So what do y'all think? Is Delany underestimating the capacities of contemporary students? Is he setting the bar too high? Is he out of touch with the realities of teaching?

What do you think?

Welll.....

I'm not sure the excerpt here is long enough to be sure how the author defines "teachability." It almost seems as though to him, 'teachability' means that students like the book or find it easy or enjoyable to read. Personally, I would define 'teachable' as offering plenty of opportunity for debate, discussion, project work, classroom events such as musical presentations or art connections, multiple attacks for further research, etc. By 'teachable' I would mean 'rich in opportunities for classroom examination'. But I don't think that's what is meant here.

I do think the tastes of young, inexperienced reading audiences are not to be relied upon when scholars set about selecting the most significant, influential, or otherwise valuable works within their genres. We don't go to college to go shopping, to be exposed only to what we easily and quickly like and enjoy; we go to become familiar with the broadest outlines of the major ideas and forms that our culture has been working with for centuries. Whether we like them or not, it's invaluable to be familiar with the major authors and ideas, and know the outlines of their works and their contributions to their fields. Sometimes, the works read are likeable for students; sometimes, not so much. I read a lot of things in college that I absolutely detested -- Ezra Pound, Spenser, I'm looking at you -- but my awareness of literary history is not something I'd want to give up. To select works just because students will enjoy them, or at best not find them troubling, would be to do a great disservice.

I also value the presumption that the books read in classes will not be the last books to be read by students in their lives (though I realize that may be optimistic). There is nothing preventing anyone from reading palatable books of their own selection, and I hope that everyone does that, and finds their reading enriched by the fact that thanks to their education they now grasp the allusions and references in the books they've chosen. But professors should choose significant, provocative, challenging, and illustrative works for the classroom regardless of this flimsy definition of 'teachability.' Sheer enjoyment is not what families are paying $20K a year for their students to experience, nor is it worth the time and effort required of students to read and respond in an academic fashion .

an ‘introductory background lecture’ cannot substitute for exposure to the dozen to two dozen titles that would make the new work come alive by its play of differences and similarities.

That's the important nugget, and I agree, and that's why I favor a core curriculum in the humanities.

My viewpoints come from going to college in the early 1990s when the canon was initially being torn down. Eighteen years later, I am far more thankful for my classes which considered deeply the classics in their genre and period; I still draw on those, and my knowledge of major works lets me participate in conversations and read knowledgeably. Meanwhile, I have almost no memory of the classes which presented lesser works and dressed them up as equivalent in import to the canonical ones.

The canon establishes a framework for understanding; saying "OK, here's what the canon was, now let's read Chinua Achebe/Maragaret Atwood/Dashiell Hammett' creates an inadequate understanding of literature; in fact, a patchwork of knowledge which amounts to little or no understanding.

I also value the presumption that the books read in classes will not be the last books to be read by students in their lives (though I realize that may be optimistic).

That was the thing that always bugged me about the various canon warriors -- the unspoken assumption that, OMG, IF WE DON'T GRAB THESE KIDS NOW AND FORCE THEM TO READ THE ODYSSEY/ZORA NEALE HURSTON/ETC. NOW NOW NOW, they'll never read the works in question. Not every book is going to speak to 18-22 year olds. Some books will speak to them when they're thirty. Some books will speak to them in middle age. And some will just never turn into anyone's favorites. Those are the books that ultimately wind up dropping out of the canon.


That's the important nugget, and I agree, and that's why I favor a core curriculum in the humanities.

Me too. I'm one of those people who got that "patchwork of knowledge" and now I feel more than a little bit ripped off. Ah, well. I'm still young. I've got a lifetime to rectify my incomplete education.

I've got a lifetime to rectify my incomplete education.

I know, and that's what I do. I just really wish I'd gotten it more efficiently during my 4 years.

No education is ever complete, though, of course.

I think he has a good point about the "limited narrative patterns available on prime-time TV."

Movies, TV and much popular fiction tend to stick to a rigid, reductionist plot formula where all stories are about a Sympathetic Protagonist achieving Personal Growth through Overcoming Obstacles.

I suspect people brought up on that formula will tend to stick to that formula through inertia. So, it could be helpful for a teacher to force students through initial discomfort into reading something different.

I was going to add a comment here, and then I see that Miko doesn't even know who Samuel Delany is. You couldn't know, Miko, or you never could have said what you did.

He's got a point. Where do you start?

