Namwali Serpell

Her very act of reading the works of Willa Cather and

Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway suggests shades hauteur, but also a careful objectivity that rises above mere accusation.

This is why I find it so frustrating when I come across items such as a 2019 New York Times op-ed, which claims that against a more traditional scholar such as Harold Bloom, quote, Ms.

Morrison viewed literary canons as the contingent products of history and associated forms of domination and erasure.

not as the timeless embodiments of universal experiences or values.

Her priorities, which were shared by a generation of scholars pursuing race, gender, and cultural studies-based approaches in the humanities, led toward a diversification of the canon.

Whether algorithmic or illiterate, hot takes like these ignore that though as an editor at Random House, Morrison aimed to break up the calcified demographics of contemporary publishing, as a critic, she was deeply committed to the existing canon.

Indeed, in her criticism, she is as skeptical of its anti-intellectual attackers as of its blowhard defenders.

She writes...

Not only may the hands of the gunslinging cowboy scholars be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration, the sacred texts, get sacrificed, disfigured in the battle.

This cannon fodder may kill the cannon.

And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare or James or Twain or Hawthorne or Melville, etc., etc., etc.,

There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them.

Morrison, the critic, generally does not disparage or derogate.

She diagnoses with the withering air of an analyst for whom nothing is personal.

She focuses on ideological symptoms over stated beliefs, on literary imagination over authorial biography.

Rather than adjudicating an author's historical actions of racism or sexism, she queries their fictional words.

How do embedded assumptions of language work, she asks.

Absolutely.

I'm completely in agreement with you.