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« Back to Do We Need the Western Canon? main page    Transcript for: Do We Need the Western Canon?canon.html ANNOUNCER: Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient ofthe Presidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN, helping cancerpatients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving livestoday and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation,the Lilly Endowment, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, theUnited States-Japan Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. The debate aboutwhat books to teach in our universities is as old as universitiesthemselves. Is there a classic body of work, a canon that everystudent should learn? What authors and what books should beincluded? It's important, control the minds of the young and controlthe future. Joining us to look at the matter are Stanley Fish, professor ofEnglish at Duke University, and author of Professional Correctness;Andrew Delbanco, professor of humanities at Columbia University andauthor of Required Reading: Why our American Classics Matter Now;and Harvey Flaumenhaft, dean of St. Johns College, which places aspecial emphasis on the Western canon, and author of The EffectiveRepublic: Administration and Constitution in the Though of AlexanderHamilton. The topic before the house, the canons roar, this week onThink Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Over the last decades some students havechanted, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go. Critics arguethat too many professors have taken their advice. They argue thatthere is a body of knowledge which any educated person ought to know,and that today's universities are not providing that. They point tocertain statistics. Consider, for example, the results of a survey of collegeseniors by the Gallup organization, 25 percent could not locateColumbus' voyage within the correct half-century, 25 percent couldnot distinguish Winston Churchill's words from Joseph Stalin's, orKarl Marx' ideas from the U.S. Constitution, 40 percent did not knowwhen the Civil War occurred, most could not identify the authors ofworks by Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Others see it differently. They argue that the texts of oldare no longer relevant to students today. That the so-called DWEMs,dead white European males, are antiquated and need to be replacedwith fresher perspectives. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. This is a topic that hasbeen much in the news, much misunderstood. May I ask you for a shortanswer to a simple question, which is, starting with you, Harvey,what is this argument about? MR. FLAUMENHAFT: Well, I guess there are two questions, onehas to do with inclusiveness, and one has to do with relevance. Manypeople think that what has been traditionally read leaves out allkinds of things that should be read. Other people think most of whatthere is to be read, that's been around for a while, doesn't havemuch to say to our current questions and difficulties. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Andy Delbanco. MR. DELBANCO: I think this argument is about whether the pastis dead or should be. Whether books that have survived the trial byfire, in some cases, some of them have actually been burned over theyears, or trial by time, still have something to say to each newgeneration. That's what it's about, I think. MR. WATTENBERG: Stanley Fish. MR. FISH: I more or less agree with Andy. I always think ofBen Johnson's line about Shakespeare, not for an age, but for alltime. And there are some people for whom the status of being for alltime is the one that should determine what books are on our readinglists and taught, and others who, in fact, want to focus on the age. That is, the present age, and what is considered relevant to theconcerns, especially of young people, today. MR. DELBANCO: This argument does come out of a very big socialchange in this country. The population that has access to highereducation in this country has changed a lot. And I think that's beena very good change in the last quarter century or so. So aninstitution like mine, Columbia College, for instance, the studentswhom I teach come from a much wider variety of backgrounds than theyonce did. So it was very natural for these students to ask thequestion, what have I got to do with these old books? They come fromparts of the world that I have no blood connection to, perhaps. Whathave I got to do with them? It was a natural question. MR. WATTENBERG: Let us get a little specific here for some ofour viewers who are not as erudite as we four here. What were they,whoever the they is, the people who were the multiculturalists, whowanted to change this curriculum? What, for example, did they wantto put in and what did they want to take out? Maybe we can try toget a handle on this, it's a pretty complicated thing for us normalpeople. MR. DELBANCO: I want to point out, in response to yourquestion that everything we're saying here seems to be based on thepremise that the canon, and you punned on the word canon earlier, isthis big, ponderous, heavy thing that needs about 15 people to dragit along and it doesn't change and it weighs a lot. And that'ssimply not so. And the fact is that the argument we're talking abouthere, as Stanley said, is a very old one. The canon has always beenchanging. If we -- our predecessors of 100 years ago listened tothis conversation, they'd think we were all apostates, with thepossible exception of Harvey, because we've put into the canonliterature in the English language, which