You know I actually find myself taking a moderate position in this discussion rather than either of the extremes. I don't think the undermining ot the canon (to the extent that it happened) was a bad thing. There really was an idea that there was this list of great books that everybody should have read , and that everything else was trash (and most of the non-trash was in fact by dead white men.) And I think it is a damn good thing that that was undermined. And while I have serious doubts about the value of post-structuralist philosophy as philosophy, I do find on ocassion of value as method of anlysis. I do find a canon of value - but no as a crem-de-la-crem thing - rather as a means of maintaining a common cultural language. In other words I think it is good if a culture has a short list of works which every educated person should be familiar with, and a somewhat longerl list which every educated person should be familar with a substantial number. (And note that I said "works" not "books".) That gives us a common sent of stories and metaphors and analogies to work from - a common cultural language.

Does this mean that there is no difference in value between one work and another. Of course not, but I maintain that the canon does not actually establish quality. It is a common cultural language - not a best of the best thing. If a lot of the works in the canon are high quality this is a bonus. But there were always be some crap in any canon, and there will always be non-canonical stuff superior to some of the canonical stuff. Really the best you can hope for is that you end up with this common body of works to serve as part of your shared cultural language,and that half or more of it is not crap.

And at the same time you have to recoginize that there is a lot of snobbery in the field. I'm friends with professor of campartive literature at .. well let's keep her name out of this. She is a fairly well known post-structuralist, and used to comment to me on how much more phisophically rigorours post-structuralism than the more "primitive" schools of literary analysis that preceded it are. "Yeah, " I always used to reply sarcasitically, "because Robert Graves was such an intellectual lightweight". Not that the older schools did not have their own snobbrey problems - the idea that certain works have been identified as THE great works, and everything else is secondm rate or worse. And with a very male, white, upper class bias besides. I think it is very hard to do literary analysis without eliteism (elitisim not in the sense that some works are better than others - which I hope is not in dispute, but elitism in the sense that the literary analysist are the experts who have identifited what is good and bad and why. For a while now it has been an intellectual faux paux to claim to have all the answers. But there are still plenty of people out there who will claim to have all the questions.) It is not impossible - but I think a lot people in the field do not manage to avoid it - including people who are anything but snobbish or elitist in their personal lives. I

In other words, I think the snobbery and elitism are structurally built in tendencies in literary criticism. I don't this invalidates the value of the field; it just is something that anyone who engages in it needs to be aware of and struggle against - and not assume they have any immunity to.

[on edit - ok discussion moved on by the time i hit post - obviously about literary theory not wuthering heights]

Oh, wait! (I'm amused at the things I underlined when I read it more than half my life ago.) *This* passage is why I thought the Cathy -n- Heathcliff relationship was What Every Girl Wants:

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."

Huh. That actually still sounds kind of good. But in the larger context of the novel, a little too obsessive-freaky.

Wrod, on both counts.

I have to admit when I last read Wuthering Heights (at 12) I thought both Cathy and Heathcliffe were nutjobs.

And zombies definitely would definitely have added something.

And a further part of the conversation from which the above quote was taken:

"....my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff -- he's always, always in my mind -- not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself -- but as my own being -- so, don't talk of our separation again...."

As an older, wiser Steph than the one who underlined those words, what I think it is, is that it takes romantic love a shade too far. "My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but necessary," is nice, and makes me want that kind of love. But "Nelly, I am Heathcliff," is just too, too obsessive and dysfunctional.

Yeah, I'm with Cathy up until the self-identification part. I can relate to a love the permeates everything, but the rest of it strikes me as the sort of ecstatic thing you run into with religious folk.

Because I've nearly finished a book? Because I like zombies? Because I'm up at the bright and shiny hour of ten in the morning? I don't see where this is coming from, blondie.

Because I see you post in the middle of the night, the day, the morning, you seem to be in the lab all the time, and yet somehow you manage to watch whole seasons of shows (Dead Like Me, ME's etc) AND read.

I rest my case.

t she says, tossing her blonde hair

t /giving you a hard time

t not really here

Isn't there a fucking ghost in this book? There are only forty pages left.

Cathy in the beginning haunts that lame-ass tenant narrator. One of the best (and most disturbing) scenes ever written.

I think why that book is so brilliant is that you can interpret it in a thousand different ways. It's told third-hand by people who really don't get Cathy and Heathcliff at all. (The narrator is the complete opposite of them, he lets all of his relationships end before they begin) Since nobody who's telling the story really gets C or H, on some pages you sympathize with them and on some pages they're just these ultimate bastards.

I see the book as more of a story about people trying break out of confining roles and failing spectacularly. That moment when Cathy's dieing and she says that she feels like some one took her little girl self who was free and wild and transformed her all at once into this "normal" civilized woman--that's the moment when I relate to Cathy. There's a similar one later when Heathcliff describes how the past 20 years of his life he's spent searching for Cathy's spirit. When he's in the house, she's outside. When he's outside, she's inside. It's mostly their own fault, but it is horrible how again and again everyone and everything denies them peace or comfort.

My heights don't particularly wuther. Why is that? I suppose I should be grateful I do not live on a moor in a time before electricity, especially if there were no Secret Garden Dickons around to keep one sane.

For the life of me, I can't remember a single thing about deconstruction that I learned in college, except that it didn't get an "ism" at the end because "it wasn't a philosophy".

Dead puppies aren't much fun.