114 American Literature
Project of canon formation itself, if only because canon creation is unavoidable. To create a monograph or even a syllabus- maybe especially a syllabus- is to engage in canon-making activity. Even if we protest to ourselves and our audience that we intend no authoritative pronouncement on who the important authors are, our choices of what texts to feature will be perceived, and rightly so, as canonical commitments, or at least as gestures toward commitment. But feminist scholars need not view canon-building merely as a necessary evil, because feminist studies can hope to have great impact on the canonizing work in which we cannot help but engage. They can hope to foment reorderings in the pre-feminist canon (the demotion of Hemingway, for instance); they can hope to expand the canon to include more women authors (Kate Chopin, Harriet Beecher Store, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, H.D., and many others). They can hope to make canonical thinking more self-conscious, so that scholarship will never again assume that Emerson is the central American antebellum writer with quite the same alacrity as in the 1970s. And they can hope to help ensure that the concept of canon itself is sufficiently problematized as to convince the profession once and for all of the impossibility of extricating canon-formation from interest-group politics. These would be very significant achievements, and although they may not all be obtainable tomorrow, I am optimistic enough to think they have been brought within hailing distance.
Versions of this essay were delivered as papers at the Modern Language Association annual meeting (1984), the University of Michigan, and Albion College. I am grateful for criticism received on all three occasions, as well as from my students in seminars on Romanticism and gender at Oberlin College and the University of Chicago.