Expandable Canon?

Annette Kolodny writes in her essay that “literary history…is a fiction” or rather a social construction that must be challenged. She writes this because she believes feminist criticism must discover how aesthetic value of literature is assigned in the first place and then evaluate the imputed norms and normative reading patterns that, in part, led to those pronouncements. All that is to say is that specific assumptions about "major" and "minor" works should be contested. Who has the authority to say that one work is better than another, or that one work shall be part of an American Literature before 1900 class, while another is not so imperative to be taught to eager, young minds?

I had really not encountered this idea before I took this class this semester. Of course, in one way or another, I had been taught to speak my mind in regards to my education, MY education. In a society where individualism has come to mean a type of personal isolationism, I have been taught to question things for MY own sake, MY fulfillment and well-being. So this type of thinking manifested itself through petty things like the clothes I wore to school or the "rebellious" poetry I would write for a particular assignment, yet I never questioned those assignments. Like a true potential Messiah student, I readily accepted my school's curriculum without question, got my good grades, was accepted into Messiah on my good grades, and then started the process all over again, now in college.

But maybe I should question what I am being taught. Why study Thoreau and Beowulf and Chaucer and Plato and Donne? Because everyone else has and does? Because they are in the national, if not universal, canon that has already been established? I could say, Cmon! Let's study more obscure artists and poets and authors just for the hell of it, just because maybe they matter too. Why not some more 19th century female writers or maybe some more African American writers and even Native American writers. We want to get back to our roots, dont we? We want to pat ourselves on the back at night and say, we care about ALL artists who have produced art! But do we need to do it when the established canon is the one that is marketable for young college graduates with BAs in English? The working world knows this established canon and functions on it (I guess in the worlds of publishing, editing, writing and the like) so what are they going to say when my education has been filled with obscure Asian literature? Im somewhat at a loss on this issue, but I want the canon to be expanded and I feel deeply for the marginalized, but if we advocate for them, what will come of it? Maybe you and I can appreciate the need for a revised canon, but can every English department in the US?

Kolodny writes that we bring our biases and preconceptions and assumptions to the interpretation of a text, but she wishes that we combat this. A significant criticism to this thinking is that she doesn’t account for the difficulty it would take for readers to recognize their biases and assumptions when reading. That difficulty also lies in getting authors and critics and English professors to expand the canon taught to students. Will change truly come? As a stubborn pessimist, I tend to think, no.