Word: canonically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Similarly, we find in Gates' book that these conservatives feared that the women and people of color who were entering traditional literary institutions would disrupt the canon of literary values and force what they called "tribal" or "parochial" cultural traditions on Anglo-American culture...
...Gates exposes the partisan nature of he canon defenders' supposedly apolitical agenda. "[C]onservative critics," he says in the Introduction, "have never hesitated to provide a political defense of what they consider the 'traditional' curriculum: The future of the republic, they argue, depends on the inculcation of proper civic virtues...
Gates says in Chapter 2 that the goal must be "to prepare our students for their roles as citizens of a world culture." The ever-defended "West" of Bennett and Bloom is properly conceived as part of a "larger whole" without a gelatinized, fixed canon but with a "porous, dynamic, and interactive" culture...
Oddly enough, at some points Gates offers his own "traditional" justification for all this--from the writings of Cardinal Newman to the "age-old ideal" of mathesis universalis to simple "common sense" (which is used by the right to defend the Anglo-American canon "common sense," for example, might say that Shakespeare is "better" than Zora Neale Hurston).But in this case, Gates says, "[c]ommon sense says that you don't bracket 90 percent of the world's cultural heritage if you really want to learn about the world." Good point...
...anyway, we each have a canon--a place where "we have written down the texts and tiles that we want to remember." For society to do so is inevitable and desirable. Gates speaks several times of personally helping to edit a new canon, in fact--the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. But doesn't all of this mean he's just selling out like Slade...