Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The Canon Wars were one of the first cultural events in America that prominently used terms like “liberal” and “conservative” to serve as shorthand for various “sides” in the debate. Indeed, because the Canon Wars coincided with a politically conservative cultural putsch to remake culture that was defined in part by its desire to brand American social, cultural, and political life as liberal or conservative, and to make sure that the former was found reprehensible, such terminology was mapped onto the very public debates about higher education’s general education and literary curriculum in the 1980s. While some arguments in the Canon Wars debate do value tradition, history, and heritage and therefore might be accurately described as traditional, liberalism and conservatism are not the most interesting or generative ways to understand the legacy of the Canon Wars. In fact, we would be better informed by understanding this debate as a clash of two different understandings of the humanities: one that embraces a traditional humanist philosophy and one that resoundingly rejects it. This paper will explain these paradigms of the humanities in more detail and show how they structure the debates in the canon wars with a brief reading of primary texts like The Closing of the American Mind, The Opening of the American Mind, Tenured Radicals, and Illiberal Education.