5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85爱情是什么意思 90 95 100 105 110早泄怎么补 115 120 新农村建设规划125 130 135 140 145 150 中国历史表155 160 165 170 175 180 185 190 195 200 205 210 215 220 225 230 235 240 245 250 255 260 265 270 275 280 285 290 295 300 | For the past couple of years, we’ve all been witness to a furious debate about the literary canon. What books should be assigned to students? What books should critics discuss? What books should the rest of us read—and who are we, anyway? Like everyone el, I’ve given the questions some thought and, when an invitation came my way,1 leaped to produce my own manifesto. But to my surpri, when I sat down to write—in order to discover, as E. M. Forster once said, what I really think—I found that I agreed with all sides in the debate at once…. Take the conrvatives.2 Now, this rather dour collection of scholars and diatribists—Allan Bloom, Hilton Kramer, John Silber, and so on—are not, to my mind,3 a particularly appealing group of people. They are arrogant, they are rude, they are gloomy, they do not suffer fools gladly—and everywhere they look, fools are what they e. All good reasons not to elect them to public office, as the voters of Massachutts decided recently. But what is so terrible, really, about what they are saying? I too believe that some books are profounder, more complex, more esntial to an understanding of our culture than others; I too am appalled to think of students graduating from college not having read Homer, Plato, Virgil, Milton, Tolstoy—all writers, dead white Western men though they be,4 who works have meant a great deal to me. As a teacher of literature and of writing, I too have en at first hand5 how ill-educated many students are and how little aware they are of this important fact about themlves. Last year, for instance, I taught a graduate minar in the writing of poetry. None of my students had read more than a smattering of6 poem by anyone, male or female, published more than ten years ago. Robert Lowell was as far outside their frame of reference as Alexander Pope. When I gently suggested to one student that it might benefit her to read some poetry if she planned to spend her life writing it, she told me that yes, she knew she should read more, but when she encountered a really good poem it only made her depresd. That contemporary writing has a history which it profits us to know in some depth,7 that we ourlves were not born yesterday, ems too obvious even to argue. But ah, say the liberals, the canon exalted by the conrvatives is itlf an artifact of history. Sure, some books are more rewarding than others, but why can’t we revi the list of which books tho are? The canon itlf was not always the list we know today: Until the 1920s, Moby-Dick8 was shelved with the boys’ adventure stories. If T. S. Eliot could singlehandedly dethrone the Romantic poets in favor of the neglected Metaphysicals and place John Webster alongside Shakespeare, why can’t we dip into9 the a of stories and pluck out Edith Wharton or Virginia Woolf? And this position too makes a great deal of n to me. After all, alongside the many good reasons why a book might end up on the required reading shelf are some rather suspect reasons why it might be excluded—becau it was written by a woman and therefore presumed to be too slight; becau it was written by a black person and therefore presumed to be too unsophisticated or, in any ca, to reflect too special an instance. By all means, say the liberals, let’s have great books and a shared culture. But let’s make sure that all the different kinds of greatness are reprented and that the culture we share reflects the true range of human experience. If we leave the broadening of the canon up to the conrvatives, it will never happen becau, to them, change only means defeat. Look at the recent fuss over the latest edition of the Great Books ries published by the Encyclopedia Britannica, headed by that old snake-oil10 salesman Mortimer Adler. Four women have now been added to the ries: Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Jane Austen, and George Eliot. That’s nice, I suppo, but really! Jane Austen has been a certified great writer for a hundred years! Lionel Trilling said so! There’s something truly absurd about the conrvatives, earnestly sitting in judgment on11 the illustrious dead as though up in Writers’ Heaven Jane and George and Willa and Virginia were breathlessly waiting to hear if they’d finally made it into the club, while Henry Fielding, newly dropped from the list, howls in outer darkness and the Brontës, presumably, stamp their feet in frustration and hope for better luck in twenty years, when Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights12 will suddenly turn out to have qualities of greatness never before detected in their pages. It’s like Poets’ Corner over at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where mortal men—and a woman or two—of letters15 actually vote on which immortals to put up a plaque to—complete, no doubt, with electoral campaigns, compromi candidates, and all the rest of the underside of the literary life. “No, I’m sorry, I just can’t vote for Whitman. I’m a Washington Irving