sphere.
Totally—this all seems right to me. Just did my own latest little bit by publishing an op-ed in the local Atlanta paper about virtue ethics as grounds for a left educational philosophy to vie against the classical education movement. With—well—close reading as my case study.
I enjoy reading your thoughts in this digital space—and chatting with you in others. It's satisfying to watch you turn Kanakia's book over and over in the light, and your thoughts about it, allowing us to accompany your developing ideas. It's close reading and good criticism at its best. There's a lot to think about here!
Naturally, as a writer, critic, and literary translator, I swim in similar (though not identical) intellectual, literary, and linguistic waters as you do. We know that the so-called Great Books exclude most literary traditions and certainly most works from the Hispanic tradition, our bailiwick, except for Borges (who was as European as he was Argentine). A tiny group of inevitable icons like Rulfo, Quiroga, and Sor Juana appear now and again but are not discussed on a par with the Great Anglophone Canon. A few years back, when I could afford to return to literature and writing, I asked for a Latin American Literature course in my MFA program, and they sent us a fellow who was quite nice but who, despite his important post at a major East Coast University, knew less about the topic than I did.
The near-total failure to include global literature from close reading and serious criticism in the anglophone humanities setting, except as an exotic and "inclusive" side dish, is partly due to the inaccessibility of well-translated editions in English and Americans' resistance to learning other languages. This is not important from an identity perspective—identity is messy, as Kanakia herself embodies. At the same time, it's true that most contemporary "Latino" authors who "make it" in the literary establishment here in the US actually live here, not in their lands of origin, and can present their work in English and in person. That does not make them the most important writers by anyone's measure; their notoriety is shaped by social class, mobility, and chance, not solely by how great their books are. For me, what's most damaging about the exclusion of the majority of global literature from the literary conversation is that we miss learning about the other ways of telling; we miss considering the lives, feelings, histories, and genius of the majority of people on Earth. And that leaves us less equipped, less informed, and, in my opinion, less aware of and less safe in the world.
This sentence is the sentence that stirred me in your essay: "There is something irremediably defensive about claiming that the solution to the current system-wide crisis in the humanities is to continue doing exactly what we have always done." Yes! And irremediably dumb, too, because it's contrary to the laws of nature. The thing about the word "canon" is that, like its homophone "cannon," it cannot fail to evoke images of something heavy, resistant, immobile, and dead as a doornail. Divisions between identities (literary or otherwise), eras, genres, and time periods are not fixed. We fix them to plan syllabi, but we shouldn't drink our own Kool-Aid. Despite the fury of the Colombian literary establishment, García Márquez wanted his estate to be at UT's Harry Ransom Center alongside those of his heroes, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Poe. In his death, he shares a roof with them.
As we consider a slowly morphing idea of The Great Books, perhaps we should ask ourselves questions like: What are the books that teach us about each other most elegantly? Which are the books that ask the questions that have always mattered, the ones that matter now, and that our students might usefully apply to their lives? Which are the ones that teach us how to think and tell stories better? Which ones make us feel—cry, laugh, roar with anger—, the ones that bring us closer to each other through the quickness of emotion. Which ones address the existential questions of our times most effectively? And how, by studying such books (canonized or not), can we learn more about how great narrative alchemy is cooked up? Great Books have been piling up since the presses began to run, since books became things people who weren't scholars, priests, or rich folks could own. No one can read them all. But before we claim authority to decide what the Great Books are, we could stop being intellectually lazy and put our shoulders to the wheel to push open the thick, ponderous doors to the rest of the world.
I enjoy reading your thoughts in this digital space—and chatting with you in others. The way you turn Kanakia's book and your thoughts about it over and over in the light, allowing us to accompany your developing ideas, is very satisfying; close reading and good criticism at its best. There's a lot to think about here!
Naturally, as a writer, critic, and literary translator, I swim in similar (though not identical) intellectual, literary, and linguistic waters as you do. We know that the so-called Great Books exclude most literary traditions and certainly most works from the Hispanic tradition, our bailiwick, except for Borges (who was as European as he was Argentine). A tiny group of inevitable icons like Rulfo, Quiroga, and Sor Juana appear now and again but are not discussed on a par with the Great Anglophone Canon. A few years back, when I could afford to return to literature and writing, I asked for a Latin American Literature course in my MFA program, and they sent us a fellow who was quite nice but who, despite his important post at a major East Coast University, knew less about the topic than I did.
