Synthesis Essay

The Loss of Worldliness in Literature

            Variation is key to understanding. A student must not just look at one type of literary work, modern, post-modern, historical, fantasy, fiction, or non-fiction, but all of these genres thruout their studies. If a writer does not just look for the same ideas and motifs for their work, then why should a student just learn one section of literature?

            Schools in other countries, as well as in private schools in the U.S., judge what to teach based on a canon standard. The canon is a group of literary works chosen by “influential critics, museum directors and their boards of trustees, and for more lowly scholars and teachers” (Landow). It looks like a sound group of judges with literary backgrounds, but they all are “hangers on of high culture that of the Victorian period.” the selected works are all of the same type, western literature, allowing no variation in study. Students under the canon may learn everything of the great Elizabethan poets but nothing of the Japanese epics of the 12^th century.

            The Canon will exclude a majority of cultural masterpieces because of the judge’s fondness for Western dramas. This is a loss to the knowledge of these foreign tomes, which was proven by researches Florez-Tighe to have a positive effect on language development and racial acceptance among children (Pirofski). Not only are these anthologies aiding in children's lack of cultural understanding but the understanding of literature all together. Iimportant pieces that identify the writer can be simply left out of the canon, giving a whole different meaning to the authors work, like Whitman's “Song to Myself” as stated by Greer of Eshlemans strategy. When Eshleman handed this poem to his students the subject that was discussed in the anthology was replaced by a greater subject of what is socially acceptable.

            The canon anthologies tend to simplify the students studies in school. All that is required to read is placed in one volume of work with an image which may have nothing to do with what is inside the text itself (Mack). But student’s adventures in scholarly achievement should not be left to what a group of scholars from a different generation who yearns for a past literary golden age to decide. A student must have variation and the canon will not provide this. It is a conformity which many have wrote of the dangers of, but a student in an anthology based class will never know this, because dystopian writings are not on the canon.