would have been denigratedas a vernacular literature. We've strayed away from the classics,which was once the canon. MR. FISH: It was a huge event when Hawthorne was first taughtin any American college. MR. DELBANCO: Exactly. I mean, my field is Americanliterature, which didn't really enter the university in a serious wayuntil at the most about 75 years ago, really about 50 years ago. MR. FISH: Really about 30 years ago. I was taught as arenaissance scholar never even to associate with people who didAmerican literature. MR. DELBANCO: So the canon is changing. My conception of thecanon is, it's a very large and fluid thing, which contains lots ofgood books. And the job of professors is to bring some of those goodbooks to the attention of their students. MR. WATTENBERG: I don't mean to be rude, but can somebodyanswer my question, which was, what are they saying about what youshould put in and what you should take out? MR. FISH: What they're saying is what they've always beensaying. I remember 30 -- MR. WATTENBERG: But, give me some examples, Stanley. MR. FISH: I remember 35 years or 40 years ago it was said, wecan't start now teaching seriously Faulkner and Hemingway, because ifwe do that we won't any longer teach Shakespeare and Milton. Earlierit was, we can't teach Shakespeare and Milton, we will neglectThucydides and Virgil. Now, we can't teach Zora Neil Herson (sp), orAlice Walker, because we would neglect Hemingway and Faulkner. Thearguments always follow the same trajectory. The beach head that waswon by a previous generation is now defended with the sameobdurateness that met that generation 30 years ago. MR. DELBANCO: Ben, you want a direct answer to your question? MR. WATTENBERG: Yes, it would be nice. I mean, we wereapproaching it there for a -- MR. DELBANCO: I've got 12 weeks to teach an Americanliterature class. There is a sense on the part of a lot of peoplethat I shouldn't waste a large part of that time teaching those oldPuritans and writers like Hawthorne, and I should get right to thewriters of the present day, or maybe the last 50 years, who speakdirectly to the experience of my students, more women writers, morewriters of color, writers who speak of the immigrant experience. AndI'm very sympathetic, actually, to that. MR. WATTENBERG: More homosexual writers, that has been a bigpoint of the -- MR. DELBANCO: And more gay writers, though of course, we havesome gay writers squarely in the center of the American canon, likeWalt Whitman. MR. WATTENBERG: I understand, and going back to the Greeks, aswell. MR. FISH: And more are being discovered every day. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, right. MR. DELBANCO: I'm very sympathetic to that impulse. And, infact, this book you were kind enough to mention, which has the wordclassics in it, I've got a chapter on Zora Neil Herson, and a chapteron Richard Wright, writers who would never have been there ageneration ago, because I think they're terrifically good writers. But, the fact is we've got -- MR. WATTENBERG: But, Richard Wright was in our canon when Iwent to school in the 1950s. MR. DELBANCO: Okay. He wasn't in F.O. Mathison's (sp) canoncreating book, however, about American literature. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: Part of the problem is that many people whowant to just jettison a lot of this, start with certain assumptionsabout what the agenda is. Certain questions are settled, and thereis really no need to revisit people far away and long ago, what havethey got to teach us? We have figured certain things out, and theproblem is to run with it. And one of the advantages of thepro-canonical view is that -- and one of the disadvantages, from thepoint of view of these people, is you explore alternatives that maybe strange, or may be offensive, but are certainly different. MR. WATTENBERG: I want to drop the puck on another aspect ofthis. And the word that I will use is deconstruction. What --again, let's take the short -- let's make believe we're starting theshow over. Now, what are we talking about? That one always get upthere in terms -- well, you tell me. What's that argument about,because that is a related argument, isn't it? MR. FISH: It is, but the relations are hard to see. Ingeneral what deconstructive analysis shows is that certain kinds ofcoherences, or neat and tidy narratives about history or the canon,or about the way in which a work should be interpreted, are not soneat and tidy. Deconstruction really is the technique ofdemonstrating how it is that something we now think of as coherent orwhole, or obvious, was constructed. Deconstruction has nothing todo, as is sometimes is thought in the popular mind, with destruction. It's rather, the discovery through historical research. MR. WATTENBERG: But, it has something to do -- it hassomething to do with the idea that literature is politics. MR. FISH: Well, not necessarily. What is has to do -- whatdeconstruction debunks is that the -- or tries to debunk, is that theidea that the canon we now have, or the list of major authors that wewould all mostly teach, is natural. That is, somehow has floated tothe top of the heap, because of a merit that has nothing to do withhistory. Instead, deconstruction, deconstructive analysis, starts byassuming the historical dimension of achievements, which doesn't meanthat those achievements are therefore denied, but that they're givena historical explanation rather than a theological explanation. