c h a p ter 1 6

The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate

Mary Jo Bona

I originally mistyped the title of this essay to read “The Canon Debates
and the Culture War,” perceiving more richness within academic debates
than my perception of the rigidity of a culture war bent on conservative
thinking. Coming from academia, I thought my inadvertent title change
might reflect a healthy recognition that the struggle to reconsider our read-
ing practices continues in many US academic departments in the human-
ities. As Bill Readings explains in his 1996 The University in Ruins, “the
canon debate is a specifically American crisis, and . . . a salutary one. What
we are experiencing today in departments of literature in the United States
is not so much a revision of the canon as a crisis in the function of the
canon.”1 Thus the title and topic upon which I am writing, “The Culture
Wars and the Canon Debate,” reflects an established struggle in Ameri-
can culture between traditional and progressive values, the effects of which
operate uniquely in academic culture. For John Guillory, the canon debate
within the academy is interesting not because of discussion of which “texts
or authors will be included . . . but . . . why the debate represents a crisis in
literary study.”2

Culture Wars and the American Academy

The culture wars in America have had an extended history, and, with
the end of World War II, such skirmishes were engaged more fully both
rhetorically and practically, according to Roger Chapman. While citing
the provenance of the term “culture wars” in the German Reich’s “Kul-
turkampf (literally, ‘culture struggle’) of the 1870s,” Chapman examines the
culture wars in America as generally being “contained within a democratic
framework,” inclusive of many societal divisions enacted in public debates,

The author wishes to thank Irma Maini for her careful reading and instructive comments on an earlier
draft.

225

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 226 m ary j o bon a
legislative politics, court cases, religious movements, partisan media com-
mentary, “and academic discourse.”3 While such divisions obviously dif-
fer from tragic wars waged across the globe, the culture wars “are not far
removed from wars of blood and money as we might think” as they envi-
sion “either symptomatic reflections or performative articulations of larger
crises facing the body politic.”4
By the 1980s in the US, the expression “culture wars” became part of the
standard lexicon, and rhetorical references were made to 1870s Bismarck, a
“comparison greatly appeal[ing] to leaders of the Religious Right and social
conservatives in general, as it was in harmony with their view that tradi-
tional values were under assault.”5 As a result of its popularization, the “cul-
ture wars,” became defined in two interrelated ways, which both simplified
the complexity of the issues involved by characterizing the conflict of values
in binary terms and also inflected those issues through a religious sensibility.
By the 1980s, the culture wars in America assumed a “moralistic either/or
sensibility . . . lending legitimacy to the view that the struggle is religious
in nature.”6 As convenient a shorthand such labeling might be for popular
media and partisan commentary, such binary constructions also imposed
themselves on academic discourse, serving to oversimplify the issues sur-
rounding the controversy regarding the literary canon, and its formation
within the contemporary university. Binary constructions such as canonical
versus noncanonical, opening versus closing the canon, and transcendent
versus contingent literary value, were useful in initiating fuller debate over
the “nature of the study of American culture” itself.7 Underlying the dissen-
sion within the academy is the presumption that, as Todd Gitlin writes, “in
the not too distant past, an incontestable consensus reigned, and deserved
to reign, about the virtue of . . . the proper constitution of canon and cur-
riculum.”8
While I do not believe that the literary canon can be eliminated in con-
versations about curricula, I do note, along with other critics, that an idea
of an irrefutable canon of works has been subjected to scrutiny and “contin-
gencies of value,” as Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s felicitous phrase describes
it in her revisionist book of that title. Such a shifting of the ideas repre-
sented by debates on the literary canon unhinge the idea that the canon
represents “a centralized source of cultural authority,”9 spurring the pub-
lications of such works that include within their titles their revisionist
aims: Reconstructing American Literature; Courses, Syllabi, Issues (ed. Lauter,
1983); Reconstructing American Literary History (ed. Bercovitch, 1986); and
Redefining American Literary History (ed. Brown-Ruoff and Ward, 1990).
As Cornel West explains, driven by the decolonization of Third World

