Deb also makes a good point. Damn me and my seeing-both-sides-ness.

I rather liked Madame Bovary, inspite of the main characters. It was like a view into a world that I hadn't even considered before. It reminded me a bit of Vanity Fair, except that I found the latter a lot more fun.

I still have scarring from when my English Lit profs shot laser beams at me from their eyes on hearing that I didn't particularly care for Chaucer OR Conrad very much,

Oh yes. I went though the UNC-Chapel Hill English program with a massive hate-on for Faulkner. Some of the profs glared at me as if I'd eaten their puppies in front of them.

I rather like the idea of a Canon. Even the canonical stuff I don't much like (Dickens), or even loathe (Samuel Johnson), is interesting in how it reflects the tastes of the times.

See, I just read Hec's post. It's very learned and very distant and he talks about influence.

Hec, did you actually enjoy any of those writers? Did they tickle something, anything, other than the cerebral? Was there a kick in the soul for you, with one single book by any of those people?

I'm a writer and a reader. Talk to me. Not about the canon, or their influence - I'm a freak, and I don't give a damn about that. Talk to me about the books, and why the made you yell, or crack up, or think, or want to kiss someone.

Why do I have to read something critically? Why can't I read it for the only reason I find remotely acceptable: that the subjectg matter or the language causes an echo somewhere in me?

In all honesty, Deb, when it comes down to it- this is why I read. The child that read anything she could get her hands on clashes with the kicking-and-screaming critical reader that college tried to make me. I can say that for me as someone who loves to read and write, reading 'canonical' work critically, knowing exactly what I did or didn't like and why, has improved how I read. I don't, however, feel that anyone can put the stamp of 'literary' on someone else.

I fought to understand theory in college, and I still fight with it. Kind of makes my head hurt.

I think it's more relevant to this discussion to question what use the Western Canon is, rather than whether it exists or not.

I think its value is what it has always been - it allows a common set of cultural references. In this wise, it's not that different than the way this community uses ME shows as common tongue. It binds, it fosters jokes, it breeds the language, it provides allusions and parallels.

(I also don't dispute its existence, but will also fight to the death about what is or is not on the list.)

That's the fun of it! Unless you're Deb, then it's not fun, just aggravating.

Does the WC have relevance to the books you read in your ordinary habits (and how)?

What canon can often do is give you the cultural context in which a work was created. Knowing that Pound edited Eliot's "The Wasteland" and reading Pound you can see his influence on that work, and how it was shaped. You can also see Pound's influence on Yeats, helping to bring W.B.'s poetry in to the 20th century. Longer term, it's essential to have read something like King Lear to understanding Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Lear influenced her writing, and Wise Blood is (in part) in dialogue with Shakespeare.

Can you enjoy a book that was influential, but has aged badly?

Sometimes. A work that is only of its time tends to reveal the biases and mechanics of its era and those cultural assumptions. The same way that looking at the advertising of a different era will tell you a great deal about the cultural presumptions of that time. My poetry professor said you could learn more from second-rate poetry because genuine works of genius defined their own rules. Whereas the second-tier stuff (by his estimation) exposed the gears and how the poetic effects were put together.

Does ignorance of a segment of the WC necessarily impair your ability to enjoy/benefit from another novel?

See my comments re: Lear/Wise Blood.

I can say that for me as someone who loves to read and write, reading 'canonical' work critically, knowing exactly what I did or didn't like and why, has improved how I read.

See, that makes sense to me. It's not personally where I live, as a reader or a writer - as I just said somewhere else, I probably ought to have a forehead tat or a teeshirt that says "Just tell me a fucking story!" - but that's a reason I can understand.

It's just that my reaction to fiction - I really ought to clarify, I am all about the crit when it comes to nonfiction - is completely visceral, and that's not something I ever want to change.

I love it, or loathe it. My stomach, where the Chinese say the soul lives, moves around because of it. I dream about it, or find myself wondering what the characters do ten years down the line. Things like that.

It's a mantra, of sorts.

That's the fun of it! Unless you're Deb, then it's not fun, just aggravating.

Not aggravating, love. Alien and bizarre, and the few times I've tried it, hours I will never, ever get back in this life.

Why do I have to read something critically?

Well, although sometimes Milton is thrilling, I find that it's a whole nother way of thinking about Paradise Lost, knowing that he was so influential in making the Adam-and-Eve story a story about how Eve was a slutty, corruptible moron. You know, the Bible story is what it is, but the Western Civ. interpretation of that scene -- from the "fruit" being an apple to a million subtle shadings -- is filtered, in a lot of ways, through Milton.

My mother likes to call Milton a villain, for this reason. Anyway, critical reading is what helps me understand that, until he did it that way, Eve-blaming was not nearly as explicit as it has been in discourse since then.

I think the overall meaning of cultural canonicity is whether the reference to a work feels alive, appropriate, or dead and stuffy and irrelevant (or else completely obscure). The ones we're still talking about as a culture at large, lo these many years later, are the ones that are somehow still alive in their descendants, like grandparents passing on their genes (except in much more haphazard fashion).

Not aggravating, love. Alien and bizarre, and the few times I've tried it, hours I will never, ever get back in this life.

Not aggravating then - like math!

Not aggravating then - like math!

Hey! (Nilly's not here to defend math, so I have to.)