man mylf.” Well, being a liberal is not a very exciting thing to be, and so we have the radicals, who attack the concepts of “greatness,” “shared,” “culture,” and “lists.” (I’m overlooking here the ultra-radicals, who attack the “privileging,” horrible word, of “texts,” as they insist on calling books, and think one might as well spend one’s college years “deconstructing,” i.e., watching reruns of Leave It to Beaver.14) Who is to say, ask the radicals, what is a great book? What’s so terrific about complexity, ambiguity, historical centrality, and high riousness? If The Color Purple,15 say, gets students thinking about their own experience, maybe they ought to read it and forget about—and here you can fill in the name of whatever classic work you yourlf found dry and tedious and never got around to16 finishing. For the radicals, the notion of a shared culture is a lie, becau it means prenting as universally meaningful and politically neutral books that reflect the interests and experiences and values of privileged white men at the expen of tho of others—women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, the working class, whatever. Why not scrap the one-list-for-everyone idea and let people connect with books that are written by people like themlves about people like themlves? It will be a more accurate reflection of a multifaceted and conflict-ridden17 society and do wonders for everyone’s lf-esteem,18 except, of cour, for living white men—but they have too much lf-esteem already. Now, I have to say that I dislike the radicals’ vision intenly. How foolish to argue that Chekhov has nothing to say to a black woman—or, for that matter,19 mylf—merely becau he is Russian, long dead, a man. The notion that one reads to increa one’s lf-esteem sounds to me like more snake oil: literature is not a ssion at the therapist’s. But then I think of mylf as a child, leafing through anthologies of poetry for the names of women. I never would have admitted that I needed a role model,20 even if that awful term had existed back in the prehistory of which I speak, but why was I so excited to find a female name, even when, as was often the ca, it was attached to a poem of no interest to me whatsoever? Anna Laetitia Barbauld, author of “Life! I know not what thou art/ But know that thou and I must part!,” Lady Anne Lindsay, writer of languid ballads in incomprehensible Scots dialect, and the other minor female poets included by chivalrous Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the old Oxford Anthology of English Ver—I have to admit it, just by their prence in that august volume they did something for me. And although it had nothing to do with reading or writing, it was an important thing they did. Now, what are we to make of this spluttering debate, in which charges of imperialism are met by equally passionate accusations of vandalism, in which each side hates the others, and yet each ems to have its share of reason? It occurs to me that perhaps what we have here is one of tho debates in which the opposing sides, unbeknownst to themlves, share a myopia that will turn out to be the most interesting and important feature of the whole discussion, a debate, for instance, like that of our Founding Fathers over the nature of the franchi. Think of all the energy and passion spent debating the question of property qualifications, or direct versus legislative elections, while all along, unmentioned and unimagined, was the fact—to us so central—that women and slaves were never considered for any kind of vote. While everyone is busy fighting over the canon, something is being overlooked. That is the state of reading, and books, and literature in our country, at this time. Why, ask yourlf, is everyone so hot under the collar21 about what to put on the required-reading shelf? It is becau, while we have been arguing so fiercely about which books make the best medicine, the patient has been slipping deeper and deeper into a coma. Let us imagine a country in which reading was a popular voluntary activity. There, parents read books for their own edification and pleasure and are en by their children at this silent and mysterious pastime. The parents also read to their children, given them books for prents, talk to them about books, and underwrite, with their taxes, a public library system that is open all day, every day. In school—where an attractive library is invariably to be found—the children study certain books together but also have an active reading life of their own. Years later, it may even be hard for them to remember if they read Jane Eyre at home and Judy Blume in class or the other way around.22 In college, young people continue to be assigned certain books, but far more important are the books they discover for themlves browsing in the library, in bookstores, on the shelves of friends, one book leading to another, back and forth in history and across languages and cultures. After graduation, they continue to read and in the fullness of time23 produce a new generation of readers. Oh happy land! I wish we all lived there. In that other country of real readers, voluntary, active, lf-determined readers, a debate like the