Transforming a Literary Canon

Author(s): Paul Lauter

Source: Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 26, No. 1
(2016), pp. 31-33
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/trajincschped.26.1.0031
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Transforming a Literary Canon

Pau l L au te r

Abstr ac t The Heath Anthology of American Literature, like Transformations, celebrates

Key words

its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2016. The Heath has helped win the cultural wars in the college
classroom, greatly increasing the number of women writers and writers of color whose works
are now routinely taught. It has helped transform what is taught in American Literature classrooms, in relation to race, gender, and sexuality, but has been less successful in relation to class.

American literature,
canon, Heath
Anthology of
American Literature,
noncanonical, culture
wars

Its now twenty-five years since the Heath Anthology of American Literature was
first published (1990, with a 1989 copyright notice). It was part of the same upheaval in literary and cultural studies that brought us Transformations. And that
upheaval was, in turn, part of a broader movement for racial and gender equality
that had been taking place in the streetsthink sit-ins, freedom rides, Stonewall,
protests at the Miss America pageant, Off Our Backs, and I Have a Dream.
The Heath was both a product of and an encouragement to that movement
and its effort to bring change to America, including to its classrooms. When
Icomposed the Preface to the first edition, I carefully noted the very large
number of writers of color and also women authors we had included in the
books two volumes. There had not been anything like it before, I implied,
and that was true. The anthology was far more inclusive than any of its predecessorsor, for that matter, its successors. So it was a good thing to include
all of Frederick Douglasss autobiographical Narrative; Thomas Wentworth
Higginsons essay on Nat Turner; poetry like Frances Harpers Aunt Chloes
Politics and Claude McKays If We Must Die; Richard Wrights Bright and
Morning Star among lots of other texts, militant, serious, striking. There were
Rebecca Harding Daviss Life in the Iron Mills and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans
The Yellow Wallpaper, not to speak of Mary Wilkins Freemans The Revolt of
Mother. We put in the hands of teachers in a changing profession works that
spoke to a changing Americaeven as George H. W. Bush was president, the
Berlin wall was coming down, and the culture wars were heating up.
We won those wars. What is taught today in literary and cultural classrooms
would have been unrecognizable to the gentlemen with whom I studied sixty
years ago. We won those wars, but we have not won the peace, as the movement
called Black Lives Matter has made clear. To no ones real surprise, transforming literary study has not succeeded in transforming society ... yet. Perhaps I
register my nave optimism with that tiny word. Or perhaps I glimpse a future
freed from the sour breath of Trump and his fading breed.
To move toward that future, however, we need to think about two things
with which the Heath Anthology did not successfully engage: the World Wide
Web, also a product of the 1990s, and class, a product of the whole of American
history, from William Bradford forward. The Internet has transformed publishing in ways we do not fully understand. It is not that books and reading and
writing are disappearing, as some sillier critics have proposed. But we are only

Reflections on the 25th Anniversary 31

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beginning to understand how forms of electronic communication can not only

enhance mobilizations but also deepen understandings of culture and history. I
am not among those who think that developments like MOOCs will do much to
transform serious education. But I know how songs and stories have played vital
roles in movements for change, from the Wobblies to the CIO to SNCC. Access
to works from the past that speak to conflicts in the present brings perception
and inspiration that reading even a wonderful story like Bright and Morning
Star inside a comfortable classroom cannot. How, then, to use the web at once
politically and educationally, as a way of gathering perspective as well as force?
And there is the problem of class, reintroduced into American discourse by
Occupy Wall Street, and into the realm of everyday politics by Bernie Sanders.
We tried in the Heath to address issues of class as we had, more successfully,
engaged race and gender and even sexuality. But I think class is not basically
a category of identity or, indeed, of literary definition. Class has rather to do
mostly with work, power, and control. Thus the manifestations of working-class
experience and culture are not often the stuff of an Introduction to American
Literature course. Were only at the beginnings of the study of American
working-class literature: Nick Coles and I have just edited for Cambridge a
compilation of essays on the subject; Coles and Janet Zandy edited American
Working-Class Literature: An Anthology, and Ann Fitzgerald and I put together
a now out-of-print collection called Literature, Class, and Culture. Things are,
in short, changing. Interactions between the Internet and the Heath may help
bring a fuller focus on class issues to any future anthology.
And, I suspect, coming issues, too, of Transformations, which, like the Heath,
and like the American electorate, will be trying to find ways to address these
challenging questions of class, technology, and a threatening future.
Well see. For now, la lucha continua.
Paul L auter was A. K. & G. M. Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College until his
recent retirement. He has been general editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of
American Literature from its beginnings in 1988. His most recent books are From Walden Pond
to Jurassic Park and (with Ann Fitzgerald) Literature, Class and Culture. His latest project has
been coediting (with Nick Coles) the collection A Cambridge History of American Working-Class
Literature (Cambridge, 2017), to which he has also contributed an essay titled Why Work?
Earlier in his career, Lauter was active in the civil rights, feminist, peace, and labor movements:
he worked for a number of social cause organizations, including the American Friends Service
Committee; was one of the founders and treasurer of the Feminist Press; served as a union
official at the State University of New York; and coauthored a book about the 1960s, The
Conspiracy of the Young. He also served as president of the American Studies Association.

Works Cited
Coles, Nicholas, and Paul Lauter, A Cambridge History of American Working-Class
Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. Print.

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transformations
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Coles, Nicholas, and Janet Zandy. American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology.

NewYork: Oxford UP 2006. Print.
Fitzgerald, Ann, and Paul Lauter. Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology. New York:
Longman, 2001. Print.

A Genealogy of Transformation
Abstr ac t Transformations history can be traced back to documents like Picos Oration
on the Dignity of Man. To follow Picos lead by acknowledging our groundless situation is
to recognize that as human beings, we become only what we have made ourselves, and
that we have the capacity to make ourselves absolutely anything at alldevils or angels,
monsters or gods. Knowing this, we can clearly see that teaching and learning have never
been about goals or standards. If we were endowedas many people believewith a fixed
human nature, then research could indeed quantify educational outcomes in ways that are
measurably measurable, as the statisticians say. But measurement cant assess an artifact
of measurement itself: our measurements create what they claim to find. Transformation is
our telos and our fate.

Ku rt
Sp e l l m e y e r
Key words
history, telos,
Renaissance, teaching,
humanities

Transformations is this journals name, but what does that word mean? What
exactly gets transformed?
The genealogy of transformation we can trace back to the Renaissance
philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As a preamble to a longer work,
he composed a speech in 1486 he never actually delivered, the Oration on the
Dignity of Man, which was unlike anything the West had seen before. Even
more remarkable than Picos willingness to cite the work of non-Christians
was his definition of the human being, a definition that directly contradicts
the understanding of humanism that has become conventional today. After
God had fashioned the world, Pico says, he began to entertain the possibility
of creating man, but He had no archetype from which to fashion this new
form of life. And so He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent
nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him Adam, we give
you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that
is yours alone. We have no fundamental nature, Pico wrote. Instead, we can be
defined only by our capacity for transformation. What we call the humanities
begins with this claim. So too does democracy, another project without any
fixed goal whose subject, the citizen, is indefinable as well.
The links between the humanities, democracy, and transformation are far
from arcane or unimportant. Recently, the New York Times featured an article,
ARising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding
(Cohen). Among the opinion-makers profiled there was Kentucky Governor
Matt Bevin, who has proposed withholding state funds from college students
majoring in French. The report also noted that Marco Rubio, the US senator from

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