August 20, 2021

I have lived a life steeped in literature. My parents raised me with books. I took accelerated, honors, and AP courses in K–12. I came away from college with an English degree, and afterwards I spent 4 years teaching and writing English class curriculum. During those many years, I was introduced to, read, analyzed, and taught the Classic Literary Canon.

Most of us, regardless of our professions, are familiar with some texts in the Classic Canon. They are the books we are usually required to read in K–12 English classes: The Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Catcher in the Rye, 1984. I can go on, and I am sure you will either recognize the titles or have read them yourself. These are the books that have been chosen as the most important ones for people to read and learn from. They are considered beautiful and revolutionary works of prose and story, their authors great influencers from across time.

I love the Classic Canon.

I have a problem with the Classic Canon.

This surprises and confuses people, as most perceived dichotomies do, and I have been ridiculed and debated fiercely by both lovers and haters of the Classic Canon. However, to me, this is not a dichotomy, and I want to share with you how I have related, and in future hope to relate, to the Classic Canon.

As I said: I love the Classic Canon. Some of my favorite reads (and rereads) come from it: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pride and Prejudice, Fahrenheit 451, Beowulf, the Odyssey. I can remember finding true joy in reading these books and learning a great deal as I analyzed them for both school and pleasure. They have had a positive impact on my life, I do think they are important, and I sure hope many other people read them in-depth. One of the great many reasons I love books is because of their endurance across time. Books are little time capsules giving us a peek into the minds and wonders of people and places long past—yes, even fiction books that take place away from our known world. To lose a book, to forget about a book, for a book to go unread is to lose a piece of our history as humans. The past is meant to be remembered, learned from, and the best way to do that is through stories.

But the past isn’t perfect. What about books preaching terrible things? What about the exclusion of minority/marginalized authors and their stories? What about books that just don’t speak succinctly to our modern times and peoples? Those questions are why I have a problem with the Classic Canon, and that problem is simple: the Classic Canon has not changed for decades. Oh, occasionally a book gets added to it, but we’ve all been reading and praising the same books for decades. Because the Classic Canon has remained stagnant, we do come across issues where marginalized voices, stories, and themes are not being taught to the up-and-coming generations, leading to a narrow viewpoint of our own history and culture and a shaky present or less hopeful future. And that is of service to no one.

In my view, a classic is a story that has been analyzed and determined to be of high quality and valuable to society and culture, and I think many of us can agree such stories don’t have to be 100-year-old literary tales to fulfill that requirement. Can they be? Most certainly. That has been proven. But they can also be books that have been released in the current year. They can be stories written by authors from all over the globe and with all different backgrounds. They can be about other worlds and peoples, about the magic and the mundane. They can be universally relatable or completely unique, analyzed by scholars or popular trends. We as humans are multifaceted, complex beings, and we deserve a Classic Canon reflecting that aspect of our lives. I want to see the Classic Canon grow and change just as we humans grow and change.

The Classic Literary Canon is real. It has come and made its permanent mark on our histories and impacts our lives today. This is a good thing.  I love many classics, but not all classics, and that is okay. I want us to continue to teach classics to the next generations, but not only classics. Let’s instead grow the Classic Canon forward with us so that our future may be the better one that so many of those classic authors imagined when they put pen to page and wrote a story.