On the Death of Canon
Feb. 1st, 2019 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelI’m coming to the conclusion that the breakdown of any kind of “Western canon” of films, books, music, etc is a root cause of some of the stupid media “discourse" infesting every corner of the internet.
Case in point: The Bible (specifically the King James Version) was the single most important reference point in Anglophonic Western literature for centuries AND was a text that every educated man and woman was expected to know. If you are not even passingly familiar with The Bible or what was then mainstream Christianity, then the quotes, references, images, symbols, and analogues that litter what used to be the Western Canon are going to be decorative at best and impenetrable at worst, and more recent works that reference The Bible second-hand or third-hand via reference to those earlier works in the "Canon" are going to look simply like homages to or even plagiarism of the old Canon.
So you get YA authors accused of "plagiarizing" Tolkein over one line ("don't go where I can't follow) that IIRC evoked dialogue between Christ and Simon Peter in the Gospel of John to start with and a bunch of nitwit children on tumblr attempting to make the arguments that literary symbolism doesn't even exist and IDK was invented by mean pretentious English teachers. (I am guessing the average age of these children is about 15, which is the age where I read The Old Man and the Sea and hated it, but that doesn't mean the shitty fish book is not in fact drenched with symbolism.)
Is the solution to dig in one's heels and defend the Canon of dead Anglophonic White Christian Men? No. Is the solution to start teaching The Bible in schools again? Hell no. But watching these nonsensical debates unfold in real time definitely gives me the sense that some useful way of 'reading' art and literature and hell superhero movies-- aka culture in the sense of a group's shared stories-- has been lost and right now there's no good, solid, inclusive, relatable non-white-dude-centric paradigm in its place. It's literally children screaming from a position of ignorance.
I have more to say about the film angle but that'll involve referencing The Last Jedi and right now I'm too tired for that.
Case in point: The Bible (specifically the King James Version) was the single most important reference point in Anglophonic Western literature for centuries AND was a text that every educated man and woman was expected to know. If you are not even passingly familiar with The Bible or what was then mainstream Christianity, then the quotes, references, images, symbols, and analogues that litter what used to be the Western Canon are going to be decorative at best and impenetrable at worst, and more recent works that reference The Bible second-hand or third-hand via reference to those earlier works in the "Canon" are going to look simply like homages to or even plagiarism of the old Canon.
So you get YA authors accused of "plagiarizing" Tolkein over one line ("don't go where I can't follow) that IIRC evoked dialogue between Christ and Simon Peter in the Gospel of John to start with and a bunch of nitwit children on tumblr attempting to make the arguments that literary symbolism doesn't even exist and IDK was invented by mean pretentious English teachers. (I am guessing the average age of these children is about 15, which is the age where I read The Old Man and the Sea and hated it, but that doesn't mean the shitty fish book is not in fact drenched with symbolism.)
Is the solution to dig in one's heels and defend the Canon of dead Anglophonic White Christian Men? No. Is the solution to start teaching The Bible in schools again? Hell no. But watching these nonsensical debates unfold in real time definitely gives me the sense that some useful way of 'reading' art and literature and hell superhero movies-- aka culture in the sense of a group's shared stories-- has been lost and right now there's no good, solid, inclusive, relatable non-white-dude-centric paradigm in its place. It's literally children screaming from a position of ignorance.
I have more to say about the film angle but that'll involve referencing The Last Jedi and right now I'm too tired for that.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 06:29 pm (UTC)I had another (blacker) Eng Prof extremely tired of the Old Dead White Men's Classics, who always tried to make a more diverse reading list for American Classics. Which, at least personally, I felt my historical knowledge helped me navigate since the references were usually heavily based upon the events of the times. For both classes I was lucky to be a history nerd and for the former one had an advantage because of my personal Bibliological studies.
Symbolism, allegory, and references are all something that seem to be... ignored? Dismissed? Erroneously interpreted?? Quite often with the younger fandom crowd these days. It might be because of how literally they tend to tackle fiction, almost always trying to 1:1 it with their IRL experiences rather than grounding it in any extraneous contexts. I've seen a lot of posts discussing how tumblr fandom especially picked up a lot of literary jargon without fully understanding how to apply/test it in an academic way. They're trying, but right now act more as exclusive gatekeepers than anything.
Funny thing about the KJV is at least from what I'd last heard, it's not been the popular standard for theological studies for several decades now. Because of translation and the debate of accuracy- it was one of the earliest common language translation, thus because super well known. But now that people can go back to the original Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew and more directly translate- those modern versions are more preferred. (and often have me thinking of bad practices of translation accuracy, when game companies decide to translate based on an English translation of a Japanese script- a giant game of telephone in worse cases).