I'm still struggling with this, in a narrower sense because I'm not a literary college lecturer, with occhiblu. I can't get her to engage Golden Age SF because it's hidebound, sexist, mired in apparently outmoded early-20th-century American moral values, dealing with issues of little relevance such as - gasp! - a man landing on the moon! (Never mind its relation to the Modern literary tradition, what SRD chooses to call its paraliterary qualities and which I - having known many SF-weaned engineers - would prefer to call consciously anti-literary; The Modern has been so successfully refuted in other contexts that the way the old SF authors chose to do it seems quaint.) But I don't know how to get her to engage any of the reactionary stuff either, because it's out of context, because it's less interesting deprived of its predecessors, or because it's flat-out bizarre and uncomfortable. I think she'd dig The Female Man - but she'd dig it a lot more properly if she read Heinelein's Future History first. But I can't make her care.

So there's an entire canon - to use a very distasteful word, perhaps I should call it a para-canon instead - that was of the first importance in my own intellectual development and which I despair of ever being able to introduce to someone whom I love and esteem deeply.

How SRD expects to take a classroom weaned on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and enthuse them by a sourly postmodern, revanchiste take on the 19th century French novel I can't imagine; sympathy's not enough for this endeavor.

Here, let me quote Ursula LeGuin, from her introduction to Tales from Earthsea; this little paragraph has been much in my mind lately:

In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I've changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are chagning times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go "there and back again," and "there" is always the beloved, familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity; an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitudes. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life - of a sort, for a while.

And mind you, this is from a woman who wrote an award-winning story about a gifted young boy who travels to study at a school of magic - in 1967, 30 years before J.K. Rowling lifted and sanitized the same story and built it into a $2 billion empire.

In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I've changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are chagning times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go "there and back again," and "there" is always the beloved, familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity; an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitudes. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life - of a sort, for a while.

And mind you, this is from a woman who wrote an award-winning story about a gifted young boy who travels to study at a school of magic - in 1967, 30 years before J.K. Rowling lifted and sanitized the same story and built it into a $2 billion empire.

Wonderful, it double posted it. Anyway;

What Ursula Leguin does not proceed to do is examine the effect that a steady diet of commodified paraliteray product does to the digestion of the unwitting consumer. What SRD does not do is give his views on his classroom which found The Man Without Qualities perhaps an enlightening morality play, but couldn't find anything of interest in Flaubert's Parrot.

I happen to have read Flaubert's Parrot, or most of it at least - it bored me too - and quite frankly I think the reason that Flaubert himself has held up so well is that the postmodern reaction to Flaubert is the superficially the same that he received from his contemporaries - namely, envy. At the time, he was held up, and quite rightly I suppose, as a prose stylist without peer in recorded history. Now, however, I think I read a Madame Bovary and think, "How nice to grow up in a world where a man could come of age, look around at the men around him, and think 'Here's the life I'm going to have' - and then go have it." That possibility was already narrowing during Flaubert's lifetime. Now it's wholly gone. I can read A Sentimental Education - but I can never have that education for myself. What Flaubert offers is a window into an utterly vanished past, and I really don't believe that's what he thought he was offering to the young man who might happen across his novel.

I think I look to science fiction the same way your average literature student looks to a work of literature; our approaches are different but our needs are fundamentally the same. The student TheophileE cites above - looking for "a Sympathetic Protagonist achieving Personal Growth through Overcoming Obstacles" - is looking, in the end, for her own Personal Growth, and she wants to read a story that is ego-syntonic to her own goals. I am looking to my own future, but in a different way; sometimes I, along with the rest of post-modernity, on the other hand, have given up on my ego; sometimes I feel like a bunny stuck in the middle of the highway, trying to figure out what strange futuristic semi-truck is coming so I can know which way to jump before it mows me down.

And that is simply no kind of a mindset in which to sit down and spend ten or twenty hours in the company of a dusty old fictional historian who seeks solace and wisdom in the history of a stuffed parrot.

So yeah, you asked.

I think she'd dig The Female Man - but she'd dig it a lot more properly if she read Heinelein's Future History first.

WTF? What on earth kind of light would Heinlein shed on Joanna Russ? Who was in the book writing with white-fisted rage a magnificent tear down of just the kind of macho-teleological SF that he specialized in?

I mean, you could certainly look at how her reaction to "Golden Age" SF informs her work. But reading Heinlein in order to "dig" The Female Man? I don't get what you're saying here.

How SRD expects to take a classroom weaned on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and enthuse them by a sourly postmodern, revanchiste take on the 19th century French novel I can't imagine; sympathy's not enough for this endeavor.

Huh? Have you ever watched Buffy?

