Pretty reactionary, and just as fatuous as those complainers he is complaining against. Bias is bias, no matter whether you standards are one way or the other. claiming to be above bias doesn't mean you're not biased.
I have no more sympathy for literary reactionaries such as this, because what they're really saying, as smugly as one can imagine, is that they're smarter than you are, and you should just shut up and drink their kool-aid.
The argument against inclusion in the "canon," whatever the canon is—and I have noted many times that those critics who care most about the canon are those who also most often complain against "inclusions"; those viewpoints ARE connected—tends to default to a kind of argument about literary "quality" that is merely another kind of canon-making, just one supposedly based on merit alone. Yet the lists of great books that result from such canon-making tend to be just as subjective, in the end, as every other list.
The whole process is subjective. Claims to make it more objective are themselves an indicator of one kind of bias.
I am not a fan of canons, nor do I much care about inclusiveness. Books should be judged on their own terms, not in respect to whether the author was this, that or whatever.
Pretty reactionary, and just as fatuous as those complainers he is complaining against. Bias is bias, no matter whether you standards are one way or the other. claiming to be above bias doesn't mean you're not biased.
ReplyDeleteI have no more sympathy for literary reactionaries such as this, because what they're really saying, as smugly as one can imagine, is that they're smarter than you are, and you should just shut up and drink their kool-aid.
The argument against inclusion in the "canon," whatever the canon is—and I have noted many times that those critics who care most about the canon are those who also most often complain against "inclusions"; those viewpoints ARE connected—tends to default to a kind of argument about literary "quality" that is merely another kind of canon-making, just one supposedly based on merit alone. Yet the lists of great books that result from such canon-making tend to be just as subjective, in the end, as every other list.
The whole process is subjective. Claims to make it more objective are themselves an indicator of one kind of bias.
It just doesn't compute.
I am not a fan of canons, nor do I much care about inclusiveness. Books should be judged on their own terms, not in respect to whether the author was this, that or whatever.
ReplyDelete