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 The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate 227
countries, the movements for social change in the US during the 1950s,
1960s, and early 1970s, shattered “male WASP cultural homogeneity,”
yielding a variety of intellectual polemics, which promoted the “recovery
and revisioning of American history, in light of the struggles of white male
workers, women, African Americans, Native Americans, Latino/a Ameri-
cans, gays and lesbians.”10
In the decade of 1980–1990 (and beyond), a host of books were published
on the North American culture wars by critics left and right (e.g., Gitlin,
Hunter, Bloom, Hirsch),11 thus clarifying the fact that the topic of canon-
icity within university departments exceeded debates about literary inclu-
sions and exclusions (as important as those were), and transcended argu-
ments pro and con about the legitimacy of the Western literary canon. As
William Cain points out, “the ‘canon controversy’ not only involves choices
among books, but also impels people to make decisions about the degree
to which America’s diverse population will be represented in institutional
life.”12 Thus, what is involved here is institutional in nature, as the school
regulates forms “of syllabus and curriculum,” . . . and distributes access to
“the forms of cultural capital” represented by what we call literature.13 As
such, the canon “is a discursive instrument of ‘transmission’ situated histor-
ically within a specific institution of reproduction: the school.”14 To claim
as one professor did that “Literature has to do with the soul, not with polit-
ical movements”15 fails to address the fact that educational institutions like
the university reproduce “social relations by distributing, and where nec-
essary redistributing, knowledges.”16 Perhaps unfairly coupled due to their
1987 publication date and best-selling status, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of
the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy nonetheless consti-
tute an endorsement of an educational system that calls for reform through
a reinforcement of a primarily Eurocentric view of American culture and
its reading practices.17 In contrast to the conservative nature of works like
Bloom’s, the decade of the 1980s also produced plentiful responses to the
controversy surrounding the culture wars and the canon debate within the
university, and, in particular, the conversation brought to fruition previ-
ously marginalized voices into the academy.

Canons, Contexts, and The Heath Anthology

In her chapter on the institutionalization of literary value, Jane Tomp-
kins traces the history of anthologies from the beginning of the twenti-
eth century through the Depression of the 1930s and into arguably the
most conservative decade of the century: the 1950s Cold War era. With

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 228 m ary j o bon a
McCarthyism at the forefront in the news media, the New Critical method
of analyzing literature was experiencing its own apogee behind classroom
doors and within literature departments. The New Critical focus on aes-
thetic excellence and formal integrity of a work was reinforced by a host of
anthologists, who were “active shapers of the canon,” presenting works as
“timeless, and universal,” thereby preventing these editors from “recogniz-
ing their own role in determining which are the truly great works.”18 New
Criticism’s focus on the work of art as an object in itself with a specialized
kind of language that requires formal analysis of such entities as theme,
irony, tone, setting, and imagery, made considerations of the “social, histor-
ical, or political context secondary to considerations of formal analysis.”19
As Barbara Herrnstein Smith explains, “these academic exercises also per-
petuate a thoroughly unproblematized conception of art, which is to say
an essentialist definition of the label ‘art.’”20 Paul Lauter argues that if close
formal analysis of certain reputable texts “constitutes the central task of the
literature classroom, then students at virtually any level will feel powerless
before the skills and intertextual knowledge of the instructor” because such
works are presented ahistorically and without cultural specificity.21
Challenging the very idea of immutable literary value, Jane Tompkins
argues convincingly in Sensational Designs that great literature does not
“exert its force over and against time, but changes with the changing cur-
rents of social and political life.”22 Just as the 1930s Depression and the
subsequent New Deal were reflected in anthologies of that era, the move-
ments for social change of the 1960s effected canon-altering changes in
reading choices and critical practices that reached its own apotheosis in
Paul Lauter’s monumental The Heath Anthology first published in 1988, and,
as of 2013, in its seventh edition. Wending his way to editing the Heath,
Paul Lauter had to unlearn the lessons of exclusion and narrowness in the
academy. He describes the anthology this way: “The Heath is above all a
revisionist text, designed to refashion the canon of American literature so
that writers of color and white women authors play in our classroom the
extensive roles they have, in fact, played in our culture.”23 To this crucial
canonical event I now turn.
Antipodal reviews of the first edition of Paul Lauter’s The Heath Anthol-
ogy reflect a high watermark in the ongoing debates about the literary canon
in the university. In “Dangers of Democracy,” for example, Mark Edmund-
son faults the editors for wanting to have things both ways: “The Heath
aspires to be simultaneously an ideal political image of America, and a cel-
ebration of artistic achievement.” Interpreting works which engage social
issues as an index of their limitation, Edmundson claims that the editors get