The near-total failure to include global literature from close reading and serious criticism in the anglophone humanities setting, except as an exotic and "inclusive" side dish, is partly due to the inaccessibility of well-translated editions in English and Americans' resistance to learning other languages. This is not important from an identity perspective—identity is messy, as Kanakia herself embodies. At the same time, it's true that most contemporary "Latino" authors who "make it" in the literary establishment here in the US actually live here, not in their lands of origin, and can present their work in English and in person. That does not make them the most important writers by anyone's measure; their notoriety is shaped by social class, mobility, and chance, not solely by how great their books are. For me, what's most damaging about the exclusion of the majority of global literature from the literary conversation is that we miss learning about the other ways of telling; we miss considering the lives, feelings, histories, and genius of the majority of people on Earth. And that leaves us less equipped, less informed, and, in my opinion, less aware of and less safe in the world.
This sentence is the sentence that stirred me in your essay: "There is something irremediably defensive about claiming that the solution to the current system-wide crisis in the humanities is to continue doing exactly what we have always done." Yes! And irremediably dumb, too, because it's contrary to the laws of nature. The thing about the word "canon" is that, like its homophone "cannon," it cannot fail to evoke images of something heavy, resistant, immobile, and dead as a doornail. Divisions between identities (literary or otherwise), eras, genres, and time periods are not fixed. We fix them to plan syllabi, but we shouldn't drink our own Kool-Aid. Despite the fury of the Colombian literary establishment, García Márquez wanted his estate to be at UT's Harry Ransom Center alongside those of his heroes, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Poe. In his death, he shares a roof with them.
As we consider a slowly morphing idea of The Great Books, perhaps we should ask ourselves questions like: What are the books that teach us about each other most elegantly? Which are the books that ask the questions that have always mattered, the ones that matter now, and that our students might usefully apply to their lives? Which are the ones that teach us how to think and tell stories better? Which ones make us feel—cry, laugh, roar with anger—, the ones that bring us closer to each other through the quickness of emotion. Which ones address the existential questions of our times most effectively? And how, by studying such books (canonized or not), can we learn more about how great narrative alchemy is cooked up? Great Books have been piling up since the presses began to run, since books became things people who weren't scholars, priests, or rich folks could own. No one can read them all. But before we claim authority to decide what the Great Books are, we could stop being intellectually lazy and put our shoulders to the wheel to push open the thick, ponderous doors to the rest of the world.
This had me wondering about the ways "close reading" both overlaps and diverges from "reading like a writer," a frame which became very popular in creative writing circles, which requires close attention to text, but with a great focus on "how" it generates meaning or aesthetic response, rather than "what" a text means.
As an MFA holder/writer/writing teacher I've found reading like a writer a kind of natural state in that it privileges the initial aesthetic response, but then requires a subsequent close examination to understand its mechanisms of meaning. I will admit to sometimes being one of those people that rolls their eyes at some literary scholarship that seems like it pulls stuff out of thin air, but as I've gotten more mature I've better appreciated the skill, sensibilities behind this kind of reading.
Personally, I think that academic creative writing has gone much too far in the direction of privileging discussion of "craft," a byproduct of the fact that pulling out something like point-of-view or perspective and looking at it as an individual element is the kind of thing you can talk about in the workshop. Both as a teacher and student I sat in rooms where people were admiring "craft" elements while dodging whether or not a story was actually, you know, compelling.
I wonder if these things are always going to be in some measure of tension. Both the book and this review really helped me think about those tensions.
This is great, John. I don’t have an MFA, but as someone who writes both fiction and criticism, I often find myself reflecting on these modes in the way you suggest here. My sense is the both “close reading” and “reading like a writer” are practices that make most sense within a particularly institutional context, and may very well need to be rebooted as our institutions change. And yes, I think all such techniques run the risk of becoming stale and predictable if they don’t keep the larger purpose in mind (i.e. writing compelling interpretations or good fiction!)
That focus on the larger purpose is tough sometimes. I lost it for a while in grad school as I thought my route to success was impressing my “mentor” rather than, you know, exploring what I might have to say about the world in whatever way I could say it. It’s good to reminded that this is what that work of close reading is in service of every so often.
It’s an interesting bind. I defend close reading whenever discussions about it arise in my department. I teach (that is, model) close reading in the textbook chapters I write for the distance students who take our modules. But of the 30-odd articles and book chapters I’ve published, only 1 is straightforward literary criticism/close reading. And that was an analysis of some utterly forgotten 19th-century novels that I was confident no one had looked at seriously before (and no one would need to ever again).
