Study of classical works is acceptable to an extent but not at the cost of completely ignoring world literature
About 40 years ago, I was thrown into the center of the canon wars. As a graduate student in the volatile 1960s, I was amazed by the excessive emphasis on UK literature in English departments. It seemed rather elitist at a point when other cultures began to claim their place in world affairs after the Suez Crisis (1956), when Britain’s rebuke by the US brought the Pax Britannica to its final collapse. Was. Europe began its foreign trade and commerce about 500 years ago, culminating in two-thirds of the world coming under its hegemony.
In the wake of the 1955 Bandung Conference, historians began to inquire into Western-centrism and its prejudicial accounts of the East. Martinique’s poet me Cesare already wrote discourse on colonialism (1950), an essay examining the conflict between colonists and colonists. Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Edward Saids perspectives (1978) appeared a few years later targeting Western-centered approaches that were inherently pretentious and predetermined in the understanding of other Latin American, African and Asian literature and cultures.
Being aware of this history, after many years as an assistant professor, I went to the chair of my department with a possible plan to incorporate post-colonial literature into the MA curriculum. He glanced at it with a fleeting look and indecisively, slid it back to me on the table, noting that it was foreign to the study of English. Like a true Lewisite, more English than English, many like him in the department stood only for the great tradition of canonical texts from Europe, which my father’s generation had fed all these years. Helen Gardner’s rebuke and the rejection of George Steiner’s doctoral dissertation at Oxford on the grounds that comparative literature was outside the scope of English studies immediately flashed through my mind.
cultural studies
I returned to my room disappointed but with the hope that the department’s conservatives would gradually move towards a more cosmopolitan course. Well, as soon as a new chair took over, I succeeded and then persuaded the faculty to take a liberal approach to cultural studies. I met opposition from the majority, who argued that it was too elitist, not realizing that his strict adherence to the curriculum from Britain resonated with Alan Bloom’s narrow, right-wing account of the importance of traditional pedagogy, which he described as expressed in the book. The Closing of the American Mind, I persevered, however, and was successful in convincing a handful of people to support the idea of starting cultural studies at the first opportunity. The study of classical works of philosophy and literature is acceptable to an extent but not at the cost of completely ignoring world literature.
I remember the University of Berkeley, which was the first to stand up against the supporters of Alan Bloom. A new curriculum called Culture and Values began to place equal emphasis on the literature of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the late 1970s, we began to plunder both Middle East and South Asian literature. When student radicals from around the world, from Berkeley and Paris to New Delhi, launched their assault on the narrow boundaries of the authority of professors and drowning in Western theory, a crisis in the humanities became fertile ground for pursuing an interdisciplinary multidisciplinary program. Gone. Where all cultures, races, beliefs and ways of life became equally legitimate.
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