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 The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate 229
caught “in a double bind of its political and aesthetic alliances,” attempting
a sort of “democratic congress” on one hand (e.g., including Mexican oral
tales and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills), and, on the other
hand, including standard selections that “seem to be rather exclusively aes-
thetic” (e.g., Henry James, T. S. Eliot).24
Recognizing the project’s organizational shortcomings, Lilian Robin-
son in “I, Too, Am America – I” notes the unevenness of the proportions
(e.g., shorter selections of familiar names, atypical selections of major writ-
ers), thus echoing Edmundson’s concerns. In contrast, however, Robin-
son interprets the project’s inadequacies in structural terms, as in the
“strange-bedfellow” appearance of “formalist categories coexisting with
social ones.”25 Robinson ultimately praises the fact that The Heath Anthol-
ogy includes major and minor authors, “whom we expect to find in any
survey of American literature,” supporting the editors’ choice to include in
every section of the anthology “the same mixture of acknowledged classics,
popular genres and minority voices.”26 Acknowledging that the rationale
of the collection and “its constituent categories is never ‘either/or,’ [but]
always ‘both/and,’” Robinson admits that the connections, for example,
between the women’s movement and prose narrative are “not always obvi-
ous, and the contents of the collection do not reflect them in any immediate
or simple fashion.” Despite its shortcomings, the Heath “offers a fuller and
deeper picture of American culture of the past.”27
Paul Lauter’s ruminations over the years regarding The Heath Anthology
provide a useful lens through which to scrutinize the multidimensional pro-
cess galvanizing such an endeavor. Combining autobiography and critical
analysis, Lauter’s essay “Little White Sheep, or How I Learned to Dress
Blue” examines the relationship between his Ivy League Yale education
during the Cold War years and his move toward critiquing the academic
canon – the received set of texts deemed timeless, universal, and undis-
putedly great. Recalling the influence of the 1950s academic theorists who
espoused what he calls the “Eliotic ‘pedagogical canon,’” Lauter links those
theorists with their conservative heirs, “peculiarly insistent on posing their
ideas of value not against competing ideas but against politics and ideol-
ogy all together.”28 On the curricular level, this approach in the classroom
could not be more crippling to students, offering no pedagogical or intel-
lectual collaboration between instructor and students: “the universe of cul-
tural knowledge is fixed, displayed in a received set of texts, the contents
of which need only be transmitted from apostle to novice.”29
Paul Lauter’s reflections on such an oppressive intellectual stance within
the academy echoes a Paolo Freirean focus on critical pedagogy, particularly

