Literature’s Legacy

March 7, 2014 by hannagilley 3 Comments

Literary criticism is “the art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of literary works” (according to Google.com), but who is in charge of literary criticism? Who gets to say what we read and what we shouldn’t read? Our parents, family and friends? Our teachers? Worldly scholars of past and present? Personally, I think it’s a mixture of all of the above plus celebrities and social media (i.e Oprah’s Book Club). Okay, now that we know who is telling us what to read, we need to ask ourselves why we are reading what we are reading. How has value been assigned to literature? This is where the literary canon comes into play. 

The “they” that have assigned any type of value to texts and literature were either willingly or unwillingly adding these titles to the literary canon. Shakespeare, for instance, is undoubtedly part of this grouping of literature that everyone must read in their (educational) lives. Allan Bloom, author of “The Closing of the American Mind” agrees but insists that Shakespeare has remained a constant in the canon because “as he [Shakespeare] has been read for most of this century, does not constitute a threat to egalitarian right thinking”(pg 65). Bloom is claiming that certain literature holds value over others because it is not threatening to the way of life of that culture. With this sentiment, texts cannot be universal because every society has a completely different set of morals and values regarding people’s lives and art and nothing would be agreed upon as “something everyone should read.” Also, does everyone read? Can everyone read? 

Why do we read the things we do? Bloom says of cultures long passed that they valued literature because it “belonged to them, that told their story, and embodied so to speak, their instinct” (pg. 54), suggesting that Greek cultures for instance valued their literature more than any other because it described them and their livelihoods and their legacy. They could relate to their literature just like we can relate to ours. 

Why does every English major need to read Shakespeare? As Bloom said, Shakespeare wasn’t threatening in his work and that alone is what helped it to endure and survive. But is it still surviving? Bloom suggests that although it’s required reading (because of the canon and collegiate syllabi) teachers aren’t teaching the Bard’s great works anymore: “The old teachers who loved Shakespeare or Austen or Donne, and whose only reward for teaching was the perpetuation of their taste, have all but disappeared(pg. 65).” This cannot be helping the English majors of the world. If there aren’t any professors out their teaching Shakespeare, it means that somewhere along the line, students stopped caring about it. So how do we get students to care about Shakespeare and other great literature again? How do we keep literature alive, our legacy, our instinct?