American Lit – It’s Still the Same Old Story

March 29, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In Commentary, D.G. Myers (here) asks:

Has the literary scholars’ 25-year worship at the holy shrine of race, class, and gender brought about major changes in the canon?

Since Allan Bloom and probably before, the folks on the right have been wailing that liberal American lit profs were scrapping the canon in favor of politically correct trash.  Myers follows his snarky question with some evidence – the number of “pieces of scholarship” an author has received in the past 25 years, according to the MLA International Bibliography. 
The number in brackets, Myers says, represents  “the rise or fall of each writer when compared to his or her ranking since 1947.”

( 1.) Henry James (3,188 items) [+1]
( 2.) William Faulkner (2,955) [-1]
( 3.) T. S. Eliot (2,659) [+1]
( 4.) Herman Melville (2,579) [-1]
( 5.) Vladimir Nabokov (2,290) [+5]
( 6.) Ernest Hemingway (2,220) [-0-]
( 7.) Edgar Allan Poe (1,958) [-2]
( 8.) Toni Morrison (1,950) [+9]
( 9.) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1,751) [-4]
(10.) Walt Whitman (1,647) [-2]
(11.) Emily Dickinson (1,623) [+2]
(12.) Ezra Pound (1,620) [-3]
(13.) Willa Cather (1,482) [+5]
(14.) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1,326) [-3]
(15.) Wallace Stevens (1,122) [-1]
(16.) Edith Wharton (1,087) [+5]
(17.) Henry David Thoreau (1,076) [-5]
(18.) F. Scott Fitzgerald (1,002) [-3]
(19.) Flannery O’Connor (935) [+3]
(20.) Mark Twain (882) [-4]
(21.) John Steinbeck (823) [+2]
(22.) William Carlos Williams (772) [-0-]
(23.) Saul Bellow (706) [+2]
(24.) Richard Wright (670) [+2]
(25.) Robert Frost (661) [-5]

Can that number in brackets really be change of rank since 1947?  If so, in 1947 Nabokov was ranked 10th, though at that time he had published only two books in English, both largely unnoticed; Toni Morrison would have been ranked 17th in 1947, the year she turned 16.  Myers must mean since 1987, 25 years ago.

But whatever that number means, it does show an increase for all five women and the one African American male on the list.  That increased attention to women writers may reflect an increase in the number of women scholars.  Or maybe just the recognition that Flannery O’Connor was a very good writer (though both she Nabokov dwelt far from political correctness).

But for the most part, the canon hasn’t changed much.  American lit scholars are still cranking out articles on good old Henry James.  The Commentary insinuation that liberalism is transforming American culture, replacing noble classics with tawdry tracts – that moan is utterly predictable (I think Commentary has a regular section called Geschrei).  But the message in the evidence seems to be: same old, same old.