Hannah Hecht's Blog

To start off this first journal of the semester, I guess I’ll introduce myself by saying that I am a senior majoring in English because I want to eventually work as an editor for a publishing company. I really enjoy messing around with sentence structure and grammar, along with basic story elements, so I think a career in publishing would be a lot of fun. Over the past three years, I’ve had a lot of fun with literary criticism, and I look forward to doing some more of it in this class. For me, criticism makes literature much more than just a story. It can allow the literature to tell you ultimate truths about society or culture or socioeconomics or a historical moment, that the author may have never intended. My main goal for this semester is to learn more about archival research, and to bring to the surface a deserving, but understudied, text. I guess my past experience has mainly dealt with works firmly inside the established literary canon, so it will be cool to study writing that is closer to the fringes. Plus, such literature will probably illuminate other whole facets of life that the canonical texts gloss over.

Last class, we pretty much learned the purpose of literary recovery. Recovery involves finding old texts which aren’t considered part of the canon and demonstrating their worth and worthiness. This class will mainly focus on women’s texts, which were largely glossed over or forgotten by history. We spent a lot of time discussing the word “canon.” Pretty much, the canon is the group of texts with which a literarily educated person ought to be familiar in order to participate in educated discussion. It also consists of those texts that are deemed worthy of being taught to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. When writers of the past are excluded from the canon, their work pretty much loses its readership. When an entire class of authors (on the basis of socioeconomic status, race, gender, etc.) are excluded from the canon, we lose out on a whole facet of human experience. That is why literary recovery is important work.

One of the texts that we read for class today was “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather,” by Sharon O’Brien. It was really interesting to see the fluctuations in Willa Cather’s readership across time. Near the beginning of the article, O’Brien explains that while most people see the list of works in the American canon as objective, it simply isn’t. In the past, people would always defend the canon by saying that the books in it are simply the best because they have “stood the test of time,” but they instead have actually stood the test “in which publishers, reviewers, editors, literary critics, and teachers structure the interaction between the text and the reader.” (O’Brien 111). O’Brien offers Cather as a prime example. At their first publishing in the late 1910’s and throughout the 1920’s, Cather’s works were critically and popularly acclaimed. But, then, with the publishing of One of Us, a novel about a soldier in World War I, H.L. Mencken and other critical scholars began to categorize her as a “lady novelist” (114). From that point, her reputation fell and she eventually limited the reproduction of her own books, so to keep students from “hating her” after studying the increasingly negative reviews of her work (121). While I really enjoyed the article, especially as a case study for how women writers were (are?) written out of the canon, there was one part of it that kind of bugged me. On the last page, O’Brien says that “Cather herself did not fully recognize that… we simply do not read writers whose work has not yet been published, evaluated, preserved, and transmitted by social, economic, and literary institutions of some sort” (124). I thought that that whole quote was kind of belittling to Cather. When she made the conscious decision to keep her books from being printed in anthologies and in cheap paperback form to keep them from being read in classes, I highly doubt that she didn’t understand the implications of her actions. From the article, it seemed as if Cather was embarrassed of her work, especially when she wrote to H.L. Mencken, asking him to give her an honest review, especially if it ended up being a bad review. If she really was that embarrassed, either of her work or of its reception, then she kept it from being published so that people wouldn’t “grow up hating her.” She didn’t want to be remembered as another example of a woman whose writing didn’t measure up to men’s writing. If she couldn’t break the curve by being great, then she’d rather not add her name to a long list of “inferior” women’s writers. It seems as if she would rather not be known as a writer at all. I think that the article is being very condescending in saying that Cather didn’t realize that not publishing her work to the masses would keep it from being read by students. Obviously, I don’t really know very much about Cather, but her idea to keep her writing from the masses seemed like a very conscious and personal act.

Another article that we read for this week was “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study for the Twenties” by Paul Lauter. I found this article particularly interesting because the fluctuations in acceptance of woman writers seemed to coincide pretty well with the fluctuations of acceptance of Willa Cather’s work from the other article. I also though that it was really interesting toward the end where he talked about literary periods, such as “Puritanism,” “The Frontier,” and “Urbanization.” Here, he said that such periods often encompass only the male experience, as the female experience of home life contains more continuities than discontinuities across time. I also thought it was interesting when he talked about how the professionalization of academia ended up completely excluding women. Where before, women’s book clubs helped determine which texts were widely read, the role switched over to professors who were largely male. The readings for today really helped me to understand why literary recovery is important work.