I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that close reading is “just like, your opinion, man” and thus not something I feel confident placing in front of other scholars. That’s why I’ve always been drawn to book history and literary sociology, even before I was really conscious of working in those fields. One can write about literature, but in a way that feels more rigorous and less grounded in mere assertion and performance (“here’s my reading of X” when such readings are potentially limitless).
Yeah, I'm similar. I do lots of close reading in class and in my scholarship. But almost always within a broader sociological or historical framing. I also like for my students to think about narrative structure, which has its own vexed relationship to the verbal analysis typical of older close reading approaches. I see it as one tool among many, which I take to be your point as well.
I'm in furious agreement with everything you say here. I'm planning to write about Kanakia's book at some point alongside some of the Substack projects to ask: what alternative possibilities exist for organizing around literary culture in this brave new world; what do they assume and what do they entail.
I share your skepticism about close reading as the discipline's salvation (not coincidentally I see my writing as literary history, so I suppose I'm biased). As classroom pedagogy, i.e., as Dan Sinykin's using it... yes, sure. I still have to read his book but an earlier exchange convinced me it is definitely worth reading. But what's wrong with "interpretation," or something like that, which is flexible enough to encompass many approaches, and is the natural account of the range of activities we bring to understanding highly valued texts?
On the inclusive canon, I agree with you. Insofar as the history of culture is a comedic rather than tragic history (feeling pretty debatable at the moment) it's because the canon becomes more inclusive along lines of sex and race with time; I think this story is essential to what literature is and means. Hard to see how eg Toni Morrison isn't part of our canon on any measure. To see this, you actually have to be able to deal with an earlier more exclusive canon, though, which has made this story quite difficult to tell. For anyone who works on the entry of women into the canon (eg in the 17th c) this is very much in contention right now.
All of this is great, Julianne. I’m looking forward to reading the piece about the Substack projects. At some point, it would be cool to discuss canon plus alternative possibilities with Henry, since it seems like we’re all thinking along these lines!
Very interesting review, Jeffrey, thanks for writing this. I'm not totally on board with the immersive versus close reading framing, however (I realize this is your gloss on Kanakia's introduction). As someone who participated in a "Great Books" program my first year of university, the reading experience WAS immersive; the idea was to read a ton and then discuss the books with the other students. Yes, we took notes and wrote essays, but the experience was not that dissimilar to a book club. I believe our program was based on the University of Chicago's program, which was founded on open ended inquiry around the texts in question (very free form, curious, not prescriptive at all). There was never any mention of "close reading" as a method, although we did that as a sort of osmosis because that, to my mind, is just the natural outcome of reading and being interested in something (I'm thinking of the way Guillory basically says close reading is "paying attention to the words on the page" and then Kramnick writes about how close reading is really a form of writing). I think you can make the case that immersion is actually the first part of close reading.
To my mind, the more accurate distinction between a sort of autodidactic, library card reading and what happens in academia is in relation to the Theory that is taught in grad school. The idea that there is a meaning in the text that doesn't "really exist" is representative of the paranoid style of criticism; you think the book is about one thing, but then you learn, via Frederic Jameson or someone, that it's really about sexism, or racism, or colonialism. And, to be sure, maybe the book IS also about that, but when viewing a text in this way, everything is backwards--rather than starting from the book and moving out into these broader discussions, you start from the broader discussions and then investigate the book for evidence to support your preconceived notion. Obviously, I'm painting with a broad brush here, and the best Theory will feature close readings that pay attention to the text, but too often Theory is a sort of crutch used to avoid the encounter with the text, which can and should be troubling, disconcerting, wondrous.
As far as I know, the Great Books programs that happened or still happen in universities usually take pace in the first year of undergrad study and don't feature literary theory. The whole idea is to encounter the foundational texts of western civilization. Then, you can deconstruct them later if you want, but as Justin Smith Ruiu often mentions, you can't deconstruct and tear down before you actually have the base!
A few books we read in my program: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, History of the Peloponnesian War, The Aeneid, Inferno, Anna Karenina, Frankenstein, The Birth of Tragedy, a bunch of Greek tragedies (I can't really remember if we made it to the 20th century, I've been trying to dig up a syllabus from back then...)