And just because I'm tetchy from lack of sleep, I'll add this:

I can't get her to engage Golden Age SF because it's hidebound, sexist, mired in apparently outmoded early-20th-century American moral values

Well, that seems reason enough to me to avoid the genre. Life is short, and there are many good books to read, you know?

dealing with issues of little relevance such as - gasp! - a man landing on the moon!

Can I just note how much I hate this faux-sarcastic construction? The "gasp!" thing? It's a rhetorical tic that bugs the hell out of me.

I agree. It's impossible to appreciate science fiction without a thorough familiarity with the works of Alexandre Dumas. Sci-Fi that isn't grown from French Romanticism, steeped in the ideals of French Classicism, and rich with dialog-driven character development and serialistic plot complexity isn't worth a second glance.

Have you ever watched Buffy?

Nope, never. But many people I know seem to be very, very big fans. How would you sell me on it?

Yeah, and further. I love Le Guin's essays with all my heart, but I think you quote her to your disadvantage:

Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitudes. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

Pretty much sums up my feelings about the so-called "Golden Age" of SF.

the effect that a steady diet of commodified paraliteray product does to the digestion of the unwitting consumer.

That's not at all what she was talking about, but I do actually think that this idea-- that much entertainment for children has become a parody which has lost its source texts-- is worth discussing.

Buffy TV suck. Buffy movie good.

Have you ever watched Buffy?

Nope, never. But many people I know seem to be very, very big fans. How would you sell me on it?

Hang on, box, there's an essay that I can link but I just have to find it...

Here you go. Zoe William's The Lady and the Vamp.

Heh. I'd forgotten how breezy and chatty that essay is. But her main points-- about the series' metaphorical power-- stands, I think.

I like these two paragraphs, though I'm not sure I agree with them:

The very best of American telly is the telly of giants. There's no getting away from that. And yet, even against this backdrop, Buffy is still a stand-out experience. And here's why — TV occupies one of two moral universes. In the first, the ordinary-Joe affair, the largest moral decision any character can make is whether or not to be monogamous (other ethical choices centre around issues such as greed and loyalty; etiquette stuff, basically). Programmes in this camp — Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier and co — either wind up as comedies, in tacit admission that this moral remit is not wide enough to create its own pace, or they are comfortingly banal (Dawson's Creek, Neighbours, Hollyoaks).

In universe two, external factors intercede to give the characters more pressing dilemmas: enter hospitals (ER, Casualty, Holby City), aliens (The X-Files), leading the free world (The West Wing), people with supernatural monkey powers (Monkey), any life 'n' death stuff. Largely, the characters still have small personal decisions to make, but it is narratively unviable to mesh the larger picture — "Shall I transplant this liver/shoot this alien?" — with the smaller one — "Shall I go out with George Clooney? Well, obviously" — so plot and sub-plot form distinct units. In Buffy alone, all traumas are major, pressing and could result in the end of the world; and yet, at the same time, all function as metaphors for genuine crises in the everyday human condition.

So if I was going to give Buffy a chance, would I start with the movie, or with the TV pilot, or what?

I personally like both the movie and the TV show, although for different reasons. I would start with the TV pilot (although, you know, pilots are not always the best). Then, if you want to see the essence of Buffy the TV show I would try and watch Hush from Season 4. You won't have context, but it is the one I always show Buffy newbies, and if they are going to like Buffy, they will like that episode even without backstory.

The movie has a better cast (Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, Rutger Hauer, Luke Perry, Hilary Swank), and shows Kristy Swanson at her best (faint praise, I know). And the movie, unlike the TV show, doesn't have an insurmountable Sarah Michelle Gellar problem.

i use to have a SMG problem until the range of acting opportunities that was Buffy changed my mind.
It's hard to explain why a cult show means something to someone as every show like that happened to me because some moment happened when it filled a gap or became opportune or hit some chord at some time. Choosing to become invested in characters and only to be rewarded by having one's expectations exceeded--
it's an amazingly gratifying experience, be it with a book or movie or a telly show or even a human.
In a world of every day disappointments, it's hard to take a chance, but if you want something more than what you know, you invariably have no choice.

that Miko doesn't even know who Samuel Delany is. You couldn't know, Miko, or you never could have said what you did.

No, and I still haven't looked him up, but the important part is that we were presented with an excerpt here, and I responded to the ideas in that excerpt, with which I happen to agree. It might be true that if I knew more about the author, my response would change or grow more complex, but my basic orientation to teaching literature would not change.