current one over the canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to a dert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in a lifetime. It would not em racist or xist or hopelessly hidebound to put Hawthorne on the list and not Toni Morrison. It would be more like putting oatmeal and not noodles on the breakfast menu—a choice part arbitrary, part a nod to the national past, part, dare one say it, a kind of rever affirmative action: School might frankly be the place where one read the books that are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you might overlook becau they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake24 in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn’t mean so much. It might even add to a writer’s cachet not to be on the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring, too exciting to be ground up25 into institutional fodder for teenagers. Generations of high-school kids have been turned off to26 George Eliot by being forced to read Silas Marner at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership for her if grownups were left to approach Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure.27 But, of cour, they rarely do. In America today, the underlying assumption behind the canon debate is that the books on the list are the only books that are going to be read and if the list is dropped, no books are going to be read. Becoming a textbook is a book’s only chance—all sides take that for granted. And so all sides agree not to mention certain things that they themlves, as highly educated people and, one assumes, devoted readers, know perfectly well. For example, that if you read only twenty-five, or fifty, or a hundred books, you can’t understand them, however well-chon they are. And that if you don’t have an independent reading life—and very few students do—you won’t like reading the books on the list and will forget them the minute you finish them. And that books have, or should have, other lives than as items in a syllabus—which is why there is now a totally misguided attempt to put current literature in the classroom. How strange to think that people need professorial help to read John Updike or Alice Walker, writers people actually do read for fun. But all sides agree, if it isn’t taught, it doesn’t count. What a peculiar notion! Let’s look at the canon question from another angle. Instead of asking what books do we want others to read, let’s ask, why do we read books ourlves? I think it will become clear very quickly that the canon debaters are being a little disingenuous here, are suppressing, in the interest of their own positions, their own experience of reading. Sure, we read to understand our own American culture and history, and we also read to recover neglected masterpieces, and to learn more about the accomplishments of our subgroup and thereby, as I’ve admitted about mylf, increa our lf-esteem. But what about reading for the aesthetic pleasures of language, form, image? What about reading to learn something new, to have a vicarious adventure, to follow the workings of an interesting, if possibly skewed, narrow and ill-tempered, mind? What about reading for the story? For an expended n of sheer human variety? There are a thousand reasons why a book might have a claim on28 our time and attention, other than its canonization. I once infuriated an acquaintance by asrting that Trollope, although in many ways a lesr writer than Dickens, possd some wonderful qualities Dickens lacked: a more realistic view of women, a more skeptical view of good intentions, a subtler n of humor—a drier vision of life that I mylf found congenial. You’d think I’d advocated throwing Dickens out and replacing him with a toaster.2放量上涨9 Becau Dickens is a certified Great Writer, and Trollope is not. Am I saying anything different than what Randall Jarrell said in his great 1953 essay, “The Age of Criticism”? Not really, so I’ll quote him. Speaking of the literary social gatherings of the era, Jarrell wrote: “If, at such parties, you wanted to talk about Ulyss or The Castle or The Brothers Karamazov or The Great Gatsby30 or Graham Greene’s last novel—Important books—you were at the right place…. But if you wanted to talk about…any of a thousand good or interesting but Unimportant books, you couldn’t expect a very ready knowledge or sympathy from most of the readers there. They had looked at the big sights, the current sights, hard, with guides and glass; and tho walks in the country, over unfrequented or thrice-familiar31 territory, all alone—tho walks from which most of the joy and good of reading come—were walks that they hadn’t gone on very often.” I suspect that most canon debaters have, in fact, taken tho solitary rambles, if only out of boredom—how many times, after all, can you reread the Aeneid, or Mrs. Dalloway, or Cotton Comes to Harlem32 (to pick one book from each column)? But tho walks don’t count, becau of another assumption all sides hold in common. And that is that the purpo of reading is not the many varied and delicious satisfactions I’ve mentioned; it’s medicinal. The chief end of reading is to produce a desirable kind of person and a