Keeping this as vague as possible, a close acquaintance once informed me that they just weren't going to tell their kids anything about what I considered an important cultural subject because it didn't interest them, and I thought, well, fine, but then they're probably going to feel confused and unprepared when they get out into the world and inevitably encounter these ideas with no context. (I didn't actually say that, though.)
That raises a different and maybe thornier conversation about parenting etc., but I think it connects back to your point about the continuity of culture and what's to be gained from learning about it. Maybe undergrads will ultimately decide they don't care about a particular canonical work/the past in general, but it does seem like a strong liberal arts education should at least provide them with the tools to make an informed decision on that score rather than predigesting ideas for them.
But then, also, when these conversations come up online, especially in the age of the paid bluecheck, I try to remind myself that complaining about anything that isn't instantly gratifying is a way to get attention and money, both of which *are* instantly gratifying, so I've more or less given up trying to change strangers' minds about anything.
The Odyssey is also just great on its own terms, though. I think the canon holds up very well in non-circular terms. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante... these really are the best poets. The Milton haters in early C20th were cranks, for example.
I think it holds up too! But I feel like if I were designing a curriculum, "this is part of your cultural grammar" is probably the explanation I'd go for. (Maybe this would be doomed.)
OK, now it's just starting to feel like you're messing with me - first giving me an Appleton reference, now talking about translations of the Odyssey when I've got a PhD in Classics . . .
I have indulged my interests in ancient thought and literature to an unhealthy degree, but it has given me a sense of what we're arguing about when we're arguing about a canon. The place to start is to recognize that we are talking about social phenomena, that for there to be "classics" and a "canon" there needs to be a community of people who are playing a game that we can call "culture".
If we're using the Odyssey as an example, we're talking about a poem that has belonged to several different cultures. In the earliest culture we know of to which the Odyssey belonged, the Odyssey was recited in its entirety at religious festivals by specialists called rhapsodes. These performances were mass media, in that the rhapsodes performed before crowds, and they were popular media, in that the performances were something that people attended for their enjoyment, rather than as a duty. The performances of the Odyssey (and the Iliad, often at the same festival) were so popular that some of the earliest poems composed as writing were poems that filled in the gaps in the story of the Trojan War and the return of the Greek heroes. At that point, the Iliad and Odyssey were classics in the same way that the movies "Sleeping Beauty" and "Star Wars" are for us - you'd been attending performances for as long as you could remember, and making references to them and reciting dialogue were ways to talk to other people with the knowledge that they would definitely get the reference.
None of us have any problem with classics in that sense. It may be the case that in the future, some of the classics will be forgotten and replaced by others, but that's just the way that mass or popular culture works. There are occasionally disputes at the boundaries over whether something ought to be classic in this sense, and a lot of Taylor Swift discourse fits here - those of us who aren't interested in listening to Taylor Swift need to figure out how much we need to know about Swift's work in order to get along with the Swifties in our lives. But no one is going to say that Swift's problem is that she hasn't made her work accessible enough. And in Ancient Greece, no one said that Homer wasn't accessible enough.
The problem that the post is discussing, however, is that some of the cultures that consider the Odyssey a classic, and part of a canon, are elitist, designed to exclude people from participating. If you find yourself being introduced to these cultures (and a liberal arts education is, at the least, an introduction to these cultures) you are put in the position of asking yourself - how much work do I really want to put into reading the books I need to read to fully participate in this or that elite, literary culture?
There are no good answers to this question. The nicest literary elite culture I ever participated in was the Greek Lyric poetry panels at academic conferences for classicists. The barrier to entry was high, but the stakes were low, and everyone was pleased as hell to meet other people who had the ability to say interesting, true things about poets like Pindar and Simonides. Just a very pleasant experience. At the same conferences, the worst panels to attend were always the ones on Greek Tragedy. Same barrier to entry, but because the tragedies are taught to people who don't know Greek, there is a bigger payoff to being an academic expert on Sophocles. And so the scholars who are more ambitious come up with increasingly implausible readings of the texts, and generally give one a feeling that they are bullshitting and don't care that you know it.
I can read Latin and Greek, I can throw around philosophical terminology in German and French, and even some in Sanskrit and Chinese, but there are also a lot of books that are deservedly in the canon that I have not read. I think reading books in the canon just because they are in the canon is something that you may need to do to develop your skills as a reader, or a writer, or to fit in with the culture that you want to belong to, but in those situations, it will not be FUN to read those books, at all, because you're not reading them because you want to.