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 230 m ary j o bon a
in Lauter’s decision to challenge the gate-keepers of the monolith called
Modernism by offering an alternative countercanon to modernist poetry,
and concurrently by introducing new theoretical strategies and classroom
praxis. In what we now have come to appreciate is typical Lauterian prac-
tice, linking texts and promoting cross-cultural discourse between writers
and eras, Lauter reconsiders the performative aspects of poets Amy Lowell
and Sterling Brown (long neglected in literature anthologies and discus-
sions of modernist poetry). However different, both poets register a mod-
ernist discontinuity with the past through evoking forms of the vernacular,
whether through performances of gender ambiguity or blues and folk cul-
ture. Recognizing the mutable nature of canons, Lauter continued to be
vigilant about revising the anthology, aware of the fact that new inclusions
have the potential to be co-opted and contained by discourses that ulti-
mately defer to monocultural prescriptions of “aesthetic value,” thereby
managing and neutralizing textual conflict and tension.30
In an interview about editing the anthology, Lauter reprises the inter-
linking activities of archival work and institutional establishment. Recog-
nizing that a canon is “always in formation, always changing, and always
contextual,”31 Lauter has regularly responded not only to his critics, but also
to his own ongoing work of revising the anthology, critiquing the limita-
tion of the first edition by explaining how the Heath “maintains the central-
ity of an established version of modernism [rather than] deconstruct[ing]
the continuing hegemony of that narrative within American literary stud-
ies.”32 Thus anthologists such as Lauter are aware that as important as it
is to renew interest in Amy Lowell and Sterling Brown through scholarly
analysis, equally important it is “for our students to be able to read Lowell
and Brown as Eliot and Pound.” To ensure that happening, “it is necessary
to construct anthologies and curricula that prepare them to do so.”33
The publication of the Heath compelled critical debates about the
study of American literature and spurred fundamental changes in canon
standard-bearers like the storied Norton Anthology. Lauter’s pioneering con-
tribution to this ongoing enterprise might best be described as fulfilling the
injunction, “always historicize,” as Frederic Jameson famously asserted, and
from which Kenneth Warren quotes in his examination of the uncertain
utility of anthologies.34 Warren suitably encapsulates Lauter’s intervention
in reconstructing the American literature anthology: “Rather than plac-
ing before students the single text – be it a poem, play, or novel – the
anthology materializes the truism that all interpretation is intertextually
mediated . . . By placing texts in relation to one another and in relation to

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 The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate 231
their historical ‘context,’ [we] begin the task of historicization in part by
corroding the specious authority that clings to ‘canonical’ works.”35
In conjunction with the publication of the Heath, Lauter brought out
what might be called a companion volume, Canons and Contexts, in which
are collected fourteen essays published during the 1980s, when he was
adumbrating the priorities involved in reconstructing the American liter-
ary canon. A collection reflecting disciplinary struggles of the two previous
decades, Canons and Contexts moved beyond attempting to diversify the
canon to addressing, as Michael Bérubé explains, “not just the content of
the literary canon, but the apparatus of canonicity – from anthologies to
curricula to critical conventions – that had produced such a restricted field
of inquiry.”36 While Bérubé contends that Lauter’s Canons may not have
been an innovative book, it was and continues to be a “deeply influential
book, offering an incisive account of its time and in indispensable account
of ours.”37 Describing Lauter’s obligation to “throw down the gauntlet
again and again and yet again,” confronting his colleagues with the “limits
of their own discipline-sanctioned ignorance,” Bérubé reminds us in the
millennium what Lauter knew palpably about the past: canon revision was
“not only about recovering the past but also about combating intellectual
conservatism in the present.”38
Perhaps Lauter’s most recognized essay in Canons remains the classic
(now canonical!) “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Lit-
erary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties” first published in Femi-
nist Studies in 1983. This essay inspired me in the 1980s to shift my atten-
tion to different categories of historical and cultural coherence, including
those outlined by Lauter: the color line, colonization/decolonization, and
urbanization.39 According to Lauter, literary historians limited the study
of texts because they applied historians’ “structure to frame the study of
literature and thus the canon.”40 As such, three influential factors were
responsible for the progressive elimination of black, white female, and all
working-class writers from the American literary canon: “The professional-
ization of the teaching of literature, the development of an aesthetic theory
that privileged certain texts, and the historiographic organization of the
body of literature into conventional ‘periods’ and ‘themes,’” which serve
to create intrinsic barriers to advancing the works of lesser known writ-
ers.41 A Lauter-inspired move on my part, I teach Harriet Jacobs’s Inci-
dents in the Life of a Slave Girl alongside Marie Hall Ets’s Rosa: The Life
of an Italian Immigrant, inviting a cross-cultural dialogue about women
whose external circumstances belie their ability to survive colossal odds.

