Briefly on The Canon (and its straw discontents)

You'd think that issues of Canon-formation and feminism would be of great interest to those concerned with the future of literature.

Here's to the possibility of that conversation.

 

Spivak, in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value:"

"Yet...it is a truism that a full undoing of the canon-apocrypha opposition, like the undoing of any opposition, is impossible...When we feminist Marxists are ourselves moved by a desire for alternative canon-formations, we work with varieties with and variations upon the old standards."

Derrida:

Speaking of or going back to my own, let's say, tendency of taste or idiosyncratic 'style', I love reading Greek. It is difficult, this thing, a very difficult task, and when I read Plato I enjoy it, and I feel, if anything, it's difficult; I think it's an infinite task. The project is not behind me, Plato is in front of me. That's why today among so many stereotypes and prejudices that circulate about deconstruction I feel it's painful to see that many people about the question of the canon think they have to make a choice between reading Plato or the 'great white males' and so on and so forth and reading Black Woman writers. Why should we choose? Even before the question of the canon became so visible, even before then, no one in the university could be simultaneously a great specialist in Plato and in Aristotle and in Shakespeare; the choices have to be made and that is the distinction of our conditions. Nobody can at the same time be an expert in Plato and in Milton, for instance, and we accepted this, it was commonsensical. Why, today, should we choose between 'the great canon', i.e., Plato, Shakespeare or several texts of Shakespeare and Hegel, and others on the other hand?

The academic field is a differential field. Everyone can find his or her way and make choices and a program as such of course can become, let's say, specialized, but this doesn't mean that there cannot be other programs with no exclusivity which would specialize in other fields, and that is why I don't understand what's going on with 'the question of the canon'. At least as regards deconstruction, deconstruction at the same time is interested in what is considered 'the great canon' - the study of great works, western works - and open to new work, new objects, new fields, new cultures, new languages, and I see no reason why we should choose between the two. That is the tension in deconstruction.