Submitted by Rhiannon Goad on Mon, 09/29/2014 - 20:02
By accident, books on my nightstand fall into two piles: those which I should read and those which I want to read. In my current situation, coursework determines my should pile. The want pile consists of, well, books I read even though no one is making me. My haphazard nightstand organization is not meant to defend the divisions between high art and low culture—what gets counted as Literature with a capital L and what’s categorized as trash reflects hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nationality. My piles of books merely echo a more general conversation about the canon, one that is particularly active in English courses.