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 232 m ary j o bon a
Discussing the female subjectivity of women who were thrice marginal-
ized by race/ethnicity, gender, and foreignness, requires a search for new
models of emancipation, in contrast to traditional avenues of autonomy
that would have further silenced if not killed these women. Linking slave
and migration narratives through the lens of women’s migratory move-
ments shifts focus from notions of an autonomous self to a more nuanced
contemplation of the material circumstances that enabled these women’s
survival through different forms of mobility.
Examining lesser known writers invites a kind of textual analysis that
does not discard close reading practice, but rather involves examining
the uses of power and the authors’ resistance to generic structures that
may too easily domesticate nontraditional voices. As Kathleen Diffley
declares, such practices “put the story back in history, the curse back in
discourse . . . [promoting a method that] makes the most of exegesis by
acknowledging that its patterns begin outside the text.”42 Such patterns
can be detected when anthologies are edited purposefully. A case in point:
in choosing to “go with learning what they knew nothing about,” Paula
Bennett’s students chose the Heath over the Norton after perusing copies
of the table of contents from both anthologies.43 And though they did not
regret their decision, Bennett’s students read the early literature in the con-
text which makes “violence, economic exploitation and racism, not inno-
cence, central to the American experience, and, therefore to the evolution
of American character and literature.”44 Students not only read canonical
writers – like William Bradford – against Native American writers pre-
viously excluded from the canon, but also, quoting Hazel Carby, discov-
ered that American literature is “centrally concerned with the formation
of a national subjectivity and ideology that construct and simultaneously
exclude a racialized other.”45 Taking a cue from Carby, Bennett states that
European-descended whites have projected their aversion toward a racial-
ized other and as a result have “chosen economically as well as spiritually to
exploit” racial and ethnic minorities in the US. Bennett soberly concludes,
“the teaching of American literature will never be safe,”46 but canon refor-
mation opened up space for investigating the category of race vis-à-vis the
study of American literature.

Unspeakable Things Now Spoken

The culture wars and the canon debates were waged throughout the decade
of the 1980s, with writers and scholars focusing their comments also on the
recalcitrant responses of the traditional keepers of the canon. Employing

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 The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate 233
a crucial term that would inflect her later critical work, Toni Morrison
explains that the turbulence over the canon seems less about its flexibil-
ity than about its “miscegenation . . . A powerful ingredient in this debate
concerns the incursion of third world or so-called minority literature into
a Eurocentric stronghold.”47 Offering a brief history of the inauguration
of classical studies, in which Greek culture supplanted and absorbed Egyp-
tian and Semitic cultures, Morrison extends the contemporary debate to
include a long-held pattern of racism and, quoting from Martin Bernal’s
Black Athena, “‘continental chauvinism’” throughout Western history.48
Locating the canon debate within the larger landscape of European hege-
mony, Morrison issues one of the most persuasive proclamations about the
high stakes involved in canon disputes, reflecting those larger culture wars
about whose values are made accessible, and whose are repressed, for the
language and the images we use and see are made available by those with
access to power:
Canon building is Empire building. Canon defense is national defense.
Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range (of criticism, of his-
tory, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universal-
ity of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination),
is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.49

Cautioning against diversifying the canon only to see works by African

Americans positioned as orphan texts, achieving a kind of “benign co-
existence near or within reach of the already sacred texts,” Morrison rec-
ognizes that such works are not only sabotaged by “proclamations of
‘universality’” but also need to be analyzed according to “the indigenous
created quality of writing.”50 As Jane Tompkins iterates, “the issue of liter-
ary value cannot be settled by invoking apparently unquestionable exam-
ples of literary excellence . . . as a basis of comparison, because [such] texts
already represent one position in the debate they are being called upon to
decide.”51
In an effort to expand her analysis of the attribute of miscegenation in
canonical American texts, Morrison submits this literature to a revision-
ary reading in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,
rebutting majority critiques by literary historians and critics who have con-
tended that “traditional, canonical literature is free of, uninformed, and
unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and
then African-Americans in the United States.”52 Refusing to permit such
a centralizing presence to “hover at the margins of the literary imagina-
tion,” Morrison couples the championed themes of American literature

