Twinkle, twinkle, little bat

Honestly, I am so very, very weary of people who pretend that the field of literature consists of a reading list—one reading list. For every writer added, another is dropped? Ah, no. That’s what the National Association of Surlycurmudgeons will try to tell you, because that’s their job: they don’t punch out and go home until they’ve written or said something to the effect of “Toni Morrison is displacing Shakespeare because of affirmative action racegenderclass OH NOES,” but there’s no reason for a smart person like Rachel Donadio [who wrote an essay in the NYT on "Revisiting the Canon Wars"], whose work I like, to fall for this tripe. In reality, for every writer added, a writer is added to the field of literary study—perhaps to a freshman-level survey; perhaps to a lower-division undergraduate course; perhaps to an upper-division course on a literary genre or period; perhaps to an undergraduate honors seminar; perhaps to a graduate seminar—and those are just the basic possibilities for teaching assignments. Quiet as it’s kept, the college literature curriculum does not consist of one course on the West’s Greatest Hits; you can read Achebe in one course and Yeats in another. Then there are all the possibilities for research, for literary criticism, for scholarly editing, for new anthologies, and for literary history: in none of these endeavors is there a zero-sum game among writers. A new book on the poetry of H.D. [yes! spreading the H.D. love!] does not wipe out another book on the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and a new book on the “long eighteenth century” is enriched, not enfeebled, by a scholar’s study of a wide range of writers and works.
[...]
Perhaps the sorry state of contemporary canon-commentary is best exemplified by Ross Douthat, who picks up the NAS study and writes, “obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing.” Obviously, you just gotta love the “obviously.” In a stroke, five of the most accomplished novels from the high-modernist era—Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves—have now been so pwned by Ross Douthat! No way they deserve to be sitting in the chair reserved for the author of “Mac Flecknoe.”