CANON REVISION:
HISTORY, THEORY, PRACTICE
(SYLLABUS, 1996)

Alan Liu
UC Santa Barbara
English 265

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OVERVIEW
REQUIRED TEXTS
CLASS & OFFICE HOURS
SCHEDULE
* T Oct. 1
* Th Oct. 3
* T Oct. 8
* Th Oct. 10
* T Oct. 15
* Th Oct. 17
* T Oct. 22
* Th Oct. 24
* T Oct. 29
* Th Oct. 31
* T Nov. 5
* Th Nov. 7
CANON REVISION PRACTICUM (Nov. 12, 14, 19, 21, 26; Dec. 3, 5)
* Requirements
* Schedule
* "Team-Concept"
* Grading Policy
WEB AUTHORING HELP
(1996-97 COURSE HOME PAGE)

----------------------------- OVERVIEW ------------------------------
This graduate-level seminar examines the current canon debate in a way that gives students a grasp of the history and theory of canon formation as well as hands-on practice in canon revision (tailored to the particular field-specialties of students). The course proceeds simultaneously along two intellectual threads:

CANON FORMATION--
Readings in:

* Primary literature and criticism in the self-consciously canonical lineage that was formative of the English literary canon as we now know it (authors include Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, W. Wordsworth, Coleridge, P. Shelley, Keats, Arnold, Hulme, Eliot)

* Primary non-canonical literature that was conscious of the canon that excluded it and therefore equally formative of the literary canon as we now know it (authors include Lady Mary Wroth, William Collins, Robert Burns, John Clare, Felicia Hemans, Ann Radcliffe, Dorothy Wordsworth)

* Current academic criticism and theory of the canon as well as selections from the journalism of the "culture wars."

The questions this part of the course addresses: "how do authors know who are the Great Authors (as well as the "minor" and "marginal" authors)? how do they build that knowledge into their works?"

CANON INSTITUTION--
Readings on the following topics or "problems" designed to suggest that the evolution of the canon cannot be understood separately from that of the major institutions of the modern nation-state (political, economic, social, and educational):

* "The classics problem"
* "The national literacy problem"
* "The genre problem"
* "The generation/period problem"
* "The schooling problem"
* "The minority/marginal cultures problem"
* "The anthology/publishing problem"

The question addressed by this part of the course: "why does society need a canon?" And an updated version of this question that will become increasingly important as the "team"-projects in the course proceed (see below): "why does the team-based, flat, downsized, knowledge worker, continuous quality improvement, and just-in-time inventory society of postindustrialism need revisionary post-canons?"

The course concludes with a practicum in canon revision whose production-format and medium reflect on the last question above. Students break into teams (e.g., a Renaissance team, an 18th-C. team, a Romantics team, an Americanist team) and over the course of several weeks create the apparatus for an innovative literary anthology or course in their field. The apparatus will be put online on the World Wide Web.

------------------------- REQUIRED TEXTS --------------------------
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vols 1-2

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style

English 236 Class Reader (available at Kinko's)

In addition to the above texts, a special collection of literary anthologies, readers, and histories from my personal library will be made available in the English Dept. office. These may be consulted for Class 13 in the syllabus as well as for the purposes of the team-projects described below.

Required readings are from the Norton Anthology (unless otherwise indicated), the course reader (marked "reader" below), or the World Wide Web (where linked and marked as ""). Other WWW links are to non-required online equivalents of print texts--which by comparison sometimes have less consistent or up-to-date textual/editorial integrity (caveat emptor). Links embedded in author names are to non-required online resources related to that author.

[Online]=Required online text.
[Info]=More information on a given topic.

