I have for quite some time questioned the canon of literature that has been used for American education. This questioning not only came with the Common Core controversy but also my experience with English Literature courses in the United States. How is it that Americans are more likely to know more English history than US history? If several Americans have Irish ancestry, why do we not hear of the extensive Irish literature that begins in the 5th century? Why did poetry become somewhat dead or deadly in the 20th century? Do we necessarily have to accept the canon that has been passed down from a system of education that is having problems with helping students become literate? What kinds of literature do I think my students should know in order to be able to think thoughtfully through the various pieces of information they encounter every day?
To even attempt this sort of project, however, I have had to ask why and where certain biases existed. Why was some highly significant literature left out? Why was other literature emphasized? How does that affect people’s perception of the world and history? As an American and a Catholic, this becomes a very provocative line of questioning, especially when you consider that one culture’s written literature in the US was held as superior at the expense of all others and when you consider that Catholic thought seemed to find its way through other literary instruments despite the odds.
My preference, however, is not to tear one culture down in order to make all other cultures feel better. I want to build a canon of literature that resembles a quilt; I do not intend to condemn any culture’s literature. As I see it, literature is not an evolution of the art of writing [once I began to study early Irish literature, that theory falls apart] nor can literature be confined to that which is written [movies or visual stories have proven to be the most widely accepted literature today]. I do not want to ignore or toss out pieces of this quilt in order to prove some point, but I also know that as a teacher, I will have a limited time to convey the story of…literature. The information age is a blessing, but it is also more abundant than one person can learn in a lifetime. Which pieces will I choose to go on this quilt?
- Catholic literature
- American literature
Those are pretty broad terms…
It also becomes a question of knowing not only literature from several cultures, but it also is a question of knowing history and historical context.
An honest literature scholar must admit that no one can claim that available written literature is the only type of literature. Most scholars must admit that oral tradition was the most efficient way to pass on literature in most cultures for a very long time. Even today, to talk to another person is far quicker and probably more understandable than taking the time to write something down. Written work takes time to write as well as time to interpret. How many interpretations do we make of a work because we cannot read the body language, the tone of voice, the historical context? Knowledge of oral tradition also means knowing that just because we have older written texts from certain areas of the world that those cultures may or may not have been necessarily better at telling a story, nor can it be claimed that they were the first to tell a particular story. Just because a piece is missing does not mean that the gap can be ignored–we can’t say a puzzle is done when pieces are gone. Thus, original stories were not necessarily written down first.
For instance, if I write a poem down by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poem that he spoke but did not write down, I cannot claim to be the author of that poem [he died before I was born]. This fallacious line of thinking has been made by some teachers of world literature. They believe that since an older version of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI exists today than does the written Hebrew Bible, that means that the epic’s portrayal of the flood is the original story. The first assumption is that all writers had to read a text before knowing the story themselves [the Brothers Grimm would have had a hard time printing any folklore with that line of thinking]; the second assumption is that the flood story was only known by the Mesopotamian people in circa 1900 BC [I think that we are up to 250 different cultures from all around the world having a similar story, a story that is hard to date but extremely coincidental]; and the third assumption is that oral tradition is inferior to written text [Wouldn’t you rather get the story straight over a cup of coffee? I would like to talk poetry with Gerard Manley Hopkins.]. Written text might be more concrete and stable, sort of, but it is not superior to oral tradition.
Stories travel through people far better than through paper. I like to think of oral tradition as a collection of books who were people. In some places, they were called poets, in other places bards, in other areas priests, and in other places prophets.
Oral tradition might not be as clean and stable as written work but neither is history. How many interpretations of history are we getting now even with written information? Here, I have to mention another phenomenon I have noticed. Many Catholic authors wrote the histories of the cultures they encountered as if finding another culture were a blessing. Rather than throwing things out, Catholics seem to have enjoyed gathering what they could, good, bad, or ugly. They just love story!
So, in that beautiful tradition, this is just the beginning of my journey in trying to build a suitable canon of literature that tells the story of humanity, the Church, and Americans. It will be a story filled with heroes and villains, with hope and fear, victory and loss, God, Saints, and sinners. The setting will be that past, the present, and the future on any continent or planet. The plots with be thick; the conflict will be intense; the sense of humanity will be real. My aim for this project is to be honest and grateful for the abundant blessings of literature.
As a reminder, this would be for Secondary education.
Let’s begin:
1. Creation Story, Oral Tradition and World Literatures (a study of myth and meaning; note, myth means that which points to something which is hard to say with words)
2. The Bible, Old Testament (a study of genres); Egyptian love poetry (something that will be noted in contrast with Hebrew poetry and literature is that Hebrew work contains more hope)
3. Maccabees with Greek Literature supplemental (Plato, Aristotle, Homer, etc.); Confucius and Buddha supplemental
4. The New Testament (as well as the Christian innovation of moving from scrolls to books in the early centuries); Roman Literature (Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, etc.)
5. The Church Fathers and Mothers, 2nd century forward (Augustine of Hippo, Isidore of Seville, Catherine of Alexandria, and other Saints); Boethius, the Consolation of Philosophy, and Valmiki supplemental
6. Irish Literature, 5th century forward (vernacular, genre study, and historical impact)
7. French Literature, 9th century forward (philosophy, science, etc.); also literature from Japan and the Middle East (7th Century +); also St. Alfred the Great
8. Spanish Literature, 13th century forward (poetry, international law, navigation, philosophy); also Germanic/Nordic 11th & 12th century forward
9. Italian Literature, 14th century forward (poetry, science, etc.)
10. English Literature, 14th century forward (Chaucer, More, Shakespeare, etc.); German Literature, 15th century forward
11. American Literature, 16th century forward (short stories, slave narratives, letters, novels, movies)
12. The 20th Century
To choose literature from the 20th century will be the most complicated of all previous centuries because so many editors had odd nationalistic or political tendencies and created canons according to those tendencies. No longer was it about enjoying good literature from wherever it came but cherry picking literature that proved a point. Early in that century, the British perspective in written literature became dominant in the US and therefore was read in school, but community-enjoyed literature in the US had moved to the movies and songs by the 1930’s. The second half of the century’s canons in the US were built by those trying to prove a political point at the expense of losing literary and historical perspective. The most frustrating thing for literature scholars when it comes to the 20th century must be those darn cultural revolutions that ended up destroying a great deal of literature and culture. If you love culture and literature, you probably do not like the active suppression done by several regimes in the 20th century.
The above list is not set in stone and literary history is certainly not linear endeavor. Great literature, flourishing with Christian initiative, was being produced at multiple places at the same time. I still have more research to do and could use your help, but with Catholic and Hebrew literature as the base, students will learn how innovative and original people have been with literature. For instance, framework stories, essays, autobiographies, ethical religious works, utopia literature, and science fiction are just some of the inventions fully employed by Catholic and Hebrew writers. Students will also learn that God’s light does not hold brightness in just one culture, but He moves around to share the wealth and abundance of the Word. In my mind, He’s creating a beautiful quilt that can be wrapped in and read, on a cold day with a warm cup of coffee.
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