Moby-Dick is one of my favorite novels, but I read it because I was really fascinated by the whaling industry as a part of US history. The great thing about Moby-Dick as a reading experience is that if you want to know what it was like to hunt whales in the middle of the 19th century, Melville tells you, in detail, and in a way that gets you looking at the US and the world differently. But if you aren't interested in whale-fishing, reading that book has got to be a terrible slog. Tangentially it's about the modern world, and homosexuality, and racism, and God, and sin, but it addresses all of these subjects metaphorically, with one metaphor, which is whale-fishing. I love that book, but I'm not surprised it was a failure when he published it.
Again, there is nothing wrong with taking on difficult intellectual challenges for reasons that are hard to explain. My life is defined by such challenges and I have no regrets about that part of it. But there is the work of learning things, and there is the pleasure of reading things, and mastering a canon is learning things. Canon comes from a word that means measuring-rod, and the point of having one is to have a bunch of books that possess qualities we admire, so that other writers can read them, see how they work, and take those lessons into their own writing.
The reason Shakespeare is in the canon is because, if you want to write plays (and screenplays), it is worth making sense of the archaic language and seeing how he made those plays work so well that even today people can take parts of his plots and turn them into gripping dramas. You can learn those plays through simplified versions, such as movies, or modernized texts, or (as I did with Macbeth as a child) comic books. But in those cases, you are trusting that whoever produced the movie, or the modernized text, or the comic book, is as good a dramatist as Shakespeare was, and it is very unlikely that they are. For every great work, that's the case. If you want to really grasp the Odyssey, you're going to need to learn Greek, or you're not going to learn all the lessons Homer has to teach you.
Nevertheless, ars longa, vita brevis. You need to make decisions, so read what you like, work at what seems important, and remember that the nerdiest cultures (high barriers to entry, low social stakes) will always be the most fun to belong to.
I think I basically agree that culture is a game, but I think it's a game we don't opt "into"—if this makes sense. We come from somewhere and we're going somewhere and everything we use to make sense of our situation comes from culture. Like on a very stupid and basic level, there are cars called "Odyssey." Why they are called that is a question with an answer… etc.
I guess to bring it back to education, I think it is true—there are going to be things you ought to read that are not fun to read. They might _become_ fun to read, or you might grow to love them, but they are not fun and they were not meant to be fun. (I'm not thinking here of Shakespeare but somebody like… idk… John Locke.) To some extent we grasp this when it comes to math, I think, even though math is frequently a victim of "when am I ever going to use this" wailing—we think, OK, but you're still learning algebra.
And schools _should_ I think be helping students by putting them through a course of study where it's clear why you are reading these things, because when you leave school you can just do what you want. At that point, you get to pursue and develop your own taste and priorities. You can continue projects of self-education by learning Greek, or studying number theory, or you can say "I'm done with all that" and go on and do something totally different.
(This is part of why, even though I'm quite devoted to Taylor, I don't understand teaching college courses on her—I'm sure you can use her as an object lesson through which to teach basic sociology or marketing or whatever, but also, nobody needs help understanding Taylor herself. She is happening now! On the other hand, though, she has lots of literary things in her work that some non zero portion of her fans seem to think she invented.…)
This is a good response to what I wrote, and I'm going to try to bring the same level of earnestness and charity you gave to my comment to my response. But before I start, I do want to point out that there are a whole bunch of arguments that have been had about whether a Western literary canon is anything other than a replacement for religious orthodoxy or a tool for imposing Eurocentric hierarchies on the world that could be raised at this point. I think they would distract from the more subtle point that you are making in both the original post and your reply to my comment, so I will leave them out, except to note that "culture" has been something used to sort the sheep from the goats, and in that respect it is not necessarily a nice thing that should be preserved.
My perspective on the literary canon reflects the fact that I had an atrocious education in both literature and history in the public schools I went to. Prior to college, the literary works that mattered to me were the comic books, fantasy, and science fiction that I read on my own initiative, and the Bible and Lutheran theology that I encountered at church. The summer before I went to college I discovered C.S. Lewis' Christian apologetic works, which blew my mind by linking both sides of my reading life, and from him realized that I should be familiar with classical literature. The stuff I read in school just didn't connect with me at all, and they didn't give me all that much to read. In retrospect, I've built most of my knowledge of the world on a foundation of religious literature and pop culture ephemera.
In terms of getting along in the world, this foundation has served me pretty well. People discuss things in their lives based on their religious beliefs and the movies and pulp novels they've read. After grad school, I got back into collecting comic books again, which served me well when I failed to find a job in academia - the one place where you can always find a person willing to talk about art and writing is a comic book store. That part of culture that sustains one through a challenging period of one's life was in large part filled by discussions of superhero comics and Star Wars, and they did sustain me through some very dark times.
