Canonical Predicaments

• Published in: Legacy (Amherst, Mass.) Mass.), 2017-01, Vol.34 (1), p.194-197
• Main Authors: White, Ed, Faherty, Duncan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Allusion; Austen, Jane (1775-1817); British & Irish literature; Classrooms; Emotions; English literature; Gothic fiction; Honesty; Legacies; Literary canon; Literary characters; Literature; Narrative techniques; Ngai, Sianne; Plot (Narrative); Politics; Reading; Reprint; Rowson, Susanna; Sentimental novels; Stress; Sympathy; Teachers; Writers
• ISSN: 0748-4321; 1534-0643
• DOI: 10.5250/legacy.34.1.0194

The participation of thirteen teachers around the country, five of whom we asked to write more sustained reflections for this forum, reminded us yet again of the importance of a scholarly community for recovery work and of the diversity of responses.1 We had each taught the novel several times, and in our conversations about those classroom experiences the frequent touchstone was Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings. Ngai's interest in expanding the breadth and depth of aesthetic and political analysis is multifaceted, but among other things she notes how "[s]omething about the cultural canon itself seems to prefer higher passions and emotions" (11) over the "sites of emotional negativity" (1) that almost "disable" other works "from acquiring canonical distinction" (11). Ngai's discussion, it should be noted, includes among the "higher passions and emotions" of the literary canon the well- studied sympathy of the nineteenth- century sentimental novel- Stowe is a frequent reference- to suggest that the alternative canon that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has suffered some of the same distortions. Weyler's stress on the periodical, seriality, and different patterns, habits, and paces of reading in those contexts illuminates how thematic and stylistic qualities of writing can be pedagogically modified and...