<p>Why do some books make it into the literary canon, and why does the canon seem exclusive to modern books (ie–there aren’t many canonical texts from 1960s on forth)?</p>
<p>Who influences whether a book is worthy of such an honor (ie–the public, the intellegentista, companies, the media)? </p>
<p>What differentiates canonical texts from non-canonical texts? </p>
<p>Which canonical texts (ie–As I Laying, The Scarlet Letter, Heart of Darkness) do you like and dislike? Why?</p>
<p>One thing is durability. A book has to transcend time and last several generations. Books written post 1960 are still undergoing the test of time.</p>
<p>The books that make it to the “classic” stage were very much best sellers in their day. The quality of writing and appeal over time with themes that still catch the heart of modern readers is what makes them classic.</p>
<p>I love Heart of Darkness, although I am the only one I know who enjoys Joesph Conrad.
( The Duellists, taken from Conrad’s short story " the Duel" is also one of my favorites but I don’t think it would have been as good without Harvey Keitel.)</p>
<p>The Color Purple, is a book that seems to have made it into the more modern literary canon. ( it was published thirty years ago) it also won the Pulitzer Prize & national book award for fiction.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. Moby Dick was considered a failure for most of Melville’s lifetime and then was mostly considered a “boys book”. It wasn’t until sometime in the early twentieth century that it began to make its way into the canon. It really does take time for a book’s literary merit to be established.</p>
<p>Love Heart of Darkness, not so fond of Hemingway.</p>
<p>100 Years of Solitude is another modern novel that seems to have entered the canon.</p>
<p>I think Catch-22 is in the canon - 1961 publication date. Also One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - 1962.</p>
<p>I liked both Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness which we read as a pair, my junior year in high school. I like the Hemingway I’ve read on my own (Light in August), but loathe the one most kids have to read (Old Man and the Sea).</p>
<p>Luck and coincidence along with quality. Many really incredible books do not make it into the canon. </p>
<p>And the canon has changed considerably in the last 50 years: less dead, white men and more people of color, women and contemporary authors.</p>
<p>I really doubt too many people besides English students (usually at the grad level) read all of THE FAERIE QUEEN. It used to be quite common for a high school student to have memorized all of the General Prologue to THE CANTERBURY TALES in the original English and a Shakespeare sonnet or two.</p>
<p>There are some works in the canon that should be rethought because they really aren’t very good.</p>
<p>^Oooh which ones? I understand why the Fairie Queene got dropped. It’s really hard to read, I’ve only read bits of it. And I’ve always meant to read more of the Canterbury Tales than I have. I’ve read lots and lots of Shakespeare’s sonnets though! And lots of stuff not in the canon, like Jacobean drama. :)</p>
<p>Mathmom, “Light in August” is Faulkner, not Hemingway.</p>
<p>Spaced out. I hate Faulkner, (bad of me I know I should try again), I meant* A Farewell to Arms!*</p>
<p>I loved the Scarlett Letter. Great Expectations should be dropped from the canon, but I enjoyed Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Also like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The childhood adventures are timeless.</p>
<p>I feel like A FAREWELL TO ARMS is not a great book. Hemingway had already started to become sentimental. THE SUN ALSO RISES is a better book to most critics. I agree.</p>
<p>I love Faulkner but it is an acquired taste. I would suggest AS I LAY DYING as the most accessible and in many ways the best.</p>
<p>Bad? I think OF MICE AND MEN is not a very well-written book and Steinbeck’s novella, “The Pearl” is worse. Kids hate it.</p>
<p>Perhaps GREAT EXPECTATIONS should come out of the canon. I loved it in ninth grade, but I think I was the only one in the class who really liked it, with the exception of my two best mates.</p>
<p>We could easily drop THE SCARLET LETTER and cover much of the same territory with Hawthorn’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” I happen to like THE SCARLET LETTER, but lots of readers bog down when they read it.</p>
<p>Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis are too dated.</p>
<p>Theodore Drieser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY should be dropped in favor of his far better SISTER CARRIE.</p>
<p>I could go on.</p>
<p>As for the Brits, I can’t say which should be dropped. I am not even exactly sure of their canon, but people should read more Trollope. He’s really funny.</p>
<p>Jacobean drama does make it into the canon but only a few plays. THE DUCHESS OF MALFI definitely does.</p>
<p>I wish THE CRYING OF LOT 49 was dropped because both V. and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW are so much better, as are some of Pynchon’s later novels.</p>
<p>No one seems to have discovered Richard Powers in contemporary lit classes, but he’s brilliant.</p>
<p>BELOVED is a much stronger book than THE COLOR PURPLE.</p>
<p>I think I’ll stop. Since this is my profession, I’ve obviously thought about this a lot, but I don’t want to overwhelm the thread. I made this list in response to a query, but I don’t want to post as a stuck-up expert. These are just some of my own personal observations.</p>
<p>Mythmom, I’m enjoying your musings…keep going! I personally hated " Of Mice and Men" but both my kids thought it was a great story. My favorites were “East of Eden” and “The Grapes of Wrath” (which I listened to as audiobooks).
“As I Lay Dying” is the book that seems required in HS today.
I still think Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is great. It has a historical significance as well as great writing and story.
Moby Dick is a boy’s book–the original critics were right.
“The Hobbit” is a real classic. We read it in 8th grade and I think it turned everyone into readers (especially since you then had to read the 1000 pages of story that follows it.)
I think the Harry Potter series will stand the test of time also.