What's confusing me is that I think you and I agree. But we are talking about different aims. The aim of the college classroom is to create awareness of context for literary developments of the past and those to come. The aim of your getting occhiblu to read your favorite books is more personal. You don't just want her to read them, you want her to like them. I'm suggesting it's not very important what students like. Reading in college, to advance your education, is not the same as reading for enjoyment - though, fortunately, for me, that often overlapped.

I assume, ikkyu2, that you've read all these books because of your own interest, on your own time? There's nothing in the teaching of literary history that would prevent you from doing so, and, as Hugh Janus said, it would most likely provide a much better context for understanding the relative degree of innovation you're finding in these books. One frustration I have with the SF genre is that there is so little in the way of new ideas about narrative. They're easily likened to sagas, epics, and myths. In the limited amount I've read I've found clumsy storytelling, limited emotional range, and repetitive themes - hero's journey, society plants the seeds of its own destruction, people are cruel to one another, people seek power. Not that it's any different from any other genre - the detective genre is trendy to teach, too, although the detective novel is arguably a more innovative form than speculative fiction (there really are no similar antecedents). But my point remains the same: taste should not be a guide to developing literature curricula.

I love Archie comics. They're complete garbage, though they have something to offer a student of the uses of liteature. Archie comics would make a great small syllabus component in a contemporary pop-lit class, along with other comics genres, but they should be offered in elective/independent format only; they don't belong at the center or core of a university curriculum. A student who took only courses in 20th century sci-fi, detective novels, and comics could not be called a well-educated student of literature, though they might know a tremendous amount about those particular genres and eras.

Couple random thoughts, mostly sidestepping the SF issue:

I think the issue with messing with the canon, or teaching lit outside the traditional canon, is (for me at least) less about engaging students (though that's a nice side effect) and more about teaching students that not everyone thinks the way that straight white rich Protestant men do. Or did, really, since most of the canon is, more or less by definition, a bit old. I feel like it's less of a "We have to teach these books now otherwise people will never read them!" thing and more of a "By teaching these books, we are telling students that these are the books that are important, that have shared meaning in our lives." And I think it's important to make sure the works we're saying have shared meaning actually do represent a broad spectrum of human experience, rather than privileging one small slice of it and calling it universal (and, in the process, teaching us all that anyone whose experience is outside that slice is somehow less human).

I *also* think that it's important to give contexts and antecedents and sources and inspirations, to look at the dialog the author is in and not just examine the work as some sort of weird, stand-alone, out-of-time experience. And I think Delaney is, from what I'm gleaning from the excerpt, correct in saying that some works can't really be appreciated until you've done enough work to understand their context.

And I think both those aspects of teaching literature can be satisfied, given enough time. But teachers only have so much time in the classroom, so it becomes a question of trade-offs, which means that any solution is imperfect.

I also think that the contextualizing doesn't really need to happen in chronological order. I remember the pleasure I got (and still get) from re-reading works in high school and college, and seeing how I was a different person during this reading than I had been during the last reading, because I had learned more -- but also realizing that I couldn't be who I was during this reading unless I had done that last reading, because this work had shaped me at that time into who I was now. There's a looping, circular, spiraling, past-and-future thing that can happen with good literature and art, where the fact that you've read Foucault now influences your reading of Shakespeare (for example), in ways that Shakespeare didn't intend (obviously) but in ways that contribute to your understanding of both. And I think *good* "patchwork" approaches can play on that, and engage students in that dialog among authors, even if those authors never talked to each other in real life.

And that's possibly more post-modern than is fashionable any longer, but I think digging in at any point and working outward in all directions is closer to how the universe works than anything strictly chronological. (On the other hand, I have just been rereading Madeline L'Engle, so I may be more emphatic on that point than I usually am.)

One frustration I have with the SF genre is that there is so little in the way of new ideas about narrative.

Miko dear, I love you, honestly, but you can't just come out and say this if you don't know who Samuel Delany is. It makes you sound ignorant. You need to read the seven or so novels and five or so books of criticism he's written before you make sweeping statements about what is and isn't done in what you're dismissing as a 'genre'. Go read 'Dhalgren' and 'Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand' and 'Atlantis: Three Tales' and then if you want to engage Delany in a discussion about narrative structure, engaging the text, and real novelty in the SF genre you will have a firmer leg to stand on. You'll also enjoy yourself; those are three fantastic books.

I happen to really enjoy Buffy, just as I enjoyed Star Wars, Le Morte d'Arthur, and the surviving works of Euripides. But Buffy and Star Wars are commercializations of old, tired tropes. Occhiblu and I are watching Buffy now - we just finished watching season six - and I don't think an episode has gone by where I haven't counted at least 5 overt allusions to SF-or-fantasy-that-has-gone-before. If I'd been keeping track, I'd have a list of hundreds of allusions and allegory - but very little original material at all, if any.