(My experiences in this regard mean that I'm not surprised that your most popular posts are about Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I myself have not read them. IMHO, it's hard to imagine that anything better could be said about Evangelion than was said in FLCL, and I haven't been adventurous enough to see whether your posts clear that bar.)
I have also learned that when you are dying in an American hospital, the people who are there to discuss the meaning of life with you, and hold your hand as you leave this world, are likely to be people who have devoted their lives to Christ. So although I am no longer a Christian, I am prepared to draw on my memories of a Christian education to talk with a hospital chaplain in a productive way, because it seems like a worthwhile way to deal with dying.
So on the one hand, I have a lot of sympathy for people who haven't read a lot of great literature, and are comfortable talking about comics and Star Wars, because that's culture, that's a good thing, and it should be encouraged. On the other hand, I never want to discourage anyone from reading something difficult if they want to do it. I've read the Odyssey in Greek, and it's a classic for a reason. After 9/11, I realized I had been giving Islam less attention than it deserved, so I learned enough Arabic to be able to read some verses of the Qur'an. It was very good poetry, unlike anything else I had read.
In my experience, the people who are most familiar with the canon of great literature are not better people than the people who aren't. They can communicate in ways that people who aren't familiar with the canon can't, but that's true for someone who has the Star Wars movies memorized too.
I do think that it's important for teachers to be able to act like being able to read the texts they assign is the most important thing. When I was a Latin teacher, I made sure to communicate that what made me the authority figure in the classroom was that I knew Latin well, and they didn't. Latin mattered to me, and if they wanted to be an important person in my class, they needed to learn Latin. There are English teachers who can't communicate that reading the texts they are teaching is important, and that those texts matter to them. But this is a matter of performance, not necessarily a truth about the role of the canon in modern life.
I enjoy your writing a lot, and I don't believe it would be what it is without your appreciation of the Anglo-American literary canon. But that's a statement about *your* performance, and not a truth about the role of the canon in modern life. As I hope I've made clear, I have a fair amount of ambivalence about the social value of the Anglo-American literary canon, while at the same time having great respect for those who read it, teach it, and let it affect their writing and lives.
A lot to think about here, but one thing I did want to say is that I really never want to imply that studying canonical texts makes somebody "better" (in a moral sense). That is not something I think because it is—like you say—observably not true. So if it came off like I thought that, I definitely don't!
If somebody asked me why I think they should read Homer, I'd probably say because the Iliad and the Odyssey are beautiful and also because they're old… and when you read something that is very old that turns out to be full of the kinds of things that trouble you in life, you feel less lonely and on your own. (I go back to Ecclesiastes often for this reason.) There are aspects of human life nobody gets to escape but none of us have to face them alone. (In a certain sense, maybe one should read Homer because the whole reason he's still here is because he has something to say to you.)
You mention science fiction and whenever I read Joanna Russ, I similarly feel less lonely.… I feel like: here's a friend. (And I agree with you about how certain kinds of nerdy spaces are / were great places for real discussion about art… I don't know if you watched the movie Tar but my take on the ending was that she was at last conducting for an audience that really, really loved music.) But I also feel like, everything is in continuity with something before.… I can follow Russ's thread in We Who Are About To…, where she questions the primacy of survival, backward and backward, to Old English poems and continually back.
On the other hand if somebody said "why should I dedicate teaching time to Homer" or "why should I hire somebody to teach Homer," I don't think I'd have an answer other than the circular version sketched out above.
I certainly agree that there's a quality to high culture (or subcultures) and canons that functions as exclusionary—but they also seem to me to be things that we also develop as social creatures inevitably. In that sense I kind of think all we can do is be aware of the dark side of these things and do our best to mitigate them. (For what it's worth, I have lots of gaps in my reading, and I'm always sort of expecting somebody to be like, how can you talk about X without having read Y.)
I think what you're pointing to is a fundamental quandary of teaching teenagers - we can structure what we teach them, based on what we think is important, but they aren't at a point where they can know what they will need for their lives. In relation to art and literature, this means giving them worthwhile things to make sense of situations that are likely to happen in their adult lives but which may not seem particularly important to adolescents.
Things like death (one's own or a loved one's), serious illness (loved your recent piece by the way), mental illness, old age, financial or professional setbacks - these are going to happen every person, and they're going to be terrible in ways that, ideally, an adolescent can't imagine. We need to be able to talk about these things, with ourselves at least. Religions are happy to tell us what they mean, but in the context of imposing a whole lot of obligations that we may not want to take on, just because we need a narrative to bridge the gap created by a disaster or miracle. Having a head full of great art gives you materials to build those bridges, without imposing religious duties on you.