Another series that I love is Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” and its sequels. They were best sellers in their time and actually got me reading all the old classics.</p>
<p>I didn’t mind The Pearl. It was read out loud to us by a 6th grade English teacher who was very sweet, and did not make us analyze it to death. I liked *The Scarlet Letter *but didn’t love it. I liked whatever was included in the Norton American Lit Anthology (which I read cover to cover on a year long road trip). I think it was The Marble Faun. I’m not a big Dickens fan - I think in some ways it’s better to read Hard Times and Upton Sinclair in a history class and leave it at that. I agree that Trollope is tremendous fun. Read all the Barchester and Palliser novels while we lived in Germany.
Mythmom, don’t stop! Your posts always make me want to fill up the huge holes in what I have or have not read. </p>
<p>This girl read* Moby Dick* in a girls school and we all loved it - maybe you just have to have the right teacher - I certainly never thought of it as a boy’s book. 
The Hobbit is a classic, but I think canon is something different. OTOH it and *Harry Potter *have probably turned more kids into real readers than any other books I can think of - there should be some sort of recognition for that.</p>
<p>^^^^Agree with mathmom. The “canon”, a “classic” and what we like to read are all different.</p>
<p>I worship J.K. Rowling for what she did for my kid. No kidding. Son of an English prof and he doesn’t really like to read. Too much ADD, I think. Got 760 on verbal SAT’s but not a reader. He devoured J.K. Rowling. It didn’t turn him into a reader, though. </p>
<p>I read all the books to keep my kids company. I honestly didn’t think much of the writing. I had to remind myself that it was a kids’ story. I did enjoy some of the books, but canon? I think not. Classic if we mean will be read in the future, certainly. </p>
<p>The canon is literature that must be read to demonstrate the progression of literary thought, and every person who wants to be educated in that discipline should plan to read these books. It really doesn’t mean everyone is enjoyable. </p>
<p>I didn’t enjoy long sections of Moby Dick, but I would never remove it from the canon. It is vital.</p>
<p>I don’t think either Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair write well enough to be in the canon no matter how historical their novels are. That’s a different issue. And if they’re enjoyed for that reason, more power to the writers and the readers. I certainly wouldn’t argue with that.</p>
<p>Same with Steinbeck. </p>
<p>Same with my absolute all-time favorite, Little Women. Not in the canon. Too sentimental perhaps. The chapter when Beth dies is very sentimental, but I have read it about 100 times. I do have a morbid streak, I’m afraid.</p>
<p>Still, if I were assigning Civil War reading in a lit class I would choose Whitman and not Little Women. </p>
<p>I think a great book challenges our received view of ourselves and teaches us knew ways to use language to express what it means to be human.</p>
<p>Not every “classic” or book we really enjoy does that.</p>
<p>I love The Scarlet Letter. I wanted to remove it to substitute a short story of Hawthorn’s just because I’m not sure it’s worth the time for a new generation of students. I like to use “the canon” to get them to a particular place vis a vis the Western tradition. It’s a great book, but so many students bog down in it. The sections with Pearl as a child of nature are just so odd it takes a very talented teacher and open-minded student to grasp exactly what Hawthorn means. That’s fine. I just wasn’t sure it still justified its place.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t include Lord of the Rings, no matter how good a read it is, or The Hobbit either. In my opinion, Tolkien just doesn’t operate at the highest levels of literary achievement. I would read the actual Beowulf instead. I have taught it about 50 times, and it still takes my breath away. It is economical, too, in terms of length.</p>
<p>So Huck Finn, but not Tom Sawyer.</p>
<p>Dickins? Hard Times or Bleak house but not David Copperfield, even though I personally fell in love with David Copperfield as a kid.</p>
<p>Books included in the canon are books that are necessary to understand how literary technique and the use of language to understand ourselves evolved. Lots of books we love just don’t fit into that category. But they don’t have to. If they’re dear to us, the writer has done his/her job.</p>
<p>That’s just the way I see it.</p>
<p>And we can all discuss personal favorites without having to worry about whether or not they’re in the canon unless we all want to be English profs or PhD’s in the history of ideas. (I do teach that course. It’s loads of fun.)</p>
<p>^ I’m pretty sure Rowling is the only reason half of my generation read a book outside of class. She single handedly made reading cool…at least her books haha</p>
<p>I gave the first Harry Potter book to my brother-in-law, who read it in just a couple of days. He had not read a book since high school and went on to read the whole series as it came out. </p>
<p>Mythmom: can you post a list of what you consider the literary canon for English majors or well-educated people? My undergrad degree is in English, but there are some alarming gaps in my reading history.</p>
<p>Looks like I’ll be teaching a Grade 11 and then 12 English lit class (two year program, IB). Mythmom, do you have any comments about this reading list:</p>
<p>Hamlet
Huckleberry Finn
Things Fall Apart
Walden
poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
Canterbury Tales
100 Years of Solitude
Aeneid
Paradise of the Blind
Thief and the Dog
Mismeasure of Man
God of Small Things
Blind Owl</p>
<p>I appreciate your comments!</p>
<p>What do you think about the age of the reader in relation to understanding a novel? I HATED certain books assigned in class in HS and the assignment of them certainly turned me off reading them (as well as other students). I did not appreciate having to dissect a book at all at the time. I think now that I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the story and some of the themes. They were basically wasted on me at the time. As an adult I see them in a new light and get much more out of them. OTOH, I probably wouldn’t even bother with them again as an adult if it hadn’t been stressed in HS. Mythmom, You are a college professor and those few years in age can make quite a lot of difference.</p>
<p>My son had to read Beowolf in 11th grade (he had an illustrated version) and fell in love with it. He hated his English Lit class but loved Beowolf.</p>