If there is any genius in Buffy, it's the proven ability to market these episodes to people who've never cracked an F or SF book in their entire lives and never will after they shut the TV off - and of that I stand in awe.

And when people glorify Buffy for its inventiveness, its creativity, its novelty, I smile inwardly, but I usually don't bother to correct them, for exactly the same reason that SRD struggles to get twentysomethings to appreciate Flaubert's Parrot: most people don't know what's come before, and they don't care.

WTF? What on earth kind of light would Heinlein shed on Joanna Russ? Who was in the book writing with white-fisted rage a magnificent tear down of just the kind of macho-teleological SF that he specialized in?

Go ahead, jokeefe. Try to convince me that what you're talking about wasn't at least half the fun of reading The Female Man - fun you'd miss out on completely if you hadn't grown up on a diet of Isaac Asimov's nebbishy scientist-philosopher-kings. I'll just be sitting over here on the sidelines, clutching my head like a stunned monkey.

I agree that's how the universe works, but is it how an expensive university is supposed to work? If universities have anything to offer (at least in the humanities), it's an efficient exposure, in a short amount of time, to a program giving the broad outlines of the history of human thought, filtered through the judgements of people who have spent their lives evaluating the content they teach. It's that context that matters to me; the expectations of a university education. Certainly it's true that self-directed reading will continue for a lifetime and that everything you read informs everything else - but we can do that for free. When plunking down many thousands of dollars to be guided through the world's most widely shared agreements about what we know and what we respect, open-ended exploration is not what we should be looking for. That core curriculum time, I think, is best spent looking at the most read (throughout all history) and/or most influential writings of humans.

By that I don't mean only the Victorian, dead-white-men canon. I never went for a narrow definition of 'canon,' and since I went to school in the hottest days of the culture wars, the discussions about dead white men vs. twentieth-century marginalized people are familiar, but I think they also pose a false dichotomy. What was The Canon in 1900 or 1950 has certainly evolved to take in the best works of more recent times and recently (re)discovered authors. In addition, the major texts of world religions and influential songs, sagas, and poems of various global cultures should certainly be included in a basic liberal arts education. But the inclusion in core courses of really minor works of little or no broad influence outside a genre readership does seem like a waste of time, effort, and money to me. (I think their place is in elective and independent study, and within each genre, there is a canon all that genre's own, with similar recursive problems inherent in it).

The difficulty is most prevalent, I think, when trying to evaluate works of the last 30 years or so. I think the importance of influence cannot be ignored when creating a broad-based liberal arts curriculum. The new discovery of the decade is not always the thing of lasting value and influence, whereas the primary works considered canonical in our culture and in other cultures have proven their value to readers and teachers over time. It's very hard to know whether "The Crying of Lot 49" or "Everything Is Illuminated" (or, for that matter, often-taught "Slaughterhouse Five" or "The Big Sleep") is going to prove itself of lasting influence and universality, or be something best read as examples and illustrations of more minor literary movements of their times, in a contemporary or postmodern American fiction course, rather than things that changed the course of literature and culture.

One thing we saw a lot of in the 80s and 90s was rediscovery. Many works which were previously unknown or untaught were researched and brought into the curriculum by people with an interest in correcting the literary-historical record and being more inclusive for inclusion's sake. In fact, there are many authors, the above-mentioned Zora Neale Hurston among them, who were unfairly denied the wide readership and influence their work might otherwise have had, because of oppressive conditions in society and in academia. And people set out to correct that, in droves. But the influence conundrum in itself posed a problem for the canon - teachers were forced to speculate on which books would have been important influences on later authors had they been more widely read or taught. In some cases they guessed right about the potential for influence of some previously under-taught works, and that has become evident over the last three decadesas scholarship has bloomed from those new rootstocks; but they also taught some stuff that was off the mark, though exciting for being recently unearthed. It has been interesting to watch some of the trendy works of the late 80s and early 90s fall out of favor once again, as qualities other than newness and contribution to the social record were again more commonly considered.

I see that as due to the simple passage of time, not just moving beyond postmodernism. The works needed to be exposed to the air and light of day and have their chance to be valued or to fall away as so many of their contemporaries did. And now that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is sort of in the American Lit. canon, at least, it becomes evident that it deserves to be there, where something like "Herland" may not. The explosion of the old canon made room for some re-evaluation of what belonged; the explosion of the new canon has turned attention back to matters of enduring quality, which I think is a good thing. That's why this 'teachability' stuff seems like a shallow criterion for course material.