desirable kind of society—a respectful high-minded citizen of a unified society for the conrvatives, an up-to-date and flexible sort for the liberals, a subgroup-identified, robustly confident one for the radicals. How pragmatic, how moralistic, how American! The culture debaters turn out to share a cret suspicion of culture itlf, as well as the anti-pornographer’s belief that there is a simple, one-to-one correlation between books and behavior. Read the conrvatives’ list and produce a nation of xists and racists—or a nation of philosopher kings. Read the liberals’ list and produce a nation of spineless relativists—or a nation of open-minded world citizens. Read the radicals’ list, and produce a nation of psychobabblers and ancestor-worshippers—or a nation of stalwart proud-to-be-me pluralists. But is there any list of a few dozen books that can have such a magical effect, for good or for ill?33 Of cour not. It’s like arguing that the perfectly nutritional breakfast cereal is enough food for the whole day. And so the canon debate is really an argument about what books to cram down the resistant throats of a rentful captive populace of students—and the trick is never to mention the fact that, under such circumstances, one book is as good, or as bad, as another. Becau, as the debaters know from their own experience as readers but never acknowledge becau it would count against34 all sides equally, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured dos. Books do not shape character in any simple way, if indeed they do so at all, or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary run of humanity with larger vocabularies. Books cannot mold a common national purpo when, in fact, people are honestly divided about what kind of country they want—and are divided, moreover, for very good and practical reasons, as they always have been. For the burly purpos, books are all but uless. The way books affect us is an altogether more subtle, delicate, wayward, and individual, not to say35 private, affair. And that reading, at the prent moment, is being made to bear such an inappropriate and simplistic burden speaks to36 the poverty both of culture and of frank political discussion in our time.分隔符怎么插入 On his deathbed, Dr. Johnson—once canonical, now more admired than read—is suppod to have said to a friend who was energetically rearranging his bedclothes, “Thank you, this will do all that a pillow can do.” One might say that the canon debaters are all asking of their handful of chon books that they do a great deal more than any handful of books can do. | 1.when an invitation came my way: when I was invited to state my view 2.take the conrvatives: take the conrvatives as an instance 3.to my mind: in my opinion在好奇中成长作文 4.dead white Western men though they be: although they were all dead white Western male writers 5.at first hand: directly 6.a smattering /我的家乡多么美 of: a small, scattered amount or number of 7.in some depth: to a certain extent 8.Moby-Dick: a novel about whale-catching by American writer, Herman Melville (1819--1891) 9.dip into: read or study for a while 10.snake oil: n. a substance with no real medicinal value sold as remedy for all dias 11.sitting in judgment on: assuming the right to judge someone, especially in a critical manner 12.Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights: two novels respectively by English writers Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte 13.men of letters: authors; persons who write works respected for expressions of thought and imagination 14.Leave It to Beaver: a very popular American TV ries since 1954 15.Color Purple: a novel by American writer Alice Walker 16.got around to: find time for 17.conflict-ridden: be filled and plagued with conflicts 18.do…lf-esteem: promote everyone’s lf-confidence 19.for that matter: as relevant to the thing mentioned 20.role model: a person looked to by others as an example to be imitated 21.so hot under the collar: indignant, angry 22.the other way around: just the opposite 23.in the fullness of time: when the right time comes 24.at stake: in question 25.be ground up: be reduced (to something trivial, fit for teenagers) 26.have been turned off to: have been caud to lo interest in 27.at one’s leisure: at a convenient free time 28.have a claim on: have the right to take 29.replacing him with a toaster: replacing Dickens with someone who admires or flatters women 30.Ulyss: a novel by Irish writer James Joyce; The Castle: a novel by Czech writer Franz Kafka; The Brothers Karamazov: a novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevksy; The Great Gatsby: a novel by American writer F. Scott FitzGerald 31.thrice-familiar: very familiar 32.Aeneid: an epic poem by Roman poet Virgil; Mrs. Dalloway: a novel by British writer Virginia Woolf; Cotton Comes to Harlem: a novel by African American writer Chester Himes 33.for good or for ill = for good or for evil: no matter it is good or not 34.count against: be regarded to be disadvantageous to 35.not to say: an expression ud to express a stronger alternative or addition to something already said 36.speaks to: proves; reveals |
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