In one of the talks he delivered to the English student society at Oxford (if memory serves), C.S. Lewis explained that they don't include modern books because people don't need help understanding something written in their own time, unlike books from the past which are less immediate to us; I don't think this is entirely convincing, but it is somewhat the reason why more traditional lists of Great Books persist, I think. The argument about which of the books you propose to add will finally be worth adding will take a long time, and the fact of that there is a filter of "greatness" is what makes the argument matter, to some extent.
Yeah, I agree, and I get why Naomi made the decision not to make a new list on those grounds. The only thing is that, if I followed her account correctly, the original list she used was compiled in 1960, meaning that there was only a decade gap between its composition and the last text it included. So it seems to me there's a bit of a tension between the list itself and that claim about the passage in time. In any case, when I say that it feels like a missed opportunity, it's mostly because I would have liked to have seen what her list through 2000 or 2010 would be.
Thanks for this, Jeff. Maybe inevitably, I'd quibble with the portrait given of the close reading champions. I'm fully for new strategies, plural approaches, and so on. And as you hint, I don't see much *new*, however valuable, in Kanakia's argument as you present it. I think immersive reading is great: in fact, arguably a necessary or valuable prerequisite for close reading. (We say you ideally learn to read immersively WHILE observing your own reading experience at a second order.) What such close reading hopes to achieve is the marriage of the drama of lay reading with the aesthetic, epistemological, and maybe even ethical demands of university education.
Yes, that seems totally fair as far as your scholarship is concerned. I do think that Kramnick has far more of a commitment to close reading as THE technique that gives coherence to the discipline. And I got the impression from Johanna's presentation at CUNY of Close Reading in the Twenty-First Century that she also shares that sentiment to a degree (though I could be mistaken there). I'm also responding here to the sheer amount of attention that close reading has received in recent years, which I take to be its own form of evidence about institutional and scholarly priorities. That said, I'm a proponent of close reading exercises in the classroom, and I think you and Johanna did a real service to all of us with that intro, which I'll use with my students when I get back to teaching next semester. Mostly, I think we need to recognize that justifications for what we do inside the classroom will not be a substitute for making broader claims about the values of reading, literacy, etc. in the public sphere.
Totally—this all seems right to me. Just did my own latest little bit by publishing an op-ed in the local Atlanta paper about virtue ethics as grounds for a left educational philosophy to vie against the classical education movement. With—well—close reading as my case study.
I've got it bookmarked and will read soon!
thanks for the work on this, i found the review balanced and informative
Dear Jeff,
I enjoy reading your thoughts in this digital space—and chatting with you in others. It's satisfying to watch you turn Kanakia's book over and over in the light, and your thoughts about it, allowing us to accompany your developing ideas. It's close reading and good criticism at its best. There's a lot to think about here!
Naturally, as a writer, critic, and literary translator, I swim in similar (though not identical) intellectual, literary, and linguistic waters as you do. We know that the so-called Great Books exclude most literary traditions and certainly most works from the Hispanic tradition, our bailiwick, except for Borges (who was as European as he was Argentine). A tiny group of inevitable icons like Rulfo, Quiroga, and Sor Juana appear now and again but are not discussed on a par with the Great Anglophone Canon. A few years back, when I could afford to return to literature and writing, I asked for a Latin American Literature course in my MFA program, and they sent us a fellow who was quite nice but who, despite his important post at a major East Coast University, knew less about the topic than I did.
The near-total failure to include global literature from close reading and serious criticism in the anglophone humanities setting, except as an exotic and "inclusive" side dish, is partly due to the inaccessibility of well-translated editions in English and Americans' resistance to learning other languages. This is not important from an identity perspective—identity is messy, as Kanakia herself embodies. At the same time, it's true that most contemporary "Latino" authors who "make it" in the literary establishment here in the US actually live here, not in their lands of origin, and can present their work in English and in person. That does not make them the most important writers by anyone's measure; their notoriety is shaped by social class, mobility, and chance, not solely by how great their books are. For me, what's most damaging about the exclusion of the majority of global literature from the literary conversation is that we miss learning about the other ways of telling; we miss considering the lives, feelings, histories, and genius of the majority of people on Earth. And that leaves us less equipped, less informed, and, in my opinion, less aware of and less safe in the world.
This sentence is the sentence that stirred me in your essay: "There is something irremediably defensive about claiming that the solution to the current system-wide crisis in the humanities is to continue doing exactly what we have always done." Yes! And irremediably dumb, too, because it's contrary to the laws of nature. The thing about the word "canon" is that, like its homophone "cannon," it cannot fail to evoke images of something heavy, resistant, immobile, and dead as a doornail. Divisions between identities (literary or otherwise), eras, genres, and time periods are not fixed. We fix them to plan syllabi, but we shouldn't drink our own Kool-Aid. Despite the fury of the Colombian literary establishment, García Márquez wanted his estate to be at UT's Harry Ransom Center alongside those of his heroes, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Poe. In his death, he shares a roof with them.