One reason I think the canon continues to be important is simply that it has always been important - at least, for as long as there has been formal education. Whether you went to university in the US, Namibia, Japan, Croatia, for the better part of the last hundred years, you read Shakespeare, the Greek myths, Moby-Dick, the Romantics, the Enlightenment philosophers, and so on. This precedent alone, the reliance on the European model for higher education and the importation of its canon, has meant that these works have been taken in by people across the globe. To reject the things in the canon simply for having been in the canon so long forces a turning of the back on a heritage of literature and ideas that, for better or for worse, is truly shared. A complete break with the past never seems advisable to me, but that's because I think a lot about how we got the way we are, and I do believe that saw about being doomed to repeat history if we are in ignorance of it. I wonder whether we'd be undergoing this bizarre revival of Biblical literalism, for instance, if twenty or thirty years ago we hadn't thrown the core curriculum out the window? The interpretations given in Bible circles today are pathetically devoid of the context that could have come from reading some of the many literary discussions of Christianity through the last five hundred years, let alone the first milennium.

One thing I think is overvalued is the idea of universality. There are a very few themes out there, and they tend to resonate with all human beings. These themes, well expressed, offer all the universality you need, and they can be found in the literature of every culture. Universality is, you know, universal; it's everywhere in things humans make. I don't think it's the quality that makes the classics transcendent, or American TV would have to be considered canonical. I think other qualities matter more: innovative or masterful use of language, new ideas about structure or narrative voice, expressing ideas within difficult forms, moving treatment of important topics, challenge to a former paradigm.

And with that, I shall hit post and give you the ramblings of a procrastinator! It would be better for me to do some work today than to sit around thinking about how colleges ought to do their work.

on preview. i2, I said I didn't know who he was, I had limited experience with the SF genre, and that I was responding to the ideas in the excerpt. I AM ignorant about his work, you're correct, and I said so. But I'm not ignorant about the topic raised in the post. I'm not sure what's wrong with me discussing the idea presented. If this is a discussion in which participants need to have read extensively in the author's work, jason's_planet didn't say so. He said:

Is Delany underestimating the capacities of contemporary students? Is he setting the bar too high? Is he out of touch with the realities of teaching?

And those are the questions I'm answering from my point of view. It didn't seem like a discussion about a given author's works. But if I'm wrong, I'll bow out and save my thoughts on literature in academia for another day.

on preview. i2, I said I didn't know who he was, I had limited experience with the SF genre, and that I was responding to the ideas in the excerpt. I AM ignorant about his work, you're correct, and I said so. But I'm not ignorant about the topic raised in the post. I'm not sure what's wrong with me discussing the idea presented. If this is a discussion in which participants need to have read extensively in the author's work, jason's_planet didn't say so. He said:

Is Delany underestimating the capacities of contemporary students? Is he setting the bar too high? Is he out of touch with the realities of teaching?

And those are the questions I'm answering from my point of view. It didn't seem like a discussion about a given author's works. But if I'm wrong, I'll bow out and save my thoughts on literature in academia for another day.

I think I explained myself a bit poorly -- I was in a personal essay mood rather than an argument (in the good sense) mood. Miko, I think you and I arguing on mostly the same side.

I agree that's how the universe works, but is it how an expensive university is supposed to work? If universities have anything to offer (at least in the humanities), it's an efficient exposure, in a short amount of time, to a program giving the broad outlines of the history of human thought, filtered through the judgements of people who have spent their lives evaluating the content they teach. It's that context that matters to me; the expectations of a university education.

I agree, and I think the idea of judgment is what I was trying to get at with the phrase "good patchwork." I think it's the professor's job to pick and choose among works that will resonate not only with their students but hopefully with each other, to give that context and that meaning to the curriculum.

It sounds to me like Delany (and ikkyu) are arguing that that context *must* be chronological, that one can't understand a work published in 2007 without reading all the related works published before that time, and I was arguing against that notion. Delany seems to be saying that certain works aren't "teachable" because students don't have the literary background to appreciate the ingenuity (or tradition) of their devices, and I think that's a cop-out. Yes, I think many works are more comprehensible within their historical framework, but I also think that good literature and art transcends its original time, its original readers, its creators' intentions, and its sources to speak to us, wherever we are. And a teacher who can't get to that with his students is, in my mind, not having problems with his curriculum but with his teaching skills.

Granted, I've never tried to teach literature to American undergrads; they may very well all be idiots.

