Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn't read are also battles over what we should read. Every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they're also trying to corral our kids back to Hawthorne and Hemingway, Dante and Dickens.
So perhaps it isn't surprising that in the midst of a flood of book bans we're also seeing a fresh effort to rally defense of the classics. An article in the National Review claims that the great books are in need of a "massive salvage operation." A recent piece in the Federalist calls for a renewed effort to "reclaim our Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian heritage ... ." And, as if responding to a Florida politician fretting last year that the gadfly of Athens would be canceled, a professor at Columbia University has given us "Rescuing Socrates."
You'd be forgiven if you thought the Western canon was on its last legs. Let me assure you that it isn't.
I'm a humanities professor. I teach big survey courses that used to be (and still sometimes are) filled exclusively with the dead, white, godly men of Europe. And even as I try to diversify, to make room for other voices, I remain stunned at the extent to which these authors still structure the national conversation.
The best evidence comes from prestigious publications that to this day give an astounding amount of space — or pixels, I suppose — to Western authors we've been writing about for centuries. The most recent issue of Harper's asks that we rethink Casanova. (Another article in the same magazine in the spring urges us to see W.H. Auden "in a new light.") Two weeks ago, the New York Times breathlessly reported breaking news from the field of Chaucer studies. And the October issue of the New Yorker claims that the 400-year-old John Donne is "more contemporary than ever."
And we don't just see the media's preference for the canon in the content they cover. We see it in the way that canon structures their coverage.
This hit me most forcefully when I read an otherwise provocative article on literature produced by artificial intelligence. It ends with a series of pieces written by the AI at the request of the author in the style of a variety of well-known writers. Almost every one of them comes straight from an introductory English class taught in 1970: Homer, Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, George Orwell.
We can detect this trend also in what culture writers assume their audiences know. A thoughtful feature article in the New York Times Magazine this month on the contemporary poet Sharon Olds starts by comparing her to T.S. Eliot, Dickinson (again) and Wallace Stevens. That's it. Predominantly European, predominantly male and all white. And the implication is blazingly clear: These are the poets you need to know if you want to know poetry.
