COLLOQUY Responses
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COLLOQUY Responses
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 Back when revamping the literary canon in order to make it more inclusive (of women, gays, people of color, and et cetera) was the hot new thing, I had this creepy feeling that the changes were actually intended to exclude real live people, particularly if they happened to belong to those very categories. I felt this because no matter how "high culture" (a highly debatable point considering the actual works in question) the canon might have been, the works were readily available (in cheap editions at the corner drug store no less) to anyone who wished to read them. Thus, even the children of uneducated and illiterate immigrants (such as myself and people like Alfred Kazan) had access to the world's great books. Ok, we can argue that (and people have with great venom for years), but the point is that the books intended to replace the canonical works (and thus include the excluded) were often obscure, difficult to find, or afflicted with the curse of the trend. I remember when Richard Brautigan was being taught in intro classes and Tony Tanner even included a chapter on him in "City of Words." But who teaches or reads or even remembers him now. Plus, and this was discussed by David Saldivar in his book on American (with an accent thus Hispanic American) literature, when the excluded are included, it is on terms dictated by the already there. Thus minority literature is that which conforms to elite white notions of what the rest of us are supposed to be. It seems to me that this discussion of dress is little more than the debate over the canon (which was actually a debate over cultural practices used to make what Veblen called invidious distinctions, a notion further developed by JF Lyotard in his notion of discourse communities and language games) in another, shall I say, dress. The give-away (as in the present condition of the literary canon) is that what is acceptable academic dress is highly ambiguous. No one knows precisely what it is or what it might be five minutes from now or what it might be in the department next building over. Plus the fact that the code is different depending on one's status within the academy or whether one is on the job hunt or in the job indicates further that dress is being used to make some really invidious distinctions all the more cruel for their mutability. It was Professor's Nancy Johnson's remark concerning the $300 plus Coach handbags and briefcases that was the give-away. Those small indications of wealth (read "class") are the anchor. Academicians might look frumpy, but check the labels. It's all quite expensive and quite therefore quite posh in its own and highly exclusive way. On the other hand, I think I've know that about academic dress ever since my freshman year in college. Professor's tweed jacket might be old, dirty, ratty, and coming apart, but new it cost more than all the clothes I had ever worn put together. And that was precisely the point.
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