Quotes About Literary canon

I'm not interested in teaching books by women... Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

Why is the integrity of the literary canon everywhere articulated in terms of its imagined integration to a nation-state as well as a racialized civilization? What would it mean to seek justification for literary studies on the basis of aesthetic value rather than the contestable presumption that literary canons function as the preeminent repositories of national cultures and/or racialized civilizations?

I'm not really sure what makes a book a "classic" to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.

The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination...This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper fact of the decay of the common understanding of - and agreement on - first principles that is characteristic of our times.

One guy at a Rubber Tramp Rendezvous campfire was horrified to learn I hadn't yet read Travels with Charley; the next day he arrived at the van to lend me a paperback. Other entries in the literary canon of this subculture included Blue Highways by William Least Heat- Moon, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

The canon is dominated by books written by men, about men, and for men - the male voice is therefore not a particularly difficult one to impersonate.

Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed.

Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment's alternatives to the Canon, I reflect that these aspirants must believe they have spoken prose all their lives, or else that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.

I have received many nasty letters from neo-conservatives, who denounce me because I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions.

A few hours after the news broke about the death of crime writer Donald E. Westlake, a newspaper asked me to write a tribute. In short order I did so, calling attention to his decades-long career, both under his own name and that of his primary alter ego, Richard Stark, who introduced the unsentimental antihero-heister Parker to the literary canon.

Great Books of the Western World.

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

A place of literary canon wasn't a guarantee unless you tapped into something deeper, and Jay's longing was drawn from the deepest well of all...

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.