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 234 m ary j o bon a
such as individualism and innocence with “an obsession with figurations of
death and hell,” interpreting these in fact as “responses to a dark, abiding,
signing Africanist presence.”53 Implicitly responding to the long-term dom-
inance of New Critical theories to interpret American literature, Morrison
suggests that the very canonical texts under attention are reduced in com-
plexity: “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’
but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both
the art and the artist.”54
In an effort to reconstruct the critical lens through which much canoni-
cal American writers and their works have been read, Morrison challenges
such scholarship that delivers readings of works either jettisoned “by crit-
ical consensus” as being artistic failures or suffering from a kind of “will-
ful critical blindness” that prevents an analysis of how an Africanist pres-
ence complicates texts such as Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl
to cite just one example from Morrison’s book.55 Because Morrison shifts
the analytical lens to a focus on “power and license of a white slave mis-
tress over her female slaves,” Cather’s novel becomes intriguing not only
generically (as a classic fugitive slave narrative) but also with regard to the
“wholly unanalyzed mother-daughter relationship” between slave women
and their daughters, a topic which is reflected in Morrison’s own oeu-
vre.56 Social change for black Americans and other minority groups spurred
the reconstruction of African American literary scholarship in the late
1970s and 1980s, corresponding with curricular changes in the pedagogical
canon.
What Toni Morrison does through the lens of race for the canon debates
in Playing in the Dark Judith Fetterley does for gender in The Resisting
Reader, both scholars poking through apolitical pretenses, compelling read-
ers to “bring a different subjectivity to bear on the old ‘universality’” as Fet-
terley wrote in 1977.57 Fetterley’s first sentence in her monograph – “Lit-
erature is political” – was a clarion call for the canon debates to run full
steam in the 1980s. Other critics and anthologists (Gilbert & Gubar; Mor-
aga & Anzaldúa, for example), who were equally committed to reconstruct-
ing American literature, changed the way instructors respond not only to
new works but also to those well-known texts, never quite being able to
teach them the same way again – be it Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (works dis-
cussed in Morrison and Fetterley, respectively), and, I might add, Henry
James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epis-
temology of the Closet made legible through the beginnings of queer theory,
positioning James’s text within homophobic prohibitions and homoerotic

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 The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate 235
subplots. Indeed, feminist and gay studies often began with those canon-
ical writers – Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Willa Cather, Henry James –
and examined how these gay writers “have become canonical: specifically
by having their sexual preference denied, concealed, minimized, or in other
ways ‘closeted.’”58
Of the canon debates in the 1980s, Eve Sedgwick also suggested that
what is exciting about the discourse is the ongoing “interaction between
these two models of the canon” [the master canon and the pluralized mini
canons] and the wherewithal to “challenge, if not the empirical centrality
then the conceptual anonymity of the master canon.”59 The culture wars
and the canon debate of the 1980s continue well into the second decade
of the new millennium. Those of us for whom the canon remains a stead-
fastly pertinent issue articulate the uses of the pedagogical canon so that it
remains an active question in constant need of mindful response.

NOTES
1 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 85.
2 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), vii.
3 Roger Chapman, “Introduction to the First Edition: Culture Wars in Amer-
ica – Rhetoric and Reality,” in Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of
Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, ed. Roger Chapman and James Ciment (Armonk,
NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2013), xxvii. For historical context and background to the
culture wars in America, see Chapman’s three-volume reference work Culture
Wars in America and, in particular, his introduction to the first edition. See
also James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars, esp. Chapter 3, “The Historical
Roots of the Culture War,” and Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams:
Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt/Metropolitan
Books, 1995).
4 Barbara Foley, “What’s at Stake in the Culture Wars?,” The New England Quar-
terly 68.3 (1995): 458. Foley’s review essay discusses three books published in
the early 1990s which focus on disputes over canonicity: Peter Shaw’s Recover-
ing American Literature, Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching
the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, and John Guillory’s Cultural
Capital: The Problem of the Literary Canon.
5 Chapman, Culture Wars, xxvii.
6 Ibid., xxvii.
7 John Alberti, ed., “Introduction: Reconstructing the Pedagogical Canon,” in
The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implications of Canon Revision in
American Literature (New York: Garland, 1995), xii.
8 Gitlin, Twilight, 1.