------------------------------- HOURS --------------------------------
Fall Quarter 1996, T, Th 12:30-1:45
South Hall 2617, Office Hours: Tue 2-3

----------------------------- SCHEDULE ------------------------------

I. CANON HISTORY, THEORY

(Th Sept. 26) CLASS 1: INTRODUCTION

(Tue Oct. 1) CLASS 2: "ORIGINS" OF THE ENGLISH CANON

Shakespeare

1 Henry IV, Act I, Scene 1, Scene 2; also read headnote in Norton

Milton

"On Shakespeare";
Paradise Lost, Book I: 1-124, 242-63 and Book IX: 1-47

Lady Mary Wroth

Title-page to The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (reader)

Matthew Arnold

"Wordsworth" (excerpted in Norton)

T. S. Eliot

"Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Harold Bloom

The Western Canon, pp. 15-39, 483-93 (reader)

Trevor Ross

"The Emergence of 'Literature': Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century" (full text of this article from ELH is accessible only to UCSB or other subscribers to Project Muse)

(Th Oct. 3) CLASS 3: THE CLASSICS PROBLEM

John Dryden

"Preface to Ovid's Epistles" (reader)

Alexander Pope

Windsor-Forest, ll. 1-42 (reader)

Samuel Johnson

"The Vanity of Human Wishes"

Ernst Robert Curtius

"Classicism," in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (reader)

E. H. Gombrich

"Norm and Form" (reader)

(Tue Oct. 8) CLASS 4: (INTERLUDE)

This class will be devoted to planning and other practical matters relating to the team-projects in the second half of the course (see description below).

(Th Oct. 10) CLASS 5: THE NATIONAL LITERACY PROBLEM

Samuel Johnson

"Preface to Dictionary of the English Language" (excerpted in Norton)

Thomas Gray

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

William Collins

"Ode to Evening"

Robert Burns

"To a Mouse"

John Clare

"Mouse's Nest"

William Wordsworth

"Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (excerpted in Norton, 2:141-47)

T. S. Eliot

"Little Gidding," ll. 78-149, 214-59

E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, pp. 70-93

John Guillory

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, pp. 71-82, 85-133

(Tue Oct. 15) CLASS 6: THE NATIONAL LITERACY PROBLEM (CONTINUED)

Robert J. Connors, et al.

"The Revival of Rhetoric in America" (reader)

(Th Oct. 17) CLASS 7: THE GENRE PROBLEM

Charles Wesley

Selected Hymns (reader)

Felicia Hemans

"Indian Woman's Death Song" (reader)

Fanny Burney

from Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (reader)

Ann Radcliffe

The Mysteries of Udolpho, chap. 49 (reader)

Dorothy Wordsworth

Grasmere Journals (as excerpted in Norton); selected poems (reader)

William Wordsworth

"Tintern Abbey"

Mikhail Bakhtin

The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 3-13, 259-300 (reader)

John Beverley

Against Literature, pp. 69-86 (reader)

Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar

"Women's New Profession of Letters" and "Male and Female Traditions," in Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (reader)

(Tue Oct. 22) CLASS 8: THE GENERATION / PERIOD PROBLEM

William Collins

"Ode on the Poetical Character"

William Wordsworth

"Prospectus to The Recluse" (ll. 754 ff. of Home at Grasmere)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"To William Wordsworth"

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"To Wordsworth"

John Keats

Selected letters (Norton II:832, 834-37)

William Hazlitt

"Mr. Wordsworth," from his The Spirit of the Age (excerpted in Norton)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"On Wordsworth's Cottage, Near Grasmere Lake" (reader)

T. E. Hulme

"Romanticism and Classicism" (reader)

Harold Bloom

from Anxiety of Influence (reader)

Graham Murdock & Robin McCron

"Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation" (reader) (this selection also bears on the "minority / marginal cultures" problem below)

Generation-X Web Pages (Sample the resources and general "attitude" available through the following gateway sites:)

Curtis Nehring Bliss (SUNY Cobleskill), Slacker Stories (course "designed to study the literature, art, politics, and philosophy of today's twentysomething generation. Often referred to as slackers, Xers, whiners, or twentynothings") | Slacker Updates

Olivia Lopez, Myth or Reality: Distinguishing Elements of the Slacker Generation

Articles on Generation-X ("Cosma")

(Th Oct. 24) CLASS 9: (INTERLUDE)

This class will be devoted to planning and other practical matters relating to the team-projects in the second half of the course (see description below).

