Canon will expand with the times

By: Dennis M. Clausen - Commentary | Sunday, January 28, 2007 7:59 PM PST ∞

Sex! Sex! Sex! Now that I have your attention, let's talk about the more mundane, infinitely less enticing issue of college curricula. As reported in a Jan. 11 North County Times article, "Palomar student objects to 'offensive' course material," a student in professor Sonia Gutierrez's class at Palomar College has objected to works he believes are offensive and pornographic. The titles themselves ---- "Penis Passions," "Vagina Monologues" and "Brokeback Mountain" ---- are certain to generate controversy, regardless of how well-grounded the course is in literary studies.

This is not a new controversy. The Young America's Foundation publishes a yearly list of controversial courses taught in American colleges. In a Jan. 14 Los Angeles Times editorial, "They twisted 'The Phallus,' " Charlotte Allen condemned these courses. "Too much of American higher education," she wrote, "has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live."

My students at the University of San Diego would probably consider my book selections to be fairly traditional, even conservative. I believe the primary purpose of literature courses is to teach the great books from the past. Professors like me, however, have to acknowledge that the literary canon is not static. It is always changing. Who, then, is to be the final arbitrator of what books should or should not be taught?

Students who took literature courses 100 years ago might never have studied American literature. It was considered a greatly inferior branch of English literature, not worthy of serious study. The radicals of that era were the professors who insisted that American authors and texts deserved the same considerations as their British counterparts.

Fast forward a few decades when the professors who shook the walls of academia were the ones who insisted that women who attended our colleges and universities deserved to have more female authors included in the canon. Who today would question that female authors should be taught in university literature courses?

A few decades later, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans insisted that their authors also should be included in the literary canon. Once again, professors who taught these authors were considered radicals. Today, few would question the legitimacy of these authors in university literature courses.

Does this mean that the authors and texts in professor Gutierrez's literature course will someday be as acceptable as female and minority authors are today? It's too early to tell. I do know that it is better to allow these texts to be taught in college courses than to ban them because they are controversial. Many of the literary texts we now consider classics were condemned as too controversial when they were first published.

We should remember that one of the most important works in all of American literature ---- Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" ---- was also one of the most banned books. Yet Ernest Hemingway said of this controversial, deliberately inflammatory novel: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' "

Escondido resident Dennis M. Clausen is a freelance columnist for the North County Times and a professor of American literature at the University of San Diego.

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