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 236 m ary j o bon a
9 Alberti, Canon in the Classroom, xvi.
10 Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha
Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum, 1990),
25–26.
11 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New
York: Basic Books, 1991); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every
American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
12 William E. Cain, “Opening the American Mind: Reflections on the ‘Canon’
Controversy,” in Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, ed. Jan
Gorak (New York: Garland, 2001), 3.
13 Guillory, Cultural Capital, vii.
14 Ibid., 56.
15 Mary Jo Bona and Irma Maini, “Introduction: Multiethnic Literature in the
Millennium,” in Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York, 2006), 1.
16 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 56.
17 For a persuasive endorsement of rehabilitating E. D. Hirsch’s reputation in
English studies, see Donald Lazere, “Thumbs Up on Hirsch, Thumbs Down
on Bloom,” Pedagogy 9.3 (2009): 501–8. For a gathering of essays that predate
the 1987 best sellers but form a response to the “brouhaha caused by the publi-
cation of the Hirsch and Bloom books,” see Rick Simonson and Scott Walker,
Multi-Cultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind (Saint Paul, MN: Gray-
wolf Press, 1988), xv.
18 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,
1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 188.
19 Alberti, Canon in the Classroom, xiv.
20 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for
Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35.
21 Paul Lauter, “Little White Sheep, or How I Learned to Dress Blue,” Yale Journal
of Criticism 8.2 (1995): 112.
22 Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 192.
23 Lauter, “Little White Sheep,” 107.
24 Mark Edmundson, “Dangers of Democracy” (Rev. of The Heath Anthology of
American Literature), TLS: Times Literary Supplement, October 19–25, 1990,
1134.
25 Lillian S. Robinson, “I, Too, Am America – I” (Rev. of The Heath Anthology of
American Literature), The Nation, July 2, 1990, 23.
26 Ibid., 22.
27 Ibid., 23. See also Lilian S. Robinson, In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the
Culture Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), for a collection of
articles, reviews, and lectures written between 1982 and 1996 on issues related
to the culture wars, inclusive of her review of Lauter’s contemporaneous book,
Canons and Contexts.

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 The Culture Wars and the Canon Debate 237
28 Lauter, “Little White Sheep,” 112.
29 Ibid., 113.
30 David Palumbo-Liu, The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 6, 12.
31 Mike Hill and Paul Lauter, “Editing the Anthology: An Interview with Paul
Lauter,” Minnesota Review 48.49 (1997): 175.
32 Paul Lauter, “On Revising the Heath Anthology of American Literature,”
American Literature 65.2 (1993): 328. For two constructively critical responses
to the Heath in the millennium, see Richard Pressman’s chapter “Is There a
Future for the Heath Anthology in the Neoliberal State?” and Jeff Solomon’s
review of the 6th edition of the anthology, “J’accuse: The Heath Erases
Gay Writers,” The Gay and Lesbian Review/Worldwide 19.1 (2012): 27–
29.
33 Lauter, “On Revising,” 330.
34 Kenneth Warren, “The Problem of Anthologies, or Making the Dead Wince,”
American Literature 65.2 (1993): 340.
35 Ibid.
36 Michael Bérubé, “Canons and Contexts in Context,” American Literary History
20.3 (2008): 458.
37 Ibid., 464.
38 Ibid., 463.
39 Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
39.
40 Ibid., 37.
41 Ibid., 27.
42 Kathleen Diffley, “Reconstructing the American Canon: E Pluribus Unum?,”
Midwest Modern Language Association 21.2 (1988): 11.
43 Paula Bennett, “Canons to the Right of Them . . . ” (Rev. of The Heath Anthol-
ogy of American Literature), The Women’s Review of Books, 15.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid: 16.
46 Ibid.
47 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence
in American Literature,” in Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison, ed. Harold
Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1990), 205.
48 Ibid., 206.
49 Ibid., 207.
50 Ibid., 209, 212.
51 Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 187.
52 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4–5.
53 Ibid., 5.
54 Ibid., 12.
55 Ibid., 18.
56 Ibid., 18, 21.

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 238 m ary j o bon a
57 Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xi.
58 Christopher Benfey, “Telling It Slant,” The New Republic 204.11 (1991): 35.
59 Eve Sedgwick, “Pedagogy in the Context of an Antihomophobic Project,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 89.1 (1990): 140.

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