This is also where the benefit of the work of translation comes in handy. Reading a work where the language is not your own language helps develop the skill of producing your own words that are meaningful for situations where language might fail. Moreover, complex language can do more things than simple language, and you may need language to do a bunch of things all at once. Encountering powerful thoughts in a language that you need to interpret pushes your ability to use language, ideally to talk about things that are not easy to talk about.
This is my strongest case for claiming that reading books that deal with big subjects using the full rhetorical and poetic resources of a given language is a solid way to give young people something that will be of use to them in life. I don't think that there's any particular reason to insist that those books be in English, or written by people of European descent, other than that it's easier to learn the conventions of Elizabethan English to read Shakespeare than to memorize a bunch of Chinese characters to read Zhuangzi. Translations are fine, but the biggest benefit along these lines from a piece of literature is understanding what it means using the ideological and linguistic resources of the culture the work was produced in, so that's still a lot of work to get the best results.
Also, as with math, some people are going to be better at this than others, and some will be so bad at this they never want to struggle with this again if they don't have to. The latter should have friends who are the former, or at least subscribe to their substacks.
There is actually a whole recurring discourse about how it is bad that Elden Ring/Dark Souls/etc. are so difficult, and how they should have an easy mode.
Obviously this is stupid although I hate that thinking this puts me on the side of video game YouTubers and right-wing internet perverts.
(Overlapping but distinct from the non-stupid discourse that games ought to have specific accessibility features.)
I think there's a secretly interesting topic hiding behind that idea of "high English", which is that we associate a lot of these old texts (Shakespeare is a good example) with language that has come to be inaccessible and dense even though it wasn't at the time. It's not so much that modern language would inherently be better because it is more intelligible to more people (which seems to be more what the Tweeter is getting at) but different interpretations of classic works (especially translations) are a reflection not only of the author and the context of the work itself, but also of the interpreter/translator and their additional context and point of view. The woke Odyssey discourse irritates me because everyone's getting so mad about her perceived "agenda" when,,, isn't that the whole point? Using modern language in an adaptation of the text doesn't inherently make the experience of consuming that text simpler, even though most people making these modern language adaptations are doing so in order to make it simpler to consume.
Yeah, I think it's a more interesting conversation about translation because translations exist both as derivative works _and_ and stand-alone works—there are still reasons to read Chapman's Homer even if you wouldn't read it for class.
But also, when it comes to people like this guy, I feel like… "inaccessible" is something that ideally is altered through education! Like I'm learning to lift weights and lots of the room is inaccessible to me right now, but it will become accessible. Shakespeare can become "accessible" over time partly because, like you're saying, it wasn't meant to be hard to understand at the time. (You can even pick your way through Chaucer in Middle English with the right edition / help, but I think the experience of doing so is also helpful bc like—yeah that is kind of a different language!) Some art really is meant to be inaccessible but much isn't.…
This seems related to the time a friend of mine in grad school pointed out in class the beauty of a particular line in a poem. The professor laughed at him and said, “We are here to talk about ideas. If you want to talk about beauty, join a book club.”
i'd have some sympathy for that if the "we are here to talk about" didn't end with ideas. like "yeah it's beautiful but we're here to talk about…" idk the development of the sonnet. do you study that in graduate school? what do people do in graduate school. damned if i know. but "ideas"… lol.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely time in grad school. It was free and I wrote a lot and made nice friends. But for the most part, the academic classes were spent trying to figure out how to write about something in a way that would get published in an academic journal. Which is useful for your career path! If that’s what you want!
But really I just loved reading books a lot, and I was a terrible academic, so what do I know?
OK, but girl...what's the right definition of original sin! It's, like, how all human beings are so inherently sinful that they can't be saved (through acts), bc of, I dunno, something bad that Adam did wrt eating the apple, right? Or is that the wrong definition? Help a non-Christian out
(the other one people get wrong all the time is the immaculate conception—it refers to the conception of Mary, not Jesus… however, this is also not relevant to Milton lol)
That's basically right—it's being born inherently sinful. The further you go along in the history of Western Christianity the more people will disagree on what that means, i.e., Catholics hold that baptism removes original sin, Calvinists (iirc) do not. (Eastern Christianity is different, but… not relevant to Milton.)
The mistake people make is acting like original sin is like… the first sin you commit. Like pointing at something and going "and that's the original sin."
Keeping this as vague as possible, a close acquaintance once informed me that they just weren't going to tell their kids anything about what I considered an important cultural subject because it didn't interest them, and I thought, well, fine, but then they're probably going to feel confused and unprepared when they get out into the world and inevitably encounter these ideas with no context. (I didn't actually say that, though.)
