ENOUGH DEAD WHITE GUYSSSSSSS

at least a sensible opinion

Underrated.

It's cute how you think "the canon" is this monolithic and unchangeable structure, and not a very flimsy, almost non existant, consensus which exists mostly so academics can "break it" by proving this author is and/or that one isn't part of your precious fucking cannon. Harold Bloom is a sad fat memester who fell for the aestheticism spook, and americans, being as obsessed as they are with ranking, listing and quantifying things, fell for it, like a bunch of gullible morons, believing you will somehow be "cultured" if you manage to read a hundred fucking books (él oh él)

>It's cute how you think "the canon" is this monolithic and unchangeable structure,
I'm not reading any farther. That's not what I think at all. The hint here is "be studied". As in, studied in schools, a place you don't seem to have spent much time in.
You're nitpicking at nothing, and for whatever reason not even considering the point.

I don't even get. If you don't think the canon is monolithic, why are you against the inclusion of new works in said cannon?

In what way is that "sensible"? Leaves out Sappho, Dickinson, M. Shelley, Lady Murasaki, etc

>The canon is diverse. I am pretty in to merit. Which no, is not to say that non-white people have created no work of merit, just that there should be no special accommodation because people are not white.

Do you even read?

But no one is arguing Rupi Kaur should be included in the canon. At the same time, you can't deny the importance of James Baldwin or Credo Mutwa, and I doubt you can deny that the canon is made mostly of white europeans because these were the people ruling when we first came up with the notion of a "canon".

Its mostly made up of white men because they have been writing in Western languages at a high level of proficiency for the longest in the greatest numbers.

But now we have enough access and works by other groups of people who can be easily accessed and judged, and perhaps even included in the canon. There's no reason to keep anything out if it's accepted by enough people.

There's no barrier to entry but talent.

Different positions come from different experiences wing-wang. Marquez and Ellison are valuable additions to the canon because of the fresh perspectives they offer. That's the point of expanding the study of literature beyond the basic fucking Anglo-Canonical starter pack you get in shitty high schools and basic intro lit courses. It isn't that hard to understand unless you're so resistant to discussing race at all that you are willfully unwilling to understand why someone like Ellison was considered one of the most important writers of his time. If you think Invisible Man could have been written as powerfully by his white contemporaries you are being disingenuous.

>Willingly depriving yourself of Austen and Woolf because of ideology.

If non-whites write something as good or better, let them be embraced.

They're canonical because of their enourmous influence on world literature and culture. Updating the canon with bogs for the sake of diversity is stupid, especially if they aren't deserving.

>non-whites

Mhm. I can tell you're gonna be a valuable contributor to this discussion.

>thinks reading 100 books is an accomplishment

did your school abandon letter grades too?

Yeah but no one is doing that. Any course including blogs in coursework is not trying to somehow elevate them to the canon. They are using "new" media as an aide for classroom discussion you dingus. I just finished a BA in English at a tiny private liberal arts college. The closest we ever came to the boogeyman you're discussing was a private facebook group created for us to do group commentary and reflection on our course readings in a creative writing workshop course.

The thread started with "white males" so what do you want.

NOGS not blogs.

It was a typo.

Then that's an even fucking stupider thing to say. I'll repeat my original statement. Is part of the draw of literature not the fact that great writers awaken us to the aesthetic, moral, human, and experiential commonalities across the vast swath of human experience? Is great writing not great because it accomplishes this aeathetic realization in some interesting, unique, or unexpected way for the reader? Why then would you not be excited about new voices being discovered and celebrated? What exactly do you want from the study of literature? More of it exists than the Romantic poets and the traditional canonical works of the Anglo-European novelistic tradition and the culturally important works of Western philosophy? Why is this controversial? I love books. I love finding new ones that really blow my hair back. I take an especial pleasure in doing so when it is someone to whom I had yet to be introduced, because then I get to find new people to discuss a new work with and show it to all the people I like to talk to. If you take no joy in the discovery of new and different voices and perspectives in literature why do you study it? You do realize that all the "white" authors you prize so highly voraciously read across cultural and linguistic boundaries in the same way students of literature continue to do today, except now we have access to the entire world instead of only the couple dozen countries that could afford a commercial printing industry accompanied by a ready readership as was the case until very recently in the total timeline of literary studies.

