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Finally downloaded and read this - thanks for the link, todd. Putting to one side the politics informing her arguments for curriculum reform in the Humanities in (American) universities, I think that possibly the most relevant passage in regard to Tom's question and the dynamics of change is this:
[QUOTE]" Indeed, for some in this movement [to democratize the curriculum and reduce the number of texts by dead white males], questions of quality were fundamentally elitist, having been created, it was alleged, by a cabal of imperialist white males to perpetuate their own power. The actual mechanics of canon-formation over time were either unknown or ignored; in point of fact, major writers and artists have rarely possessed or were beneficiaries of power in the political sense; in most cases (as in that of the embittered Dante) they were eccentrics or social failures. Secondly, only sporadically, as in Victorian England, can it be shown that major art was primarily a political vehicle - and even then, it had little effect on the curriculum, which was still based on the classics. When scrutinized over a time-span of thousands of years, canon-formation, a process aleays fluid and open to dispute, is more intimately linked to artistic imput than to political ideology. We declare something is important and assign it to the curriculum when we find evidence of its influence on other artists. In other words, the canon is really about artistic fertility; it's the dynasty of works that have generated other works." |
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