That raises a different and maybe thornier conversation about parenting etc., but I think it connects back to your point about the continuity of culture and what's to be gained from learning about it. Maybe undergrads will ultimately decide they don't care about a particular canonical work/the past in general, but it does seem like a strong liberal arts education should at least provide them with the tools to make an informed decision on that score rather than predigesting ideas for them.
But then, also, when these conversations come up online, especially in the age of the paid bluecheck, I try to remind myself that complaining about anything that isn't instantly gratifying is a way to get attention and money, both of which *are* instantly gratifying, so I've more or less given up trying to change strangers' minds about anything.
The Odyssey is also just great on its own terms, though. I think the canon holds up very well in non-circular terms. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante... these really are the best poets. The Milton haters in early C20th were cranks, for example.
I think it holds up too! But I feel like if I were designing a curriculum, "this is part of your cultural grammar" is probably the explanation I'd go for. (Maybe this would be doomed.)
Love the title of this one
"you won't have us to kick around and tell people what the odyssey is anymore"—the PJK
Seems like it’s time for this clip from The Tick https://youtu.be/kZhJlGV2s_k?si=v_GLy8belacCK219
this is amazing
OK, now it's just starting to feel like you're messing with me - first giving me an Appleton reference, now talking about translations of the Odyssey when I've got a PhD in Classics . . .
I have indulged my interests in ancient thought and literature to an unhealthy degree, but it has given me a sense of what we're arguing about when we're arguing about a canon. The place to start is to recognize that we are talking about social phenomena, that for there to be "classics" and a "canon" there needs to be a community of people who are playing a game that we can call "culture".
If we're using the Odyssey as an example, we're talking about a poem that has belonged to several different cultures. In the earliest culture we know of to which the Odyssey belonged, the Odyssey was recited in its entirety at religious festivals by specialists called rhapsodes. These performances were mass media, in that the rhapsodes performed before crowds, and they were popular media, in that the performances were something that people attended for their enjoyment, rather than as a duty. The performances of the Odyssey (and the Iliad, often at the same festival) were so popular that some of the earliest poems composed as writing were poems that filled in the gaps in the story of the Trojan War and the return of the Greek heroes. At that point, the Iliad and Odyssey were classics in the same way that the movies "Sleeping Beauty" and "Star Wars" are for us - you'd been attending performances for as long as you could remember, and making references to them and reciting dialogue were ways to talk to other people with the knowledge that they would definitely get the reference.
None of us have any problem with classics in that sense. It may be the case that in the future, some of the classics will be forgotten and replaced by others, but that's just the way that mass or popular culture works. There are occasionally disputes at the boundaries over whether something ought to be classic in this sense, and a lot of Taylor Swift discourse fits here - those of us who aren't interested in listening to Taylor Swift need to figure out how much we need to know about Swift's work in order to get along with the Swifties in our lives. But no one is going to say that Swift's problem is that she hasn't made her work accessible enough. And in Ancient Greece, no one said that Homer wasn't accessible enough.
The problem that the post is discussing, however, is that some of the cultures that consider the Odyssey a classic, and part of a canon, are elitist, designed to exclude people from participating. If you find yourself being introduced to these cultures (and a liberal arts education is, at the least, an introduction to these cultures) you are put in the position of asking yourself - how much work do I really want to put into reading the books I need to read to fully participate in this or that elite, literary culture?
There are no good answers to this question. The nicest literary elite culture I ever participated in was the Greek Lyric poetry panels at academic conferences for classicists. The barrier to entry was high, but the stakes were low, and everyone was pleased as hell to meet other people who had the ability to say interesting, true things about poets like Pindar and Simonides. Just a very pleasant experience. At the same conferences, the worst panels to attend were always the ones on Greek Tragedy. Same barrier to entry, but because the tragedies are taught to people who don't know Greek, there is a bigger payoff to being an academic expert on Sophocles. And so the scholars who are more ambitious come up with increasingly implausible readings of the texts, and generally give one a feeling that they are bullshitting and don't care that you know it.
I can read Latin and Greek, I can throw around philosophical terminology in German and French, and even some in Sanskrit and Chinese, but there are also a lot of books that are deservedly in the canon that I have not read. I think reading books in the canon just because they are in the canon is something that you may need to do to develop your skills as a reader, or a writer, or to fit in with the culture that you want to belong to, but in those situations, it will not be FUN to read those books, at all, because you're not reading them because you want to.