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: It also debunks an idea which I still believein, that a text, they tend to prefer the word text to words likebook, or work, is not the product of a single individualconsciousness that has taken the language that he or she received andturned it into something with his or her personal stamp on it. Ittakes a different view. It takes the view that language sort ofseeps into our consciousness and, in a way, writes the books throughus. And so it tends to want to limit our admiration, or evenperhaps adoration for the great creative consciousness that liesbehind a lot of literary study of the past. And we might have gone alittle too far in that department, I suppose. We might have elevatedauthors to a pedestal and overlooked the way in which they werewriting for a marketplace, the way in which they were limited intheir ability to perceive the world, by the culture in which theylived. But, I still firmly believe, and that's why I do what I do,and why I write what I write, that there are some people who have agenius for language. And it's those people whose books we shouldread. MR. WATTENBERG: I went through, in a non-professional way,these kind of courses. And what we learned is to say, blank was aproduct of his time. That is what you wrote, that was the firstsentence in your theme. Erasmus, he was a product of his time. Sothis is, as you say, not new. But, it -- I mean, the whole '60s, thewhole radicalization of the university, allegedly, hasn't this put itto a new plateau. I mean, unless I'm inventing something, but thereis, one sense is, the intensification of the bitterness of thisargument. Let me address something specifically to you, Stanley. Thereis this group, the National Association of Scholars, which advocatessort of the traditional curricula and opposes the politicization ofresearch in the text. Now, at one point, I am told, you wrote to theprovost of Duke University, and I quote, that NAS members 'should notbe appointed to positions on key universities' committees,distinguished professor, or any other committee dealing with academicpriorities and evaluations'. Now, were that directed the other way,I suspect there would be cries of censorship, fascism, whatever. Sowhere does that intensity of your feeling come from? MR. FISH: That -- MR. WATTENBERG: For example, please. MR. FISH: For example, when I came across literature of thatorganization, which specifically said that works done by scholarsfrom a perspective of gay and lesbian studies, or African-Americanstudies, or what was then called literary theory, should not bewelcomed and encouraged in the academy. At the same time thatdocument spoke of flexibility and openness of mind. And I,therefore, said that these people were disqualifying themselves bytheir own standards. And I would say it again, as I just have. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: But, you would say that anybody who is amember of that organization should not sit on any decision-makingbody? MR. FISH: That was offered to the provost as a challenge,which he quite appropriately turned back to me and said, no I'm notgoing to respond to what you said, as I would have done we're Iprovost. But, I wasn't provost. What I was doing was pointing outan inconsistency in an argument, hoisting them with their own petard,as they used to say. MR. DELBANCO: Ben, there is plenty of intolerance on bothsides of this debate. And that's if -- MR. WATTENBERG: Are you calling him intolerant. MR. DELBANCO: No. MR. WATTENBERG: I want to get a little fight going here. MR. DELBANCO: No, you're not going to get me to fight withStanley this afternoon. No, I think that the right -- the panic onthe part of the right within the academy, that the old books aredisappearing, and that civilized discourse has come to an end, andthe barbarians are at the gates, is just as much a caricature of thereality -- MR. FISH: And a well financed one, because the answer -- oneanswer to your question, where's the intensity, the intensity comesfrom the fact, and this has been documented over and over again, thata connected network of right-wing, or neo-conservative foundations,did something that is entirely and appropriately American, put on apolitical campaign designed to put certain kinds of people on apedestal, and others on a defensive. MR. WATTENBERG: For example? MR. FISH: Well, to say that those people who were teachinggreat books courses were holding up Western civilization, and thosepeople who were moving in other directions were unraveling the fabricof civilization. This was an enormously successful political effort. MR. WATTENBERG: You know the rebuttal to that, which is, theywould maintain that the university structure itself has been takenover by the '60s generation radical left, and they are -- you're damnright they're financing a rebuttal, because the whole damnestablishment has been t together. You may have preferences, orviews, or some long-term agenda, but if you're teaching students,both the Federalist papers, Adam Smith, and Marx, and Lenin, surelyyou can hold in check your long-term agenda long enough to try tohelp clarify what the issues are. MR. FISH: No. The reason that you can't do that is becausethe basic facts that you would present, the organizational matters,this is what is said, these are the divisions and so forth, those arethemselves never innocent statements. From the word go, from yourvery first descriptive act, you are saying some things and not someother things, and you are moving from -- you are moving within asystem of philosophical, moral and sometimes, in my case, theologicalpreferences, that rule even the facts that you then dispassionatelyoffer to your students. