ALRIGHT BUCKLE UP, CHUCKLEFUCKS! Nah I'm kidding, but seriously here's my not very passionate defense of the use of canonical/classic/dead white guy/whatever literature in the classroom (I dunno how long this thread will be. It ends when it ends!):

Okay so first of all, I'm responding to a thread of thought that seems to advocate against requiring students to read ANY of these sorts of works (and example texts are usually like, Moby-Dick, The Sound and The Fury, etc.).

And the idea, based on a few people I've read on here, is that English/lit classes are there to foster a love of reading/writing in students, and that since students largely DON'T love these texts, they don't fit the goal. I uh, disagree that this is THE goal. More on that later.

So first up, situating myself: I'm a white, US, first gen grad student of 18th-century British literature. I'm a bi trans woman and my research is mainly related to that. I have taught college lit and comp classes for years but have never taught high school.

Okay so the first charge against canon lit in the classroom is that it is fundamentally white supremacist. Yes, this is true. "The Canon" is a colonialist, white supremacist project and it still functions this way today. We can't teach this lit without openly acknowledging it.

Every single first day of my lit classes is dedicated to making sure students understand that THIS is primarily how the canon was initially conceived, organized, and perpetuated. I think this has to be made clear to students, always. So then why teach it?

So this brings us back to the *goal* of the English classroom. And I'll say that if my students walk away with more appreciation for reading and writing then of course I'm extremely pleased. Many claim to do just this. But it's not my only goal in the classroom.

I teach things like narrative structure, metaphor, point of view, so on and so on not JUST so they can appreciate them as techniques, but so they can understand HOW these techniques are at work, all of the time, not just in literature.

We narrativize our own lives all of the time, and learning how narratives are put together, what purpose they serve, how they can reframe events and change minds genuinely (imo) helps students process the information they're inundated with every single day.

And this is true of tons of other literary terms! For instance, Susan Sontag argued that the way we metaphorize physical illness has REAL consequences for people with illnesses.

So why canon lit then? Well, just as literary technique more broadly saturates our daily lives, so does the canon and the (again, colonial) project that brought it about. A very obvious example would be how many popular pieces of media are Shakespeare adaptations.

But more subtly, the ideas and materials of the canon seeps into our lives all of the time, even if we don't recognize that! I tweeted this thread yesterday about how a very white, medicalized notion of transness is basically a Gothic narrative. https://twitter.com/JuliaFtacek/status/1333467468459806721

And we could actually trace that idea! From 20th century sexologists and psychoanalysts who literally took ideas from canonical lit, applied it to people's lives, and left it submerged in our culture for decades! Whether you KNOW Gothic texts or not doesn't change that.

So when we examine canonical lit, we also come to see many of the building blocks that make up our culture—many of which are dusty and racist and altogether disgusting, yes. And when we SEE that structure, then we can begin to understand how to start existing outside of it.

And I don't mean this in a "master's tools" kinda way. We can't decolonize white supremacist lit. But we CAN come to understand that the common metaphors, narratives, and tropes that undergird so much of our culture are made from these building blocks.

We don't have to use the master's tools, but wouldn't it be a lot easier to tear down the house if had a better idea of how it was built in the first place?

So that's not to say that our classrooms SHOULDN'T have more contemporary, diverse, non-canonical lit included. My students often laugh when I inform them that I think Twilight is a text that can be read and interpreted just as meaningfully as Hamlet.

But to teach no canonical lit at all doesn't serve our students as fully as we might otherwise. Teach them to break it down, them to the to critique it, to understand its history, to see its long shadow and to step out from that shadow.

(ugh that typo) I'm not here just to make my students enthusiasts of things. They do a really good job of that on their own. I'm here to teach them new ways to think and look at things. I'm here to give them the tools that'll tear down the way I gave them the tools!

So yeah, I dunno, Hemingway is boring and "White Elephants" is not my favorite day in class. But he does get us thinking about a certain type of masculinity, about cultural taboo, about the history of a style, about a particular turn of phrase.

I uh, didn't plan an ending to this thread. Y'all can teach The Hunger Games if you want. That's cool and has value. But teaching Utopia also has a value, of a different kind maybe, but still value. I think that's worth keeping in mind.

Um. The End.

Uh also an addendum, this is absolutely not me saying that a syllabus should be entirely or even mostly composed of dead white guys. Diverse syllabi are great! Just that the dead white guys do have *some* value in a syllabus

Anyway it's very funny that I'm now in the position of being like "uwu no not my Shakespeare" when my evals usually include complaints that my classes are "too feminist" or whatever.

It has come to my attention that this thread possibly reads as a response/subtweet to someone I was not addressing, whose own tweets I hadn't even seen. If this thread gets deleted this is why, because I don't want to contribute to any shit that person is getting