Moby-Dick is one of my favorite novels, but I read it because I was really fascinated by the whaling industry as a part of US history. The great thing about Moby-Dick as a reading experience is that if you want to know what it was like to hunt whales in the middle of the 19th century, Melville tells you, in detail, and in a way that gets you looking at the US and the world differently. But if you aren't interested in whale-fishing, reading that book has got to be a terrible slog. Tangentially it's about the modern world, and homosexuality, and racism, and God, and sin, but it addresses all of these subjects metaphorically, with one metaphor, which is whale-fishing. I love that book, but I'm not surprised it was a failure when he published it.
Again, there is nothing wrong with taking on difficult intellectual challenges for reasons that are hard to explain. My life is defined by such challenges and I have no regrets about that part of it. But there is the work of learning things, and there is the pleasure of reading things, and mastering a canon is learning things. Canon comes from a word that means measuring-rod, and the point of having one is to have a bunch of books that possess qualities we admire, so that other writers can read them, see how they work, and take those lessons into their own writing.
The reason Shakespeare is in the canon is because, if you want to write plays (and screenplays), it is worth making sense of the archaic language and seeing how he made those plays work so well that even today people can take parts of his plots and turn them into gripping dramas. You can learn those plays through simplified versions, such as movies, or modernized texts, or (as I did with Macbeth as a child) comic books. But in those cases, you are trusting that whoever produced the movie, or the modernized text, or the comic book, is as good a dramatist as Shakespeare was, and it is very unlikely that they are. For every great work, that's the case. If you want to really grasp the Odyssey, you're going to need to learn Greek, or you're not going to learn all the lessons Homer has to teach you.
Nevertheless, ars longa, vita brevis. You need to make decisions, so read what you like, work at what seems important, and remember that the nerdiest cultures (high barriers to entry, low social stakes) will always be the most fun to belong to.
I think I basically agree that culture is a game, but I think it's a game we don't opt "into"—if this makes sense. We come from somewhere and we're going somewhere and everything we use to make sense of our situation comes from culture. Like on a very stupid and basic level, there are cars called "Odyssey." Why they are called that is a question with an answer… etc.
I guess to bring it back to education, I think it is true—there are going to be things you ought to read that are not fun to read. They might _become_ fun to read, or you might grow to love them, but they are not fun and they were not meant to be fun. (I'm not thinking here of Shakespeare but somebody like… idk… John Locke.) To some extent we grasp this when it comes to math, I think, even though math is frequently a victim of "when am I ever going to use this" wailing—we think, OK, but you're still learning algebra.
And schools _should_ I think be helping students by putting them through a course of study where it's clear why you are reading these things, because when you leave school you can just do what you want. At that point, you get to pursue and develop your own taste and priorities. You can continue projects of self-education by learning Greek, or studying number theory, or you can say "I'm done with all that" and go on and do something totally different.
(This is part of why, even though I'm quite devoted to Taylor, I don't understand teaching college courses on her—I'm sure you can use her as an object lesson through which to teach basic sociology or marketing or whatever, but also, nobody needs help understanding Taylor herself. She is happening now! On the other hand, though, she has lots of literary things in her work that some non zero portion of her fans seem to think she invented.…)
This is a good response to what I wrote, and I'm going to try to bring the same level of earnestness and charity you gave to my comment to my response. But before I start, I do want to point out that there are a whole bunch of arguments that have been had about whether a Western literary canon is anything other than a replacement for religious orthodoxy or a tool for imposing Eurocentric hierarchies on the world that could be raised at this point. I think they would distract from the more subtle point that you are making in both the original post and your reply to my comment, so I will leave them out, except to note that "culture" has been something used to sort the sheep from the goats, and in that respect it is not necessarily a nice thing that should be preserved.
My perspective on the literary canon reflects the fact that I had an atrocious education in both literature and history in the public schools I went to. Prior to college, the literary works that mattered to me were the comic books, fantasy, and science fiction that I read on my own initiative, and the Bible and Lutheran theology that I encountered at church. The summer before I went to college I discovered C.S. Lewis' Christian apologetic works, which blew my mind by linking both sides of my reading life, and from him realized that I should be familiar with classical literature. The stuff I read in school just didn't connect with me at all, and they didn't give me all that much to read. In retrospect, I've built most of my knowledge of the world on a foundation of religious literature and pop culture ephemera.
In terms of getting along in the world, this foundation has served me pretty well. People discuss things in their lives based on their religious beliefs and the movies and pulp novels they've read. After grad school, I got back into collecting comic books again, which served me well when I failed to find a job in academia - the one place where you can always find a person willing to talk about art and writing is a comic book store. That part of culture that sustains one through a challenging period of one's life was in large part filled by discussions of superhero comics and Star Wars, and they did sustain me through some very dark times.
