Fjords Reviews

May 10, 2018

Non-Fiction
Canons by Consensus
by Joseph Csicsila

“A Critical Oversight”
284 pages
ISBN 13: 9780817313975

Joseph Csicsila’s Canons by Consensus (available in paperback courtesy of the University of Alabama Press for the first time since its publication twelve years ago) is something of a minor if overlooked classic in the field of canonical studies that seeks to disprove the now academic commonplace that the canon is shaped as much by the political attitudes of the authors and the prejudices of the times, not by appeal to ideology or theory, but by empirical study. Particularly, an empirical study of university anthologies and their critical presentation of twenty-nine major American authors between 1919 and 1999. While his conclusion that “the election of authors and materials literary by anthology editors is governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal biases” is specious, marked by a lack of explanation and an abundance of spottily supported assumptions, the body of evidence he does present in defense is so well-researched and so grounded in fact that to ignore his work is to leave certain truisms about canon formation open to devastating reproof.

Part of his great strength as a critic is his attention to structure. By identifying three major critical eras in American criticism — the historiographical phase, the New Critical phase, and the multicultural phase — he provides himself a blueprint of specific timelines and qualities that hold everything he writes to account. And in laying out his argument on an-author-by-author basis, he avoids the kind of structural confusions that a more ambitious, sweeping view of each critical era might result in. If the constant repetition of certain anthologies and authors and arguments leaves it plodding at times, it also provides much needed lucidity on a subject so prone to slip into the abstract.

However, as useful as this sober methodology is for making sense of a centuries worth of material, it also does Csicsila a disservice in that it lets him shirk any attempts to understand why certain cultural trends predominated in any given era or why, exactly, history many actors behaved as they did. He is not necessarily unwilling to venture interpretation or turn to outside sources to explain these changes; for instance, he has no trouble identifying mechanical reasons that the canon might have shifted. He acknowledges that “inexpensive paperbacks radically altered the teaching of American literature” by permitting instructors to excise whole novels from the teachings, which in turn dictated what portions of a writer’s catalog were taught. And he is quick to point out that improvements in printing and binding technology allowed editors the freedom to include minor, often overlooked authors who still warranted discussion or the minor, overlooked works of major figures.

What he seems unwilling to do is question the reasons for other, larger changes in critical attitudes. What marks the shifts from one critical era to the next often seems to be nothing but the years; Csicsila is describing a world where critical trends appear ex nihilo. While he makes mention at some point that rising social consciousness in the face of the Vietnam War and the culture clashes of the 1960s might have signaled the transition from the New Critical era to the multicultural era, he does not further explain why this should have been or what this transition must have looked like. Later, in a particularly embarrassing passage, he argues that African-American authors were so widely omitted from literary anthologies until the 1980s not so much because of discrimination as a “deficiency of literary scholarship” concerning their work. While it is true that the prevalence of literary scholarship does influence who is taught and who neglected and that authors such as Charles Chenutt and Olaudah Equiano suffered decades of oversight, it does nothing to explain why there was such a dearth of material on these authors. To explain why they should have been neglected for so long.

Nor is it uncommon for him to brush off an evident bit of contradiction with a shrug. He can readily acknowledge that there is something anomalous in William Dean Howells’ “Editha” being chosen as his most representative work when it was never even remarked upon before its inclusion in the 1954 edition of The Main Lines of American Literature. But when tasked to explain why, he offers only that “the United States’ costly involvement in the Korean War...must...be considered a likely explanation for its high regard among academics” before dismissing the topic altogether. This, despite his general insistence that anthologies published between 1947 and 1965 were almost exclusively devoted to a belles-lettres approach to criticism.

Csicsila is not incapable of counter-arguments or deeper societal interpretations. An early chapter analyzing exactly why poets such as Phoebe Cary, Lucy Larcom and Celia Thaxter should have disappeared makes hash of accusations of sexism by skillful reference to a number of their male contemporaries who suffered the same fates for the same reasons. The problem is that he seems to be so devoted to his empirical analysis of literary history that he has adopted a dangerously narrow scope to match. From such a perspective any interpretations based on evidence besides numbers or the stated intent of editors begins to seem dangerously unsubstantiated; Csicsila ventures them only with the greatest caution. While this might seem a respectable caution at first, stretched too far it begins to look like abdication. It begins to seem uncritical.