And now that I'm rereading the Delany quote I'm not even sure what he's trying to get at. "Kids today are dumb"?

On the rest of what you say about the canon: I agree. I was arguing in the 90s, against the "Why do we have to read women, or black people?" argument. But you're right, it's more nuanced than that, and I totally agree with what you're saying.

Some of this, circling back around to Buffy: What's generally wonderful about most great art (and I'm willing to concede that Buffy is not the Sistine Chapel, but bear with me) is not that it's totally original, but that it finds meaning and structure and emotion in shared symbols, creating a unique whole made up of recognizable parts. I'm obviously not a huge SF or Fantasy fan, but what does interest me in those genres is not new ideas, but new interpretations. Fairy tales fascinate us not because they're innovative but because they're deeply rooted in what it means to human, in universal tropes and battles and victories. Which is the point I took away from Leguin's essay, that fantasy taps into those Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious while Harry Potter picks up the symbols but loses their deeper meanings.

I think Buffy (well, the first few seasons) does an amazing job with imbuing symbols with those deeper meanings while still remaining faithful to everyday life; the metaphors work on both levels. It doesn't have to be new for it to be great; it has to be real.

I was actually looking up info on Buffy today, and one of the writers said, "Joss [Whedon] is just such a master of storytelling. Every time I sit in there and am going, 'It could go this way, or it could go that way,' Joss will come in like a carpenter and put the two things together and you go, 'That's a well-made chair. I will now sit in it.'"

And I think that's what good art has. It's not about whether the design of the chair is new, or whether its materials are space-age or innovative, it's about whether the pieces of the story -- wherever you take the pieces from -- fit together in well-made ways. Ikkyu and I just finished watching season six of Buffy, and while the entire season was a complete mess of a disaster, in my mind, the season finale was an amazing example of how a good writer could pull together all the broken threads, all the abandoned and poorly used symbols, and weave them together in a way that actually tapped into something deeper. Whedon managed to extract some actual meaning from what his other writers had just stacked up without rhyme or reason.

A footnoted list of allusions is clever and cute, but I don't think it's what makes a work great. Being able to read the work without the list of footnotes, and still find true meaning in it, is what makes it great.

I can look (and have looked) at Tintoretto's Presentation of the Virgin and be moved, even if I don't know the story being depicted. It helps to know the story, but the work's power is not in its literal meaning.

Because the third post's a charm: None of the above was meant to imply that the season six finale of Buffy was great, because it wasn't; it sucked. But it did manage to create meaning out of randomness in rather startling ways, and I think that aspect of it is praise-worthy.

I think Joss is brilliant, occhiblu; one of the things I'm looking forward to when we're done with Buffy is finding out what he's capable of when he's not constrained to the demands of prime-time television. I also have get feeling that Joss started really delegating a lot of creative responsibilites around the end of season three, and that you can pretty easily pick out the episodes he did and didn't have a large hand in after that point.

I assume, ikkyu2, that you've read all these books because of your own interest, on your own time?

I'm pretty widely read, Miko. A lot of the canon I encountered in college for the second time; I'd gone to a high school for "gifted kids" where we read all the things you mentioned as part of the canon. (I checked Kant's Critiques out of the high school library and read them during my free periods, largely because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and that made my Moral Reasoning college core course much more interesting a few years later.)

The F+SF stuff started with my dad's bookshelf; he was a WWII-veteran mechanical engineer who went to college in the late 40's, wore square black eyeglasses, and had a crewcut for the entire 29 years that I knew him. His bookcase was all hard SF; once I started reading that, my mom started getting me fantasy novels, in a kind of "I don't read this stuff but the Kirkus Review said if you liked Asimov you'll love Tolkien" kind of way. There was also a lot of genre detective and spy novels around the house, a lot of postwar Jewish retrospection, and historical novels - John Le Carre, Michener, Clavell, Leon Uris, Studs Terkel, Isaac Bashevis Singer were all authors my parents exercised their completion fetish on.

As you might see from this my folks were a little older; if they'd had me 20 years earlier, which they could've done, I'd have been a baby boomer; but my family skipped that generation. As a result when I grew up and dated a literary editor for 3 years in New York (her little 1BR was literally wallpapered in books, floor to ceiling, 3 deep, covering every wall and the floor) and read what she had lying around, a lot of it from last years NYTRoB's list or whatever - the things that writers chose to write about in the 90's and 00's were so different from the things the people writing for my parents were concerned about. I could easily have written about *that* gulf but I'm less familiar with it; very little of what is being written today speaks to me.