(My experiences in this regard mean that I'm not surprised that your most popular posts are about Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I myself have not read them. IMHO, it's hard to imagine that anything better could be said about Evangelion than was said in FLCL, and I haven't been adventurous enough to see whether your posts clear that bar.)
I have also learned that when you are dying in an American hospital, the people who are there to discuss the meaning of life with you, and hold your hand as you leave this world, are likely to be people who have devoted their lives to Christ. So although I am no longer a Christian, I am prepared to draw on my memories of a Christian education to talk with a hospital chaplain in a productive way, because it seems like a worthwhile way to deal with dying.
So on the one hand, I have a lot of sympathy for people who haven't read a lot of great literature, and are comfortable talking about comics and Star Wars, because that's culture, that's a good thing, and it should be encouraged. On the other hand, I never want to discourage anyone from reading something difficult if they want to do it. I've read the Odyssey in Greek, and it's a classic for a reason. After 9/11, I realized I had been giving Islam less attention than it deserved, so I learned enough Arabic to be able to read some verses of the Qur'an. It was very good poetry, unlike anything else I had read.
In my experience, the people who are most familiar with the canon of great literature are not better people than the people who aren't. They can communicate in ways that people who aren't familiar with the canon can't, but that's true for someone who has the Star Wars movies memorized too.
I do think that it's important for teachers to be able to act like being able to read the texts they assign is the most important thing. When I was a Latin teacher, I made sure to communicate that what made me the authority figure in the classroom was that I knew Latin well, and they didn't. Latin mattered to me, and if they wanted to be an important person in my class, they needed to learn Latin. There are English teachers who can't communicate that reading the texts they are teaching is important, and that those texts matter to them. But this is a matter of performance, not necessarily a truth about the role of the canon in modern life.
I enjoy your writing a lot, and I don't believe it would be what it is without your appreciation of the Anglo-American literary canon. But that's a statement about *your* performance, and not a truth about the role of the canon in modern life. As I hope I've made clear, I have a fair amount of ambivalence about the social value of the Anglo-American literary canon, while at the same time having great respect for those who read it, teach it, and let it affect their writing and lives.
A lot to think about here, but one thing I did want to say is that I really never want to imply that studying canonical texts makes somebody "better" (in a moral sense). That is not something I think because it is—like you say—observably not true. So if it came off like I thought that, I definitely don't!
If somebody asked me why I think they should read Homer, I'd probably say because the Iliad and the Odyssey are beautiful and also because they're old… and when you read something that is very old that turns out to be full of the kinds of things that trouble you in life, you feel less lonely and on your own. (I go back to Ecclesiastes often for this reason.) There are aspects of human life nobody gets to escape but none of us have to face them alone. (In a certain sense, maybe one should read Homer because the whole reason he's still here is because he has something to say to you.)
You mention science fiction and whenever I read Joanna Russ, I similarly feel less lonely.… I feel like: here's a friend. (And I agree with you about how certain kinds of nerdy spaces are / were great places for real discussion about art… I don't know if you watched the movie Tar but my take on the ending was that she was at last conducting for an audience that really, really loved music.) But I also feel like, everything is in continuity with something before.… I can follow Russ's thread in We Who Are About To…, where she questions the primacy of survival, backward and backward, to Old English poems and continually back.
On the other hand if somebody said "why should I dedicate teaching time to Homer" or "why should I hire somebody to teach Homer," I don't think I'd have an answer other than the circular version sketched out above.
I certainly agree that there's a quality to high culture (or subcultures) and canons that functions as exclusionary—but they also seem to me to be things that we also develop as social creatures inevitably. In that sense I kind of think all we can do is be aware of the dark side of these things and do our best to mitigate them. (For what it's worth, I have lots of gaps in my reading, and I'm always sort of expecting somebody to be like, how can you talk about X without having read Y.)
I think what you're pointing to is a fundamental quandary of teaching teenagers - we can structure what we teach them, based on what we think is important, but they aren't at a point where they can know what they will need for their lives. In relation to art and literature, this means giving them worthwhile things to make sense of situations that are likely to happen in their adult lives but which may not seem particularly important to adolescents.
Things like death (one's own or a loved one's), serious illness (loved your recent piece by the way), mental illness, old age, financial or professional setbacks - these are going to happen every person, and they're going to be terrible in ways that, ideally, an adolescent can't imagine. We need to be able to talk about these things, with ourselves at least. Religions are happy to tell us what they mean, but in the context of imposing a whole lot of obligations that we may not want to take on, just because we need a narrative to bridge the gap created by a disaster or miracle. Having a head full of great art gives you materials to build those bridges, without imposing religious duties on you.
