Essay by Jonah Siegel makes an interesting point: if you hold that critiquing the canon is a mode of resistance to the powers that be, you must grapple with the fact that *our* elites no longer go to art museums, see plays, attend film festivals, or read books. Moreover, they hate the people who do.
Sure there are a few right wing Silicon Valley types who claim we should “return to” the foundational texts of Western Civilization but I see no evidence that they are actually reading any of those texts themselves. They are developing apps to do that for them.
And anyway how powerful are those guys really? How many books did Sam Altman read last year? When was the last time Elon Musk went to an art museum? What is Jensen Huang’s favorite Shakespeare play? Could Bill Gates summarize Plato’s Apology?
If you must construct the edifice you plan to knock down in your lit survey course, because none of your students read a single “great work” cover to cover in high school, then how powerful can the gesture of knocking it down really be?
Quote is from “Beauty and Her Sisters in the Nineteenth Century and After” in this volume. I have it via ILL. It costs $95 and I swear to god is printed on office inkjet printer paper with bargain bin ink. Several pages are glued together at the top. Oxford University Press folks!!
