Guest writer

I decided that Patrick's blog is a bit more appropriate for this post. It didn't belong among my previous posts about female idiosyncracies, health issues, and a disdain for Texas A&M. Thanks, Noël.

The tale goes something like this: a wide eyed, bright minded, young English major emerges from the graduation stage set to make his way in the world, takes about two steps and scratches the top of his head. Perhaps it just dawned on him, maybe he’s been putting it off, or maybe he finally broke down to cry as he was faced with his reality. He trudges back onto the stage, looks his professor in the eye and asks solemnly What can I do with my degree? The old professor smiles and says, “I taught you the only thing I know, to think my boy, now pretend that you’re Godric plagued with the fate of tragic love beset by irony and then drop the metaphor and there you will find your answer.” He cried, walked to the other side of the stage and sat with the education majors deciding that he would opt for the only sure job and become a high school English teacher. It really is pathetic, all too common, and fortunately not my tale (although I sure did make it up). In fact, I didn’t even go to the stage or descend proudly because my degree was a means to another end. I intend to publish books, not peruse them for enjoyment. My critique of writing styles and theme is only to complement skills in marketing, anthropology, spirituality, and ethics that I will continue to acquire. However, as I connect my two disciplines there is one thing that disturbs me almost as significantly as a sand grain inside of an oyster shell…. What will be classified in the cannon of 21st century literature?

I woke up today with this on my mind and asked a sleepy Patrick. (He is smart and likes to think, but it takes longer for his brain to warm up. I got a blank stare.) Frustrated and in need of an immediate response I went to my laptop for the answers. The only thing I can find is the word Postmodern that is used so liberally to label everything that is of this generation from music to poetry to politics and world views, clothes, thinking, religion, etc. Automatically I am reminded that the previous period of 20th century literature is labeled Modern. Surely they recognize that the literature of the 20th century extends beyond a limited modern frame. Every acclaimed and compiled publication of 20th century literature is limited to modern works. James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, G.K. Chesterton, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck as examples, have produced works that I would like to argue are not very good at all apart from the fact that they were written using a modern technique. Why should they have been labeled acclaimed literature to live on forever as Shakespeare, Dickinson, Crane, Homer, and Hawthorne? My argument goes even further that these authors were not superior either, they just demonstrate a teachable theme. True written genius lies in the literature that changed generations and spawned revolution and dissent, advancing a culture to a different level of understanding. I am sure that J.K. Rowling will never appear in a Norton anthology, but can we just overlook that she stimulated an entire population, with no mind to generation, to read and stand in line for a book? Where will she go, and what will she be labeled? A children’s fiction author? I suppose it also doesn’t matter that war torn England used Tolkein’s novels of truth and perseverance as an escape, and Lewis’ fantasy allegorically to change children. Their writings were not modern enough and are left for media to devour when the anthologies snub their noses at the popular fantasy. Finally, will Arthurian scholars like Stephen Lawhead that turn fact into readable fiction be discarded and instead students will continue to struggle through incomplete renditions of the tales told by Mallory? Who decided the contents of the cannon, who is behind the Norton anthologies, the material that we read generation after generation? Perhaps the editors, the publishers, the unknown voices with power, money, and probably those who have never spent a day in an English lecture listening to the bologna that can be metaphorized, ironicized, and rhetoicized into one sentence of a poor text. What will be in our 21st century cannon? Christian literature? Surely not! But then again, it does have a section at Barnes & Nobel.