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: But you think there is absolutely nodifference at all between neutrality and impartiality? MR. FISH: I don't think that either of them exist, again,except that agendas that will not declare their names. MR. DELBANCO: But, Stanley, the very fact that you have ahighly developed degree of self-consciousness about this problem, andthat you are open and straightforward about it, is to me a greatadvantage as a teacher, and a great advantage for your students. What I'm talking about is the degree of concealment, or thedegree of contempt or disrespect that is projected in the classroomfor points of view that may be anathema to one's own. Of course, weall -- we can't extract ourselves from the circumstances in which welive, and from our deepest convictions. But, we can try to be awareof them, we can try to be honest about them, put our cards, as itwere, on the table. MR. FISH: Well, I think that awareness and honesty are,themselves, good strategies, rather than realizable objectives. ButI do agree -- MR. FLAUMENHAFT: Stanley, are you being honest with us now? MR. FISH: I am, insofar as I know, but that's an importantqualification. But I do believe, I really do believe with you, thatfrankly polemical teaching, in the classroom, that is in the literaryclassroom, which says, I'm not here to teach you in whatever fashionabout these literary texts, I'm here to convince you to vote for X oragainst Y in the next election, that's wrong, that's misplaced. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: Why? MR. FISH: That's not doing your job. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: Why? MR. FISH: That's not doing your job. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: What is your job? MR. FISH: Your job is, in fact, at least my job -- you're apolitical scientist, I'm a literary person, mostly. My job is topresent the materials that make up the content of my discipline. Andto introduce students to those materials in as forceful a way aspossible. What they then do with that material, and my teaching,when they go into the ballot box, or go into the marketplace is, ofcourse, something I cannot predict, and over which I shouldn't wantto have any control. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, wait a minute. I'm going to close thisconversation on an up note. Now, tell us, and I think you sort ofall have some agreement on this, why is this stuff really wonderfulfor a young person to learn? MR. FLAUMENHAFT: Because good books make people think. Theymake -- they shake you out of your complacent assumption that whatyou know or what you believe or what you think is the only thing toknow, or believe or think. When my students read the great chapterin Moby Dick where Ahab steps out onto the deck and tells the crew,you're not here to chase whales, you're here to chase my whale. Andthe crew becomes enthralled by the passion of his -- of his campaign,his crusade. My students, if they're alert, if they're doingsomething more than running their eye over the little black marks onthe white page, if they're really reading, they start askingthemselves questions about power, leadership, following,self-criticism, and so on. That's what literature should do. MR. FISH: I would add to that, at least in the way that Iteach it, an engagement with language, that is usually not affordableto us in every day life, because it involves slowing down. Forexample, at the beginning in the second book of Paradise Lost, Satanis on a throne. Milton says of him, by merit, razed to that bademinence. I ask my students to consider the word razed, which is ahomonym, it's either r-a-i-s-e-d, or r-a-z-e-d. Once you see that, the statement of Satan razed to that bad --razed -- by merit, razed to that bad eminence, begins to tremble. Merit turns out to be its reverse. The bad eminence turns out to bethe lowest thing possible, because razed either means elevate ordestroyed, and Milton has structured a sentence in which it meansboth. And you have to stop on that sentence, you have to think. MR. WATTENBERG: How is it spelled? MR. FISH: It's -- well, the nice thing about spelling in the17th Century was that it was entirely indeterminate. Autographicregularity is an 18th Century invention. MR. FLAUMENHAFT: One of the things that's important, I think,is that you're trying to help students not to be mere products oftheir times. You don't help them to do that by telling themeverybody before them was a product of his time. You do that byhelping them to see that other people have been very thoughtful, andmore thoughtful than you might expect, and they give you someexperience of what that means. MR. WATTENBERG: Thank you. Thank you all. And thank you. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make ourshow better. Please send your questions and comments to: New RiverMedia, 1150 Seventeenth Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036;or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tankvisit PBS On-line at www.pbs.org. And please let us know where yousee Think Tank. This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in associationwith New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content. Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of thePresidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN, helping cancerpatients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving livestoday and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation,the Lilly Endowment and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, theUnited States-Japan Foundation, and the Donner Canadian Foundation. (End of program.) 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