I believe in the canon. 

The first inkling I had that English classes were changing came when I worked at a college bookstore. It was not a real bookstore: it sold mostly sweatshirts and book bags, and carried only the books on the college syllabuses.

Assigned to tidy up sweatshirts, a co-worker and I snuck down to the dark book basement to see what the professors were assigning. We questioned the inclusion of the beloved Anne Tyler and the brilliant horror writer Stephen King on an English literature syllabus.  Students can read these two on their own:  they should be immersed in the canon at the university.

Since then, I have come across other instances of pop fiction in college English classes.  There are seminars on hobbits and The Lord of the Rings.  There was an enticing course on Susan Howatch’s six-novel Starbridge series, which thrillingly describes politics and intrigues in the Church of England. I love those books, but was not sure they merited a college class.  Yet Howatch is a brilliant writer of what I call literary-pop fiction, and has written in every genre from Gothics to family sagas to the more literary Starbridge books.  Perhaps her fluid work does belong in the canon. 

Why does the swing from classics toward pop fiction upset me? Most English departments still offer Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration Comedy, Defoe to Austen, and Virginia Woolf, as well as pop lit classes. The pop fiction is just the carrot to the donkey. Teachers use allure and magic to catch their students’ fancy.   But if professors are looking for classics not quite in the canon, I recommend the Library of America collection.  They publish omnibus editions of Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Spencer, Peter Taylor, Nancy Hale, Joanna Russ, S. J. Perelman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

For one semester, I, too, taught a college English class. And now I remember: I assigned a mix of literature and pop literary fiction.  It was a sad semester:  I was ill much of the time, but had to bicycle in the snow to the college because the bus stop in our neighborhood was dominated by addicts. Sometimes I was so ill that my gallant husband substituted.

Looking back, I had a smart syllabus but I also pandered.  I assigned Ron Hansen’s contemporary novel Atticus in conjunction with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer: Hansen’s book was partly a homage to Conrad. We also discussed E. M. Forster’s Howards End in conjunction with Bill Owens’s classic book of photographs, Suburbia.  And I promiscuously gave extra credit for attending readings at the college, and for reading and journaling about these writers’ books.

When I criticize the pop-classics overlap, I am not considering the reality of teaching. Instead, I am remembering my own education. We stuck to languages and literature in those days. There were no home computers or cell phones to distract us. Anyway, we adored literature. My boyfriend and I did not even have phones. We made our arrangements in person.

Because the approach to teaching English literature is much more desperate these days, I prefer teaching Latin. (I always did: my degrees are in classics.) There can’t be much fudging when one translates Virgil, Horace, and Caesar.. Translation is flexible, but must be deciphered through a complex web of Latin grammar, and I asked the students to identify grammatical constructions. .Even those who had difficulty with translation could chant “ablative absolute” and “historical infinitive” in a bored manner. I am traditional: I drilled them in grammar. And Latin teachers still used books and paper, not computers. As late as 2011, in an adult education class, I was writing on a whiteboard. 

If I were still teaching, I would pander, of course. The students have electronic distractions , and I suppose one can’t collect their phones at the door(!!!???). I feel a kind of despair, but we’ve been through the pandemic, we’ve had to Zoom, and there’s no going back.