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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Wisconsin Press
If you have lost patience with the canon debate, if you no longer expect much from it beyond unenlightening platitudes, and if unfortunately you also worry too much about literary criticism to be able to close the books on an issue that more than any other continues to define critics in the public eye, then a pleasant and instructive surprise awaits you. The publication of Michael Berube's Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers and John Guillory's Cultural Capital would seem to mark a change in the prevailing weather. Sweeping away a great deal of discursive smog, each book refuses both sides in the usual debate between tradition and inclusion, center and margins. Each risks an idiosyncratic and unfashionable position, yet each does so in the name of an energetic commitment to the values that have been driving the humanities to reform themselves. And in so doing, each contributes something to the creation of a new public position, a common sense for and about criticism that will perhaps relieve us of some of our recent public burdens.
Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon speaks to a familiar if often inexplicit paradox of the new canonicity: an overcrowding of the center as more and more marginal texts are welcomed there, and at the same time a reverse flow toward the margins as the center, hit by a sudden drop in literary values, seems unable to confer on its occupants that unstable currency of subversion and transgression in which textual merit is now measured. How is it that the canon is at once the place to be, and not to be? The fact of having been left out of the canon in the past has become, or at least has come to seem, a sufficient reason for a text's inclusion now. Both Berube and Guillory insist that it is not. Models of "exclusion," "repression," and "neglect," they argue, are confused and ambiguous guides, whether to past inattentions or to present rectifications. Perhaps, as Guillory proposes, the promiscuous free-for-all they produce can be remedied by distinguishing between the restricted number of texts appropriate to be taught and the much larger number of texts that can legitimately serve criticism as objects of research. But even for those texts that will be taught, the heart of the problem remains. While inclusion proceeds apace, any move toward the center of the pedagogical canon, however recent and conditional (one thinks of Zora Neale Hurston or Maxine Hong Kingston), has come to seem cause for suspicion, grounds for re-examining the author's political profile in search of hidden iniquities. In short, marginality as such is becoming a major criterion for literary value - an extremely untrustworthy and even self-destructive criterion, of course, for a text no sooner finds itself elevated to a place of honor than (like the "don't trust anybody over thirty" rule once upon a time) the same principle that raised it up is obliged to turn against it.
With this paradox as his framework, Berube analyzes the reception of two writers, an Anglo-American novelist who has been canonized, Thomas Pynchon, and an African-American poet who has not, Melvin Tolson. The juxtaposition, which gives his book the verve and torque of a good essay, carries a number of polemical points. "When the two are read against each other, each becomes the other's foil: Tolson's academic aspirations are mocked by Pynchon, but Pynchon's ignorance or dismissal of his academic reception is mocked by Tolson; Pynchon's reception demonstrates that canons are made, not born, that reception is less a matter of |time' than of serious...
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