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By Francine Prose

Are there any contemporary writers we must read, or does “canonical” mean “dead”?

Image Francine Prose Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

One problem with trying to decide who should be kicked out of the canon is that I’m never exactly sure who is in it. I’ve always felt that the canon was like the guest list to a secret party, a roster drawn up by covert hosts at some undisclosed location. I know that Harold Bloom wrote a book in which he ruled, quite definitively, on which writers do and don’t belong. But not having read his book, I have only some vague memory of the brief controversy that erupted when someone noted how few women Bloom included.

I understand that “canonical” is generally used to describe a writer whose work is considered an essential part of our history and culture, an author whom everyone should read, or at least pretend to have read. It’s employed, in academia, to help compose the reading lists of survey courses in literature. But given how radically attitudes, tastes and reading habits have changed even in my own lifetime, how can we determine to what degree the canon has become something of an abstract (and at least partly irrelevant) construct?

To take one of many possible examples, let’s consider the case of Alexander Pope. When I was in college, he was considered canonical, and we — by which I mean we English majors — actually read him. I think that if one were to ask most literature professors about Pope, they would say: Of course! Alexander Pope’s place in the canon is assured, now and forever! On the other hand, were one to extend that survey to include college students graduating with a degree in literature, you might have a harder time finding graduates who’d read “The Rape of the Lock” — or even heard of it. Does that mean that Alexander Pope has been dropped from the canon, almost without anyone — except Pope scholars — having noticed? And should he be excluded from the company of his contemporaries (Swift, Fielding, Johnson) who have a better chance of recent-lit-grad name recognition?

I do think that there are works that everyone should read because they tell us who we are as human beings living in history. I would start with the Bible, the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad,” the works of Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare. I think everyone should read “David Copperfield,” “Middlemarch,” “Wuthering Heights,” the essays of Virginia Woolf, not only because they will — by a sort of osmosis — improve one’s prose style, but because they can also sharpen one’s ability to think logically, to follow an argument and understand a complex sentence. I think everyone who knows about, and cares about, literature could draw up a list of (let’s say) 200 essential writers who lived before 1900. But after that things get more complex. Should Katherine Mansfield be included in the canon? Certainly. James Baldwin? Without a doubt. And what about contemporary writers? Are there any we must read, or is it somehow understood that “canonical” means “dead”?

Given how nebulous and (despite the efforts of Bloom and others to codify matters) how personal the list of canonical authors seems to be, I would be in favor of expanding the canon rather than narrowing it down, of enlarging the guest list rather than disinviting the writers we no longer want at the party. Since the question of canonical versus noncanonical seems to matter most urgently in academic circles, I would argue for an approach to teaching literature that focuses less on some notion of literary immortality than on those works that still have the power to engage us. Rather than the dutiful slog through everything of importance written during a particular century, perhaps professors might want to choose from that time the half dozen books that they most passionately love, books that have awoken them to the pleasures and beauties of that period in our history and culture.

The house of art, after all, is large enough to have room for many guests. Robert Walser? Amos Tutuola? Patrick Hamilton? Jane Bowles? Elizabeth Taylor? Naguib Mahfouz? You’re on the list. Welcome to the canon.

Francine Prose is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best seller. Her new novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.