As we consider a slowly morphing idea of The Great Books, perhaps we should ask ourselves questions like: What are the books that teach us about each other most elegantly? Which are the books that ask the questions that have always mattered, the ones that matter now, and that our students might usefully apply to their lives? Which are the ones that teach us how to think and tell stories better? Which ones make us feel—cry, laugh, roar with anger—, the ones that bring us closer to each other through the quickness of emotion. Which ones address the existential questions of our times most effectively? And how, by studying such books (canonized or not), can we learn more about how great narrative alchemy is cooked up? Great Books have been piling up since the presses began to run, since books became things people who weren't scholars, priests, or rich folks could own. No one can read them all. But before we claim authority to decide what the Great Books are, we could stop being intellectually lazy and put our shoulders to the wheel to push open the thick, ponderous doors to the rest of the world.
Dear Jeff,
I enjoy reading your thoughts in this digital space—and chatting with you in others. The way you turn Kanakia's book and your thoughts about it over and over in the light, allowing us to accompany your developing ideas, is very satisfying; close reading and good criticism at its best. There's a lot to think about here!
Naturally, as a writer, critic, and literary translator, I swim in similar (though not identical) intellectual, literary, and linguistic waters as you do. We know that the so-called Great Books exclude most literary traditions and certainly most works from the Hispanic tradition, our bailiwick, except for Borges (who was as European as he was Argentine). A tiny group of inevitable icons like Rulfo, Quiroga, and Sor Juana appear now and again but are not discussed on a par with the Great Anglophone Canon. A few years back, when I could afford to return to literature and writing, I asked for a Latin American Literature course in my MFA program, and they sent us a fellow who was quite nice but who, despite his important post at a major East Coast University, knew less about the topic than I did.
The near-total failure to include global literature from close reading and serious criticism in the anglophone humanities setting, except as an exotic and "inclusive" side dish, is partly due to the inaccessibility of well-translated editions in English and Americans' resistance to learning other languages. This is not important from an identity perspective—identity is messy, as Kanakia herself embodies. At the same time, it's true that most contemporary "Latino" authors who "make it" in the literary establishment here in the US actually live here, not in their lands of origin, and can present their work in English and in person. That does not make them the most important writers by anyone's measure; their notoriety is shaped by social class, mobility, and chance, not solely by how great their books are. For me, what's most damaging about the exclusion of the majority of global literature from the literary conversation is that we miss learning about the other ways of telling; we miss considering the lives, feelings, histories, and genius of the majority of people on Earth. And that leaves us less equipped, less informed, and, in my opinion, less aware of and less safe in the world.
This sentence is the sentence that stirred me in your essay: "There is something irremediably defensive about claiming that the solution to the current system-wide crisis in the humanities is to continue doing exactly what we have always done." Yes! And irremediably dumb, too, because it's contrary to the laws of nature. The thing about the word "canon" is that, like its homophone "cannon," it cannot fail to evoke images of something heavy, resistant, immobile, and dead as a doornail. Divisions between identities (literary or otherwise), eras, genres, and time periods are not fixed. We fix them to plan syllabi, but we shouldn't drink our own Kool-Aid. Despite the fury of the Colombian literary establishment, García Márquez wanted his estate to be at UT's Harry Ransom Center alongside those of his heroes, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Poe. In his death, he shares a roof with them.
As we consider a slowly morphing idea of The Great Books, perhaps we should ask ourselves questions like: What are the books that teach us about each other most elegantly? Which are the books that ask the questions that have always mattered, the ones that matter now, and that our students might usefully apply to their lives? Which are the ones that teach us how to think and tell stories better? Which ones make us feel—cry, laugh, roar with anger—, the ones that bring us closer to each other through the quickness of emotion. Which ones address the existential questions of our times most effectively? And how, by studying such books (canonized or not), can we learn more about how great narrative alchemy is cooked up? Great Books have been piling up since the presses began to run, since books became things people who weren't scholars, priests, or rich folks could own. No one can read them all. But before we claim authority to decide what the Great Books are, we could stop being intellectually lazy and put our shoulders to the wheel to push open the thick, ponderous doors to the rest of the world.