The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts March 2, 2007

Professors Explore Creating the Canon

Does progressive arts instruction include the idea of “classical” works, or a canon? Are the concepts of “classic” and “canonical” separate, and how? Have some artistic areas escaped the notion of a canon, and does that help or harm intellectual thought in those areas? 

Four College and Conservatory faculty members debated the pros and cons of these ideas and others last Thursday at “Considering Canon,” a panel discussion that kicked off creative writing’s “Margins & Spaces” conference. The members of the panel represented the major art areas here at Oberlin: Sarah Schuster from visual arts, Azita Osanloo from creative writing, Ann Cooper Albright from dance and Charles McGuire from music history. Unfortunately, Caroline Jackson Smith was unable to attend, thus the theater department was not represented in the discussion; Professor of English Warren Liu moderated the discussion. 

Liu’s questions for the professors focused on their attitudes toward the idea of a canon and how the canon impacted their academic and creative work.  Responses were slow at first but quickly heated up. 

“I was hired to teach the canon,” said McGuire, whose Music History 101 course is intended to give Conservatory students a “common language” with which to discuss music. Schuster and Osanloo discussed the idea of whether canonical works were the same as “classics,” particularly in view of the way the latter term is thrown around by arts reviewers.

Albright, however, waited until her colleagues had given their first careful answers to dramatically announce her view that dance had practically no canon, at least not one of which the general public was peripherally aware.

“I bet most of you know [Aaron Copland’s] Applachian Spring,” she stated, “but I bet a lot fewer of you know that Martha Graham made a dance to it.”   

The panel was followed by an enthusiastic Q & A session, during which no student adequately answered a highly personal query: do Oberlin students, who can get through an English major without reading Shakespeare, desire the presence of a canon in their education, or are they happy to take Liu’s course “Post-Everything” without first cracking “everything” open? 


 
 
   

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