Not that guy you're replying to but.. sorry you're wrong and dumb. Nogs have yet to create a work as intellectually and spiritually stimulating as Blood Meridian. I'm not even white but it seems to me that the Anglo is unmatched when it comes to literature, philosophy and introspection.
And if you really believe that James Joyce or Tolstoy wasted their time reading shit that wasn't by white people, you're out of your mind.

I'm not reading that shit.

who the fuck are james baldwin or credo mutwa?

Cool.

Yeah. Joyce was surely completely unversed in the fucking bible, all of which was written by semitic folks in the near east, with the exception of the decidedly swarthy Greeks who composed the Gospels.

>Credo Mutwa

I've never even heard of him/her/it, and I'm fairly well read.

Ha you're dumb, the translation and prose he relied on was compiled by English scholars

Why, let's hear it from the man himself:
>I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran...

>"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon

And then Bloom begins:

>The Ancient Near East
>Gilgamesh
>Egyptian Book of the Dead
>Holy Bible (King James Version)
>The Apocrypha
>Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)

>Ancient India (Sanskrit)
>Mahabharata
>Bhagavad-Gita
>Ramayana

>The Ancient Greeks
>Homer
> Iliad
> Odyssey
>Hesiod
> Works and Days
> Theogony
>Archilochos, Sappho

The Original Lesbian™ shows up as the 4th Greek writer for crying out loud. And yes, I recommend her too.

Fast forward to the 20th Century, I picked a random author, because picking from 'Africa' would be to easy:

>Rita Dove
> Selected Poems
Well, she's not white, she's not a man, and she's not dead either. Fuck Google in particular.

Christianity is basically white, sorry

>to easy
*too

Whew lad. I don't even know where to start with this one. The text itself is literally the fucking most important literary antecedent to all western literature. The prose of its translation is dependent upon the value of the original texts themselves. Harold Bloom, in his book Genius, credits not the translators but the anonymous scribe of the original Jewish text as the genius responsible for its power, and even proposes the novel theory that some of the most powerful writing of the Old Testament was in fact written by a woman. Not to mention that he also includes fucking MUHAMMAD in the book for the genius of the prose of the Quaran. And, for that matter, RALPH ELLISON. You know nothing. You do not love literature. No one who actually loves literature behaves this way, not even someone as conservative in their protection of the traditional canon as fucking Harold Bloom.

Tell that to St. Augustine bud.

A white male having opinions is viewed as prima facie evidence of bigotry in 2017. We're supposed to "shut up and let People of Colour have their say"

Tell that to Coptic Christians and Ethiopians.

>argentina
>white

False. No one is asking you to shut up except for when they are literally actively speaking. Otherwise known as basic manners, but I guess you don't afford that courtesy to non-whites huh?

>dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4154226/Shut-white-people-argues-DNC-chair-hopeful.html

It's pretty common actually. Our "voices" are "overrepresented" you see.

>thedailymail

Oh, Gee, they would never misrepresent something to fit their own reactionary narrative would they? It blows my fucking minds that white folks can have some sort of fucking persecution complex in this day and age. I say that as actual poor white trash from Appalachia, a region thag HAS actually been historically fucked forever.

There are people arguing that we should be disenfranchised, it's hard to see that as evidence of anything other than persecution. Maybe things aren't so bad right now, but where's the arrow pointing? Maybe you are a little out of touch with ethnic politics in 2017, since you are by your own admission a hick from the middle of nowhere.

Remember, Japanese men don't count, because they've actually achieved things of significance

Do I smell roast beef in this thread?

No, I just get my political news other places than fucking /pol/, which is the only way your view of reality could be so warped as to believe that there is any serious political movement to disenfranchise whites. Being from Appalachia and getting an education just kept me from buying into the myth that minorities are somehow my economic, cultural, or political enemies when it is in fact rich folks that have been fucking over everyone in Appalachia white, black, Indian or whatever for literally the entire history of the United States.

How can you read great works of literature and still be so gullible as to buy into that kind of ignorant shit? I mean, really, how? How can you be in love with literature and close yourself off to everything that doesn't fall into some historically arbitrary set of canonical works? Why would you not be excited to learn about new, exciting, powerful literature no matter where it came from? The only answer is pure prejudice or bias.

>that could afford a commercial printing industry
Lmao. Lack of printing technology didnt stop the greeks and romans writing notable literature.

