I feel that I have to address some misconceptions here. "The Literary Canon" does not exist inside academia as such. It is a casualty of the political correctness debate, with Bloom and his minions on one side and the PC proponents on the other side. We on the outside of that debate marvel and cringe as they throw rocks at each other; as usual, the truth
lies somewhere in the middle, with a lot of welts on its head from occasionally
forgetting to duck (see addendum for more on this). So since no one is stepping up to define it as it really
is and then defend it, I nominate myself since I lived it via an English
undergraduate degree.
The first thing is to understand how academic English (and related studies)
actually work. A lot of people whose experience of literature starts and
ends with one or two courses to meet a "core requirement" are
under the impression that literature is about reading something and then
evaluating it based on how much you liked it, or didn't. While this is a
perfectly valid way of determining how to stock your personal bookshelf
at home (nobody should be able to say that a book you like is, e.g., "tripe")
this is not what academic English is about. There are rules and requirements,
like any other academic discipline. The phrase that usually embodies these
rules is that the work must be "of literary merit". This is code
for the idea that academics mostly agree that the work in question follows
the rules, and exemplifies them well.
The rules are hard to define because they aren't formal or written down,
and academics generally agree where they begin but differ quite a bit where
they end, and around the fringes. (Literature is quite similar to Economics
in this respect.) But in general you need to have a certain amount of cleverness
in: richness of narrative structure, character and character development,
symbolism and allusion, social or political commentary, rhetorical device,
and historical significance. Works of literary merit also usually address
the human condition in some historical (eg: working conditions in Victorian
Britain) or universal (mortality, love, suffering, etc.) way. All this may
seem rather limited and prescriptive, but keep telling yourself that this
is an academic discipline, with the emphasis on discipline (=rules). You
have to agree at least a little bit on the rules of the game in order to
enable any discourse you hope to have about the participants. In other words,
you have to have something to write about that other people can understand. It isn't acceptable to say that
Hamlet is great because 'It rocked' or 'It made me cry' because that doesn't
really communicate anything to anyone else. It may in fact have rocked,
but you must explain its greatness (or lack of...) in terms of the ways
it uses symbolism, its structure, etc.
Now, you don't have to agree that these are things that make a work worthy
of reading, and there's plenty of wiggle room to argue your case for something
that starts out a bit on the fringe. When I was in an English program it
was uncommon to read any sort of science fiction, whereas nowadays courses
on Postmodern fiction regularly include e.g. Neuromancer, which sci-fi
fans had been raving about for years. However, the same fans also tend to
agree that his writing is a cut above most of the rest of the genre, and
virtual reality, etc., have become an imaginable part of the human condition
where they were not before, so it's now reasonable to include in a reading
list, because it is of literary merit. But it's not yet part of the Canon.
The "Canon", loosely defined, is a "best-of" set
of works with literary merit. To the extent that it exists at all it could
be defined as the books that would appear most often, and highest up, in
a poll of best works that was given to people trained in the rules, ie:
academic literature professors. The thing that distinguishes the Canon from
your random work of literary merit is that the work has, to use an overworked
phrase, "withstood the test of time". It's not just that it was
worthy of study when it was written; it has remained a fertile area of study
where other works have fallen by the wayside. Part of this is academic preference,
and since the academy trains its successors there is a sort of false consensus
that writers like Spenser, which wharfinger calls "a historical curiosity
at best", have been elevated to sainthood to the point that it is heresy
to question their worth at all.
A little bit of that goes on, of course, but it is both sad and narrow-minded
to dismiss Spenser in general and the whole Canon in particular as some
sort of grand academic conspiracy to force irrelevant, historically curious,
pre-Twentieth Century literature down students' throats. Spenser is wonderful
stuff, but it's difficult, and it's just not very available to people without
an academic guide or some training, if only because the 16th Century language
is really rough going. This is not saying you're stupid if you don't understand
or like it, it is only saying that what makes it great is not available
without a fair amount of background and plodding. Is that elitist? Not really.
The same thing applies to for example, people who view mathematics as just
counting and arithmetic. Is the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem a major and
amazing result? Yes. Can I explain the basic idea to you if you don't have
a math background? Probably. Can you truly appreciate it and its beauty
without an understanding of topology? Nope. Spenser is no different.
Which brings me to the point in the above writeup that I most disagreed
with: "When literature becomes a shrine to itself, it is dead".
Part of the reason the Canon exists (in whatever form we can agree that
it does) is that writing cannot be understood in a vacuum. Literature is
rich and allusive; words and names and actions and tropes have meaning partly
because they echo (great) works that have gone before them. Milton, for
instance, is much richer when you know the KJV Bible and Homer and Virgil
and Aristotle, precisely because Milton read them and incorporated and expanded their ideas. (Milton read everything.)
In turn, Milton had a profound influence on the Romantic Poets. The reason
that English departments insist that you read Plato, Dante, Keats, Shakespeare,
and even Spenser is that they are part of a rich tapestry of thinking and
writing whose parts can be admired alone, but which become all the more
thrilling and exciting when you take a step back and admire the whole picture.
Literature has always been a shrine to itself, as well as a parody of itself,
a reinvention of itself, and a rebellion against itself. That's part of
what makes it interesting.
wharfinger: Let me say this first: I am not defending the Canon, only
attempting to describe it. It is what it is--I am not
at all advocating an argumentum ad antiquitatem, if that was indeed
you who editorially soft-linked it below. My areas of interest were/are
17th Century poetry and 20th Century fiction. I'm not a huge fan of
Spenser either; he certainly doesn't rock the way Milton does, or
Faulkner, Don DeLillo or Barthelme. The point is that I thought he
sucked ass until somebody taught me Spenser and the 16th Century, and
told me what to look for. I hated Victorian novels too until a course on the gender politics of 19th Century
literature. Part of my point is that a lot of the great works are hard,
and enshrining and teaching them perhaps helps people to keep reading them
instead of deciding that they suck (as I did) before doing some of the heavy
lifting, although some of them, as you suggest, suck even after the heavy
lifting. And no, from the quality of your writing, I figured you knew
your shit, but most people who level those kind of arguments don't, which
was why I mentioned it.
Second: I said it before, everyone should come to his or her understanding
of what literature rocks, and read that. If that's Seuss (on my bookshelf
btw), or Tom Clancy, great. However, I'm not offended that academics generally
agree on a "best-of" list that can be used as a guide.
I am offended at the suggestion that "research done by academic
mathematicians is about new mathematics, but research done by academic English
professors is about old literature." Considering that I have done both,
I disagree: both involve new ideas about existing (perhaps old) stuff. The
most important problems in math are rather old: the Riemann hypothesis,
the Poincare conjecture. Researchers take what has already been written
and expand on it. It's all a giant (albeit magnificent) house of cards based
on the Peano postulates. If I publish a paper on Milton it's new
ideas about Milton, not old (otherwise what's the point?). Stanley Fish
revolutionized Milton study when he wrote Surprised by Sin.
And don't try to pin publish-or-perish on literature: there's plenty of
banal, uninteresting, crufty corners of mathematics that get dragged out
and published in the interest of tenure; I've seen it happen.
Addendum on the PC vs. Bloom debate: My point is that the rhetoric
and politics of PC (from both sides) tend to polarize the (I think, rather interesting) debates
about canons and canonicity into emotional, petty, counterproductive
name-calling. If we have people on the right yelling that
"this list represents the best, you must read it" and the people
on the left yelling "that list is racist and gender-biased"
it effectively shuts down the possibility of intelligent discussion, such
as what we are trying to node here. I hated that rancor, and it's one
of the reasons I got out of literature and into mathematics and software engineering.