Loose Canon: How Do We Choose Our Most Important Literary Work? (Part 1)

Clockwise from top left: Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Geoffrey Chaucer

In this episode I'm joined by my friend and cohost Lauren McCrimmon for part one of what will be a two-part series on the literary canon. The literary canon, of course, refers to those books or texts that are considered to have particular historical or social importance. In the vast scope of all that has been written, the canon is the texts we hold up as being key to understanding certain themes or time periods—the classics that educated people are expected to be familiar with. But the notion of a literary canon, or canons for a particular time or place, carries with it a lot of questions. What gets to be canon and what doesn’t? Who gets to decide? And how do we update the canon to better reflect women, people of color, and other minorities who tend to be heavily underrepresented on these kinds of lists?

To frame this conversation, we’ll be using the Open Syllabus Project at opensyllabus.org, which aggregates millions of college syllabi from around the world and has lists of the most commonly taught books. We had a lot of fun looking through their list on what was taught in English classes, and so during this episode we’ll be working our way through that list, sharing our thoughts on the selections. You’ll hear our takes on what works we would want to see taught more or less often, what writers we felt were overrepresented or excluded, and what books we had to read over and over and over again when we were in school. (I don’t know that anyone has ever been required to read a single book more often than Lauren has had to read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.) And since I’m sure listeners will have some thoughts on these books (and our takes on them) as well, we want to hear from you, too!

In the next episode we’ll go deeper into our more specific suggestions on what we’d add to the canon, and we’ll want to include reader picks as well. So when you’re done listening, share your thoughts with me at sean@seandouglass.com or tweet us @ThePlotPodcast or @_SeanDouglass_ and we may read your comment on our next episode.