Changing the Canon

This term, I took a required class for my English major called “Canons and Canonicity.” Just from the title, I expected to suffer through it, but it turned out to be the best class I’ve taken because I learned so much. We talked about what makes a “canon” and whether or not we agree with those standards. For our final project, we had to design a syllabus for an “ENG 255: Intro to American Literature” class. I’m proud of how mine turned out so I wanted to share it with you here. This project made me think, and reevaluate how I’ve approached literature in the past, and that’s why I’m proud of it.

Literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and that’s why my project centers around the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s also why I’m sharing it with you here, because if I don’t use my (small) platform to do something, why do I even write?

Trigger warning for discussion of books involving racism, slavery, and sexual assault.

Syllabus for ENG 255: Introduction to American Literature, taught by Claire G.

Course Description: In this class, we will read five novels spanning 150 years that will offer a survey of American Literature. The goal of this class is to expose students to a variety of authors with different writing styles, as well as learn about several literary movements including the slave narrative, modernism, science fiction/fantasy, and young adult literature. We will tackle issues of gender and racial inequality from the 1800s to today. And we’ll ask the question: Why does literature matter? And what has, and hasn’t, changed?

Reading List:

Above is a syllabus I would teach for ENG 255 if I were teaching the class this year. As it turns out, all of my texts are from black female authors, which was a coincidence. I’ve had classes where I only read works from white male authors, or just male authors, or just white authors. Those are a normal experience for many students. I’ve heard stories of many other fellow English majors who have had the same experience. I’ve also heard professors talk about assigning some women writers and then having students complain that it felt like they were “pandering” because there were so many women. So it was nice to flip the power dynamic for a change.

When I was working on this syllabus, I immediately put Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston on the list for several reasons. First, it’s an incredible book that stuck with me long after the class it was assigned for. Second, it’s a good example of American modernism, which I would want to cover in a survey of American literature. After I put the novel on the list, I started filling it up with other books and quickly I had four white authors and one black one. But that didn’t sit right. Is one black author really enough? Why should only 20% of the texts be by a black author? It was like I had met my diversity quota and stopped trying. So I started over, and this time I ended up with primarily black authors. I’m not trying to virtue signal that I’m such a good person for having such a “diverse reading list.” I just picked the ones that I thought mattered the most right now. But what does “mattering” even mean? 

The country is angry, and for good reason. Black people are making their voices heard when nobody has been listening for too long. Literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither do classes. If I were gearing up to teach a class this term, it would be silly for me to ignore the current political environment. I couldn’t pretend that nothing was happening and go on teaching like I planned to. I couldn’t in good conscience ask students to analyze yet another white, male author while Black people are being killed by police and no one is doing anything. So for my syllabus I chose to feature primarily Black authors so that I could promote the voices that really need to be heard right now. 

Another reason I chose this angle is because “American literature” is such a broad category that there’s absolutely no way it can be encapsulated in just five texts. I developed a lot of sympathy for my English professors in the first five minutes of doing research for this assignment. My thought process went something like, “I want this one, and this one, oh and definitely this one…but now I have 13 texts! How can I possibly cut so many out?” Depending on the texts you choose, you can present a narrative of American history. I could have assigned William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, and shown what white men have been saying over the last hundred years. Or I could turn to the other side that isn’t assigned, but that needs to be heard even more. 

American history isn’t pretty. It’s awful, and ugly, and it’s uncomfortable to look at. But that’s exactly why we need to be looking at it. If we don’t, it’s like we’re pushing it under the rug and pretending it didn’t happen. By acknowlding the suffering that our country is built on, we’re taking a tiny step in the right direction. Ignoring pain doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. While Kate Chopin was writing The Awakening, Harriet Jacobs was fighting to get free from slavery. The narrative is completley different depending on who you ask. And right now, I think we need to be asking the people who had it the worst.