Because they were more advanced as a civilisation than the third world is today.

The people who start these threads don't care about books, they're just triggered by ideological impurity.

I don't know if you are intentionally misreading my post or not, but I'm specifically arguing against the idea that having a commercial printing industry and a mass-literate population was the prerequisite for producing notable work. I'm talking about the generations of writers and scholars that came to define the canonical works as we understand them in a modern sense, which were almost exclusively European and American academics, which lead to the study of a very particular set of culturally significant texts within that tradition to the exclusion of anything that was not already a part of it.

You're portraying the narrative that the poor indentured black people couldn't read anything because white people hadn't given them printing technology yet.

It's just the typical oppression fallacy. There is nothing worth reading outside of the great civilisations except ignorance

I have no idea how that's what you got out of anything I posted. But. Whatever you say bud. With reading comprehension like yours, it's no wonder literature hasn't made you a better or more thoughtful person than the one you are.

What I'm implying is that the rest of the world, apart from much of Asia, lacks a tradition as profound as the Greco-Roman one. There are no contemporary civilisations as great as those ancient civilisations. Which is what you don't seem to get.

Great, so you have your favourite "swarthy" types in the western canon, according to none other than Bloom. What the fuck are you whining about, again? You seem to be on some sort of internet crusade.

I just do not understand how that is relevant to my argument, which is that because our entire literary heritage comes from a single tradition, it is not unreasonable to seek to introduce new perspectives into our dialogue about literature? To say that someone like Toni Morrison, Marquez, Richard Wright, Murakami, Achebe, Rushdie, or Nadine Gordimer are not exciting contemporary writers worthy of discussing because they dilute the purity of tradition is fucking ridiculous.

As someone who really values literature, I'm responding to what I perceive as ignorant and ill-informed stances on literature on a messageboard devoted to such discussion. I used Bloom as an example because he is known to habe conservative views on what constitues great literature, simply to illustrate that Bloom, despite being notoriously conservative in taste, does not dismiss work out of hand because it does not fit into some narrow, arbitrary stable of allowable great work, which, to me, is the only stance one can have if you truly love literature.

I don't have to be on a crusade to challenge what I think to be stances lacking basic critical thought on a board devoted to discussion.

>How can you read great works of literature and still be so gullible as to buy into that kind of ignorant shit? I mean, really, how? How can you be in love with literature and close yourself off to everything that doesn't fall into some historically arbitrary set of canonical works? Why would you not be excited to learn about new, exciting, powerful literature no matter where it came from? The only answer is pure prejudice or bias.

You don't know anything about me, my man. I've never once mentioned my choice of reading material ITT.

How much did George Soros pay you for that post?

Headline: "Students don't mind reading dead white guys"
/pol/ interpretation: WHY THE FUCK ARE STUDENTS SO AGAINST READING DEAD WHITE MEN? WE'RE A MINORITY IN CHINA GET REDPILLED

Its mostly made up of white men, because white men are superior to women and shitskins.

My highschool English teacher actually glossed over Aristotle as "some dead white guy" while we were doing rhetoric and simplified logos, ethos and pathos to "head", "heart" and "personally" for some twisted and unexplained reason

>They're canonical because of their enourmous influence on world literature and culture.

Idiot do you not know what a canon is

Given the context of this thread and the general tenor of this conversation, did I make an unreasonable assumption? I'd be glad however to have a reapproachment and learn more about your stance vis a vis the OP, which is white I'm really sort of trying to address with my posts here.

I've read most of those writers and they're very mediocre. Especially Murakami, I mean holy shit you're really setting a low bar. I bet you don't even mean Ryu Murakami, who is objectively the least bad of the two. You clearly haven't read much outside of your own little middlebrow cannon.

Very Sad!

>achebe
I really hope you are joking

Wow you are so smart and clever because you read the new york times and not stupid alt right news am i right?
Please tell us more on how enlightened and morally superior you are.

K.

I've seen this kind of post before

Le evil /pol/ am I right?
Such an insightful observation

Yeah you did make an unreasonable assumption. I'm tired of all the political battles over literature. I only care about literary quality: if you write good stuff, I will read it. I don't care what colour you are. I will not, however, read someone who is praised solely for the sake of praising a minority. For one thing it's condescending to minorities, and on the other hand it lowers standards.