(Tue Oct. 29) CLASS 10: THE SCHOOLING PROBLEM

John Henry Cardinal Newman

The Idea of a University (excerpted in Norton)

Thomas Henry Huxley

Science and Culture (excerpted in Norton)

Matthew Arnold

"Literature and Science"

John Guillory

Cultural Capital, pp. 3-71

E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

 Cultural Literacy, pp. 1-32

Henry A. Giroux

"Slacking Off: Border Youth and Postmodern Education" (1994)

(Th Oct. 31) CLASS 11: THE "MINORITY" / "MARGINAL" CULTURES PROBLEM

Note: The readings assigned here represent just a small fraction of the current "culture wars." See also the selections from Bloom, Hirsch, Guillory, Beverley, and others earlier in the syllabus. You may also want to browse the Internet on the topic of the culture wars.

Paul Lauter

"The Literatures of America--A Comparative Discipline," from his Canons and Contexts (reader)

Patricia Klindienst

"The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours" and "Epilogue"

Dinesh D'Souza

from Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (reader)

(Tue Nov. 5) CLASS 12: THE "MINORITY" / "MARGINAL" CULTURES PROBLEM (CONTINUED)

Readings in British Subculture Studies:

Dick Hebdige

Subculture: The Meaning of Style, pp. 23-70

Angela McRobbie & Jenny Garber

"Girls and Subcultures" (reader)

Rachel Powell & John Clarke

"A Note on Marginality" (reader)

(Th Nov. 7) CLASS 13: THE ANTHOLOGY PROBLEM

This class will be devoted to discussing the Norton Anthology together with a representative selection of "revisionary" literary anthologies, readers, and histories published since 1985. As preparation for this class, please browse the materials in the Special Collection from my personal library (see under "Required Texts" above). Also, browse the following archival-scale projects on the Internet to think about what difference online media might make to the anthology problem:

Voice of the Shuttle: Literature (English)
Alex
British Poetry Archive, 1780-1900
A Celebration of Women Writers
Online Book Initiative (OBI)
Project Gutenberg
U. Michigan Humanities Text Initiative
Women Writer's Project
The Romantic Chronology

II. CANON REVISION: A PRACTICUM
Nov. 12, 14, 19, 21, 26
Dec. 3, 5

------------------------ PROJECT DESCRIPTION -------------------------
At the beginning of the quarter, students will break into teams (e.g., a Renaissance team, an 18th-C. team, a Romantics team, an Americanist team, a generalist team, a gender team) and during the first half of the course (concurrent with the above reading assignments) gather materials and make plans for a team project. The project, to which the last few weeks of class discussion are wholly devoted, will be to create the apparatus for an innovative literary anthology or course (you choose which). The apparatus will be put online on the World Wide Web and linked to a home page for our course titled "Canon Dreaming."

In addition, these canon dreams will be linked on the home page for a special session of the Modern Language Association convention this year that I am co-organizing with Laura Mandell, Dept. of English, Miami U., Ohio. The session is titled "The Canon and the Web: Reconfiguring Romanticism in the Information Age" (though the student section will expand beyond Romanticism to include "canon dreams" from other fields). The physical session will be held during the convention in Washington, D. C., on Sunday, Dec. 29, 1996 (1:45-3:00 pm in Atrium 2, Sheraton Washington Hotel). The session's home page, however, is already up and will remain online after the convention.

