L. Morrissey, Debating the Canon

MORRISSEY, Lee (ed.), Debating the Canon, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 320 p.

ISBN: 1-4039-6820-9

Debating the Canon is a one-stop collection of the most important conversations regarding the development and future of the literary canon, with essays by T.S. Eliot, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Leo Strauss, Elaine Showalter, Harold Bloom, Elizabeth Meese, and Henry Louis Gates to name but a few. Over the past two decades, the debate over the Great Books has been the central public controversy concerning the cultural content of higher education. Debating the Canon provides the first primary-source overview of these ongoing arguments. Many of these contributions to this debate have achieved "canonical" status themselves. Through their focus on the canon, the full spectrum of approaches to literary studies is represnted here. This collection places the recent debate within a larger context of literary criticism's development of a canon, going back to the eighteenth century. Morrissey's introductions provide context for the conversations, and together comprise a history of the debate over the Great Books.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: "The Canon Brawl"--Lee Morrissey * "Pleasures of the Imagination"--Joseph Addison * "Of the Standard of Taste"--David Hume * "Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare"--Samuel Johnson * "We Never Quarrel About Religion"--Red Jacket, Iroquois * "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"--Matthew Arnold * "Hebraism and Hellenism"--Matthew Arnold * "Tradition and the Individual Talent"--T.S. Eliot * "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture"--F. R. Leavis * "Reading and the growth of the Mind"--Mortimer Adler * "Odysseus' Scar"--Erich Auerbach * "Persecution and the Art of Writing"--Leo Strauss * "National Culture"--Frantz Fanon * "Commitment"--Theodor Adorno * "Colonialist Criticism"--Chinua Achebe * "The Female Tradition"--Elaine Showalter * "A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts"--Annette Kolodny * "The Field of Cultural Production"--Pierre Bourdieu * "To Reclaim a Legacy: Text of Report on Humanities in Education"--William Bennett * "Sexual Politics and Critical Judgment"--Elizabeth Meese * "'But is it Any Good?': The Institutionalization of Literary Value,"--Jane Tomkins * "Volume I: Introduction"--Martin Bernal * "The Student and the University"--Allan Bloom * "Rise of the Fragmented Curriculum"--E.D. Hirsch * "Contingencies of Value"--Barbara Hernstein Smith * "From History and Value"--Frank Kermode * "Native American Literature and the Canon"--Arnold Krupat * "Canons and Differences"--Charles Altieri * "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors"--Nina Baym * "From Death of Literature"--Alvin Kernan * "Speaking Against the Humanities"--Roger Kimball * "The Shaping of the American Literary Canon"--Paul Lauter * "Canon to the Right of Me"--Katha Pollitt * "Master's Pieces"--Henry Louis Gates * "Turning Conflict into Community"--Gerald Graff * "Canonical and Noncanonical: The Current Debate"--John Guillory * "Connecting Empire to Secular Interpretation"--Edward Said * "Rites of Interpretation"--Vassilis Lambropoulos * "Higher Education and American Liberalism"--Michael Bérubé, from * "An Elegy for the Canon"--Harold Bloom * "To Whom To Give To"--Jacques Derrida, from * "From The Great Books"--David Denby * "Ancient Myths of Cultural Dependancy"--Mary Lefkowitz * "The 'New' Liberal Education"--Martha C. Nussbaum * "From Symptoms of Culture"--Marjorie Garber * "On the Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature"--Richard Rorty * "A Flock of Cultures: A Trivial Proposal"--Robert Scholes * "Gatsby"--Azar Nafisi

About the author:

Lee Morrissey is Professor of English at Clemson University.