Wach out we got an oldfag over here.
Pls dont doxx me with your Ipad

Demonstrating /pol/'s excellent reading skills here

Cool story bro

Not really. Achebe isn't my favorite of that list, but I think he's objectively an interesting prose stylist at times and certainly important to talk about in the context of post-colonial literature as a source of new perspectives in our broader literature. I like Ben Okri better, but he's not exactly making waves in literature courses worldwide.

I don't read the New York Times.

Readings skills are for cucks

>cool story bro
What are you 14?

Haha good one, what are you 12?

Achebe is an ape who couldn't even understand heart of darkness correctly
post-colonial literature is political trash only enabled by its agnsty and impotent rage being popular among the current generations of ideologically minded slaves

>certainly important to talk about in the context of post-colonial literature as a source of new perspectives in our broader literature

See this is what I don't care about. Your perspective doesn't mean shit if you can't write well. I was forced to read Achebe in college and his story about yams somehow managed to paint Africans in a bad light even though Achebe himself was an African.

>agnsty

Lmao.

I just don't see the evidence for what you are talking about happening though. Plenty of bullshit book-of-the-month type shit gets inordinate praise all the time regardless of the color of the person on the book jacket. I don't assume we're talking about shitty literature. That does not mean we should not be excited by the introduction of new, more diverse voices into our conversations about literature. My stance this entire thread has been that, if someone really enjoys the study of literature, they aren't categorically dismissing any work that doesn't arbitraily fit into a pre-conceived canon of literature. Canonical literature is valuable for a reason, but to dismiss out of hand someone like Toni Morrison or Marquez or Octavio Paz is fucking ridiculous and reflects a poorly reasoned stance on literary value.

that's right faggot, I called that NIGGER achebe ANGSTY. What are you going to do about it, write a poem about how much you hate whitey?

I've said already that I think Achebe is an interesting prose stylist. Would I put him against Joyce? No. But I certainly think he would rank with Steinbeck, and no one here would bat an eye if that's who we were discussing. If you don't like Achebe, how about Ben Okri? The principle of the argument remains the same. Dismissing literature on the presupposition in cannot be good because the author is Nigerian is bullshit.

You really showed him.

Being Nigerian is a pretty good indicator of how good your writing is likely to be

This is exactly what I mean. You do not like Achebe, so you dismiss an entire, unbelievably diverse body of global literature based not on a case by case analysis of value, but on an ideologically inflexible indictment of a body of literature that spans the entire globe. That's not the behavior of someone who loves literature as an aesthetic body. It's the behavior of someone that enjoys the politics of reading certain kinds of literature which, coincidentally, is exactly what you're accusing other people of.

Cool.

You're right, I don't love literature as purely an aesthetic body, yet not as a political body either. Great literature transcends the political and the aesthetic, and "post colonial" literature is almost always political by definition

I wish I could say that writers who aren't white males have written anything of worth, but I simply can't.

I omit 'straight' because the gays occasionally shit out something good.

The sad thing about African culture is they experienced a great Renaissance in the 20th century with segregation lessened and educational opportunities opened to them and you got quite a nice handful of great African American writers and not to mention all the Jazz players, then they slowly died out and they did a 180, getting completely swallowed up in the wrong kid of race issues and broken communities.

The aesthetic is political. Aesthetics is not immune to ideology dude. Why do you think there are different movements even within canonical Western literature? Aesthetic sensibilities shift with culture. That's why a canon of literature exists. You keep the best, most succesful works of a given movement or body of literature and leave the rest behind. That's why we study literature. To find valuable works. If you dismiss bodies of literature out of hand, that is not reflective of a critical love and appreciation of literature for itself. It means that ideological considerations trump the actual texts themselves. I think that is an incredibly narrow-minded way to approach the study of literature.

>That's why we study literature. To find valuable works.

>That's why we study literature. To find valuable works.
I think you're a little confused here user, I really don't give a fuck about whatever academic industry you're talking about. What makes literature great isn't aesthetic and I'm curious as to why you would defend shit like achebe from that viewpoint

We do not study literature in order to find, preserve, and discuss valuable (read: aesthetically, morally, culturally) works of literature?

It's amazing how tone deaf they are when the only poc they advocate studying are bourgeois Americans and Europeans. Can you imagine these people telling us to study native Chinese or Nigerian writers?