----------------------- PROJECT REQUIREMENTS ------------------------
In the case of an anthology, the team will produce (a) a main Web page with a table of contents plus a set of supporting pages--specifically:

• (b) a sample of what a fully-developed unit would look like (e.g., headnote, bibliography, edited text, etc.)
• (c) an annotated bibliography or commentary on older and recent print anthologies and literary histories in the field
• (d) a theory archive or commentary (e.g., short excerpts from theorists, critics, or past authors that help determine the idea of the present anthology)
• (e) a General Introduction to the anthology

In the case of a course, the team will produce (a) a main Web page with a fully-elaborated syllabus complete with schedule of assigned readings and links to online resources, plus a set of supporting pages--specifically:

• (b) notes for a sample class
• (c) a selected, annotated bibliography of related courses on the Internet or elsewhere
• (d) a theory archive (e.g., short excerpts from theorists, critics, or other sources that help determine the idea of the present course)
• (e) a "philosophy of this course" essay

------------------------ PROJECT SCHEDULE -------------------------
By the beginning of the practicum on Nov. 12, teams should have accomplished preliminary research, planning, and materials-gathering. From this date on, teams will participate in class discussions and in-progress presentations of their projects--probably on a rotating basis (i.e., one project one class, another the next, and so on).

------------------------- "TEAM-CONCEPT" --------------------------
One of the recurrent motifs of this course will be the historical relation between the canonical organization of literature and the organization of the great political, economic, social, educational, and other institutions of the nation-state era. This means that it is also appropriate to update the story by testing the relation between the current "post "-canonical movement in literary studies and the great institutions of the postindustrial, multinational era. The so-called "team concept" organizing work on the course project will serve the secondary purpose of allowing us to think about the most powerful of these latter institutions: the "team-concept," "flat," "downsized," "reengineered," "knowledge worker" corporation. How does canon revision square with such cardinal postindustrial principles as "lifelong learning," "continuous quality improvement," "just-in-time inventory," "outsourcing," and "diversity management"?

Distribution of responsibilities: Teams in this course are free to distribute research, writing, and presentation responsibilities among themselves as they see fit. For example, only one member of a team need be involved in actually putting the material online. Outsourcing work to another team in the course (but not outside the course) is allowed so long as it is "paid for" in course-related services (i.e., you can buy another team's research or online expertise in exchange for your own work on their project; but you cannot buy expertise with actual cash or with work for projects outside the course).

------------------------- GRADING POLICY --------------------------
The base grade for each student will be that assigned to his or her team as a whole, but this base will be raised for the individual (where there is still upward room in the grade scale) depending on the quality and quantity of class participation. Note: Knowing our graduate students, I doubt there will be any problems with this collaborative assignment scheme. But students who either end up feeling uncomfortable in the arrangement or desire to write something individually will have the option of turning in an independent version of item (e) in the team assignment.

---------------- HELP WITH WEB AUTHORING -----------------
E-mail accounts and web space on the Humanitas server are available to all graduate students at UCSB. To request an account, home directory, and web directory, contact Mark Whittemore at the Humanities and Social Sciences Computing Facility in the new Humanities Building (Rm 1203). Help with basic Unix commands, directory and file management, and other matters may be found in my Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (available at the UCSB Bookstore).

The following are good online resources for learning HTML:

* Beginner's Guide to HTML
* Bare Bones Guide to HTML
* Crash Course on Writing Documents for the Web
* Introduction to HTML
* Introduction to HTML Course
* Macmillan's HTML Workshop
* Web Mastery

Some popular HTML authoring programs:

* Frontpage (Microsoft) (Windows)
* HotDog (Sausage) (Windows) (downloadable shareware)
* HoTMetaL 3.0 (SoftQuad) (Windows and Mac) (2.0 version downloadable for free)
* HTML Assistant (Brooklyn North) (Windows)
* HTMLed (Internet Software Technologies) (Windows) (downloadable shareware)
* Pagemill (Adobe) (Mac) (downloadable beta test version)

Popular graphical Web browsers:

* Netscape Navigator (Windows, Mac, and most other platforms) (downloadable for free educational use)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer (Windows) (downloadable for free)

(1996-97 COURSE HOME PAGE)