My syllabus starts with Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. I don’t intend to just copy the syllabus for “Canons and Canonicity,” but I absolutley had to include this book, because I’ve really never read anything like it before. Nobody had, when it was published; it was the first of its time, and that’s one of the reasons I think it’s so vitally important that more people read this book. It was astonishing. It’s a true story, unlike the other books my hypothetical students will be reading, so that will be a valuable conversation topic: How does the fact that this story is true change how we talk about it? I plan to offer excerpts from other slave narratives to get a look at the slave narrative as a genre. Then we can discuss how radical Harriet Jacobs’ narrative is.

The next book on the list is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I’ve already discussed why I feel this book is so important. Another reason is the author’s use of dialect when she writes, which makes the book a bit of a challenge to get into at first but which ultimately offers an immersive experience that allows the reader to get into the head of Janie, the main character. We can discuss modernism as a literary movement and probably read some short stories by other modernist writers; this will be a good time to read some Ernest Hemingway because he is certainly a classic, and his stories are so short that it won’t take long or add much to the workload. But I’m less concerned with discussing specific literary movements and more focused on presenting an overall narrative with the texts I’ve chosen.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee when I was in middle school, so I’m sure a lot of the themes went over my head. I haven’t read it since, but it’s higher on my priorities list now than ever. It will be fascinating to examine the justice system when the book takes place compared to how the justice system functions now. Since the book is about a rape allegation, it will be important to look at it alongside the #MeToo movement. Because although the accused in this book did not actually rape the accuser, it’s also important to believe women when they report sexual assault. It will be a difficult conversation to have, so I would definitely want to provide warnings to the students in case they need to miss that particular day. Still, the book is an important read and it made an impact on me as a young teenager. It might be worthwhile to watch the movie adaptation too, as well as discuss Harper Lee’s recent addition, Go Set a Watchman. Maybe I would offer extra credit to the students if they read that book and talked to the class about it.

I really wanted to include something by Octavia Butler, because she’s an immensely talented writer who made an impact on American literature. However, the only books I’ve read by her are the first two books of the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, which are science fiction. I thought about including Kindred instead because it sounds absolutely fascinating, even though I haven’t read it. At first I was unsure about including a science fiction book because I thought it would make the texts feel less cohesive, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized my reasoning wasn’t very solid. Science fiction and fantasy are a vital part of the American literary tradition. A text isn’t less valuable just because it has science fiction elements in it, and I don’t want to send that message to my students. So I went with my original instinct.

I decided on Dawn, which is the first book in Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy. It’s about a woman who becomes the mother of an alien-human hybrid species. One of the reasons I think science fiction is such a useful lens is because it allows for cognitive dissonance: that is, the reframing of issues in a less familiar way. In this case, racism takes the form of humans mistrusting the Oankali, which are the aliens in the book. By seeing xenophobia mirrored in the human-alien relationship, readers might examine their own xenophobic thoughts in a different way. They might think it’s silly for humans to be so shy around the Oankali, only to realize they do exactly the same thing around people from a different race. It will be useful to have a conversation about cognitive dissonance and how it can be used to make the familiar new.

The syllabus concludes with a recent book because I wanted to span a wide range of time with the texts, so we could see how publishing has changed. This book is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, published in 2017 and made into a movie starring Amandla Stenberg. It’s about a black girl named Starr who witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood friend, Khalil, at the hands of a white cop. She gets pulled into the Black Lives Matter movement and seeks justice for her friend. This novel opened my eyes as a white person to what the Black Lives Matter movement is about. It’s based on true events that we see unfolding around us right now, and that’s why this novel is so important. It’s a difficult read, and it elicits many emotions in the reader: shock, sadness, and rage. It’s not a comfortable book. It shows that, in some ways, nothing at all has changed since Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography. No, slavery doesn’t exist in the same way, but prejudice is alive and well and black people are still dying. This book also offers a look into the world of Young Adult literature and shows that even though it’s written for teenagers, it can still be valuable for adults.

I’m sure this syllabus will get some complaints from the hypothetical students whereas a syllabus with only white male authors would likely go unremarked upon. But if I actually taught this class, I would address the choice of books so the students knew why I chose what I did. I’m genuinely happy with how this list turned out and I would be enthusiastic to teach this list of books. It won’t be an easy reading list in terms of emotional impact, but the easy reads are never the ones that stay with me in the long run. I would hope that this class would leave a lasting impact on the students.