This is also where the benefit of the work of translation comes in handy. Reading a work where the language is not your own language helps develop the skill of producing your own words that are meaningful for situations where language might fail. Moreover, complex language can do more things than simple language, and you may need language to do a bunch of things all at once. Encountering powerful thoughts in a language that you need to interpret pushes your ability to use language, ideally to talk about things that are not easy to talk about.
This is my strongest case for claiming that reading books that deal with big subjects using the full rhetorical and poetic resources of a given language is a solid way to give young people something that will be of use to them in life. I don't think that there's any particular reason to insist that those books be in English, or written by people of European descent, other than that it's easier to learn the conventions of Elizabethan English to read Shakespeare than to memorize a bunch of Chinese characters to read Zhuangzi. Translations are fine, but the biggest benefit along these lines from a piece of literature is understanding what it means using the ideological and linguistic resources of the culture the work was produced in, so that's still a lot of work to get the best results.
Also, as with math, some people are going to be better at this than others, and some will be so bad at this they never want to struggle with this again if they don't have to. The latter should have friends who are the former, or at least subscribe to their substacks.
There is actually a whole recurring discourse about how it is bad that Elden Ring/Dark Souls/etc. are so difficult, and how they should have an easy mode.
Obviously this is stupid although I hate that thinking this puts me on the side of video game YouTubers and right-wing internet perverts.
(Overlapping but distinct from the non-stupid discourse that games ought to have specific accessibility features.)
i should have known… whenever you say "nobody would say x" there's always a bunch of people saying x
I think there's a secretly interesting topic hiding behind that idea of "high English", which is that we associate a lot of these old texts (Shakespeare is a good example) with language that has come to be inaccessible and dense even though it wasn't at the time. It's not so much that modern language would inherently be better because it is more intelligible to more people (which seems to be more what the Tweeter is getting at) but different interpretations of classic works (especially translations) are a reflection not only of the author and the context of the work itself, but also of the interpreter/translator and their additional context and point of view. The woke Odyssey discourse irritates me because everyone's getting so mad about her perceived "agenda" when,,, isn't that the whole point? Using modern language in an adaptation of the text doesn't inherently make the experience of consuming that text simpler, even though most people making these modern language adaptations are doing so in order to make it simpler to consume.
Yeah, I think it's a more interesting conversation about translation because translations exist both as derivative works _and_ and stand-alone works—there are still reasons to read Chapman's Homer even if you wouldn't read it for class.
But also, when it comes to people like this guy, I feel like… "inaccessible" is something that ideally is altered through education! Like I'm learning to lift weights and lots of the room is inaccessible to me right now, but it will become accessible. Shakespeare can become "accessible" over time partly because, like you're saying, it wasn't meant to be hard to understand at the time. (You can even pick your way through Chaucer in Middle English with the right edition / help, but I think the experience of doing so is also helpful bc like—yeah that is kind of a different language!) Some art really is meant to be inaccessible but much isn't.…
This seems related to the time a friend of mine in grad school pointed out in class the beauty of a particular line in a poem. The professor laughed at him and said, “We are here to talk about ideas. If you want to talk about beauty, join a book club.”
i'd have some sympathy for that if the "we are here to talk about" didn't end with ideas. like "yeah it's beautiful but we're here to talk about…" idk the development of the sonnet. do you study that in graduate school? what do people do in graduate school. damned if i know. but "ideas"… lol.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely time in grad school. It was free and I wrote a lot and made nice friends. But for the most part, the academic classes were spent trying to figure out how to write about something in a way that would get published in an academic journal. Which is useful for your career path! If that’s what you want!
But really I just loved reading books a lot, and I was a terrible academic, so what do I know?
gah!
OK, but girl...what's the right definition of original sin! It's, like, how all human beings are so inherently sinful that they can't be saved (through acts), bc of, I dunno, something bad that Adam did wrt eating the apple, right? Or is that the wrong definition? Help a non-Christian out
(the other one people get wrong all the time is the immaculate conception—it refers to the conception of Mary, not Jesus… however, this is also not relevant to Milton lol)
OMG have definitely learned something about the immaculate conception today!!!
That's basically right—it's being born inherently sinful. The further you go along in the history of Western Christianity the more people will disagree on what that means, i.e., Catholics hold that baptism removes original sin, Calvinists (iirc) do not. (Eastern Christianity is different, but… not relevant to Milton.)
The mistake people make is acting like original sin is like… the first sin you commit. Like pointing at something and going "and that's the original sin."
Is that what they said in the Paradise Lost class?
as I remember it yes