I remember my tutor asking us if we thought our literature options were broad enough at the end of an Italian tutorial last term. This question really stuck with me: not because I have a clear answer (I still don’t – could a reading list ever actually be broad enough?), but because, surely, whether I thought so or not, Oxford would continue to teach the same novels that it has been teaching for hundreds of years.
As a Modern Languages student at Oxford – a primarily literature-focused course – I am no stranger to reading lists built around canonical authors. In theory, we are given freedom within a reading list; we choose, to some extent, the works that we want to study (though of course these include Dante and Petrarch). It would be, as I answered my tutor’s question, easy to describe our literature options as broad. After all, I have managed to study female authors without having to choose a specific ‘women writers’ topic. And yet these choices are already framed by the same set of already-established works. The range of choices may appear to be wide, but its boundaries are clear.
In reality, while they seem to be fairly inclusive, our reading lists are composed entirely of works that form part of the literary canon – works deemed ‘essential’ and of the highest quality, historically chosen by a narrow and influential elite. These are the books that our tutors studied, as did the scholars teaching them, with their authority only accumulating over time. This status seems to justify their quality: they are good because they are famous, and famous because they are good. With this assumption, though, comes the question of whether we have inherited the habit of valuing these canonical works, rather than that of analysing and questioning them ourselves.
There is a certain pressure to enjoy the classics at Oxford, especially given our university’s emphasis on tradition, and yet I have found myself writing essays on novels that I didn’t actually like. Enjoying the texts feels like a marker of intellect, seriousness, and taste, while failure to do so is accompanied by a sense of guilt and a suspicion that I’m just not clever enough to “get it”.
I wonder whether our admiration of these books and the appeal of the canon itself is genuine or just learned. Appreciation of the canon can become performative, something that is expressed rather than felt. I myself have avoided expressing opinions on novels I’ve studied here (in all honesty, I am not a fan of Sand’s Indiana, nor of Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare): there is a certain awkwardness that arises in a tutorial when someone says that they didn’t like a set text, one which I would much rather avoid.
Oxford’s relationship with tradition only exacerbates the idea that the canon has endured because of its status: studying here comes with a continual awareness that we are not only reading a selection of texts, but the same novels that have been studied here for decades. There’s a sense of continuity, a link to the past – we are partaking in an intellectual conversation that began years ago. The canon, through our reading lists, is continually pushed onto us, and it can be difficult to form our own opinions on these novels away from the appreciation that is expected from us. When we read a classic, we are aware of its status even before we begin to develop our own opinions; they come with an implicit weight and an expectation of depth, of importance. Our response is shaped before we start to read, which we then do according to this expectation.
So does the canon only endure because we’ve learned not to question it, or is it actually because of the merit of the texts themselves? The canon isn’t simply imposed and followed – its works are (or at least most of the time) there for a reason, and I won’t pretend that I don’t love studying the majority of the works that comprise my degree. The same novels have often remained so influential and so widely read not only because of tradition, but because they continue to offer something to their readers. As a Languages student, reading texts in the original and finally understanding one of Petrarch’s sonnets or a canto of the Divina Commedia provides an intellectual satisfaction that is hard to replicate elsewhere. Though it can sometimes be difficult to separate authority from quality, in most cases, canonical and classic works are genuinely well-written. We have standards for everything else, so why wouldn’t we for books? And I think that’s why the canon is so hard to reject: it’s not just elitism and snobbiness, but its works have genuine appeal.
It’s easy to think that the canon endures only because of tradition, and because we are taught that it should, but perhaps it continues to hold so much weight because it continues to persuade us. Even as we are encouraged to question it – as I myself was in my recent tutorial – we find ourselves not only guided to but drawn to it. Maybe it has continued for so long just on status alone, but to say this takes away from the genuine appeal that a lot of its works have.
Since I have been considering this tension, I’ve become less interested in whether the canon deserves its status and more in how I respond to its texts. We can approach the canon with both scepticism and appreciation, and doubt about the canon’s prestige can coexist with a genuine enjoyment of its books.