I read 'The Corrections', for instance, which won what, every award possible, and it sickened me - not the sickening characters, though they were bad enough - but the sickening disgust that Franzen has for the contents of the book he's writing. Never mind the cultural problems he's grappling; I feel sorry for a world that elevates this kind of disgust to something awardworthy.

In fact, disgust at the contents of a book to me seems to be the least valid and least interesting way to engage a text, and I really have a problem when people like jokeefe or occhiblu choose to engage my Heinlein pulps that way, based for example on Heinlein's inability to craft a female character who'd hold up under the arclights of 2007 disgust-oriented criticism. Why bother? It's a waste of good emotion, a waste of good energy. Are people really so fragile that reading a cultural relic of 60 years ago must drive them into a blinding rage that completely destroys their sensitivity to historical realities, to nuanced critiques, to historical context?

I mean, obviously, yes, but it makes me sad. How do you people walk through a museum without having a fucking nervous breakdown?

So.... you're allowed to be sickened by books and their author's attitude, but we're not?

(I'm asking that in a less snarky tone of voice than you're imagining! I just don't get why you're claiming that you get to react to books any way you like, but different reactions are wrong?)

Also, my motivation is never "disgust-oriented criticism." I may read a book and not like it, and so when I criticize the book I'm expressing disgust, but I don't enjoy the books that disgust me. (And "disgust" is usually too strong a word for this sort of thing.)

A good introduction for the non-sci-fi minded to Samuel R. Delany is his Silent Interviews. Dhalgren is an absolutely terrifying masterpiece of postmodern fiction. I'm gonna have to look up this Joanna Russ person. It is hard to find interesting contemporary sci-fi.

I've not been exposed to the canon, despite having a humanities education. I kind of like it that way. Sure I might be missing out on allusions and differences and such, but instead I'm coming up with my own interpretations of what I consume. Sure, a lot of times my thoughts have already been thought by someone else, but to me, the fact that I came up with it on my own is a better result than having read it from somebody else. I figure the canon-philosophy is good for folks who aim to stay in academia or lead an intellectualy-focused life; that kind of depth is important in those roles, but for the most part, I read to kick back and relax.

ikkyu2, I'm currently reading Under the Moons of Mars, which has excerpts from serials that appeared in Munsey Magazines from 1912-1920. Edgar Rice Burroughs and his contemporaries. The guy who put it together, Sam Moskowitz, has some penetrating insights on the rise of sci-fi with a romantic interest and gives context in terms of the pulps competition with more female-centric mags of the time. There's a historical accounting of the stories provided in the last half of the book. Great stuff if you're a sci-fi geek. I can mail it to you when I'm done with it, if you're interested. I'd like it back though, it is a relatively rare book, and cost me a pretty penny.

Are people really so fragile that reading a cultural relic of 60 years ago must drive them into a blinding rage that completely destroys their sensitivity to historical realities, to nuanced critiques, to historical context?

Absolutely not, but there has to be some deeper redeeming value if we are to read them as anything other than historical texts. I can put up with the racism, imperialism, and sexism in books that preceded our time if they have a value of their own, of the type occhiblu discusses - resonant symbolism and vital meaning that can transcend the specific story.

I spent most of my English-major career on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American poetry and fiction, which is rife with ideas I would find repulsive coming from a contemporary individual. Some authors popular in their own time dealt with their topics so narrowly and shallowly that they have left little of value to people today. However, others most certainly have, and in those cases modern readersn and scholars are willing to accept the prejudices of a given time period or personality in order to be able to receive the insights and striking observations of a work.

I think the issue in the circumstance you describe is that the redeeming value of the books you like is not as evident to other readers as it is to you, though the more odious elements are. And there are some cases in which the odious elements are so great and so obvious that the reader is shut off from the story, as you were to The Corrections, and there's no hope that any value lying deep within will be discovered as the reader rebels against the author.

An example: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who was hugely popular in his own time (editor of the Atlantic, leading literary light, knew all the write people). He wrote things like "Unguarded Gates," this vitriolic screed against immigrants. He is remembered today not for any of his poetry or lengthy memoirs, but for the fact that he wrote the first 'boy's novel,' Story of a Bad Boy, which was the first non-moralistic tale in the English language about childhood. Though it's not an especially good book, it's generally agreed that it was the inspiration for the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by his then-less-famous friend Mark Twain. Mark Twain's writing is often problematically offensive to modern eyes and ears, yet which author do we remember? The one whose humor, sympathy to humanity, skill with language, aspiration to greater meaning, and fundamental decency gives his work enough value to be read in spite of its difficulties. Meanwhile, Aldrich is a footnote.