Untitled - witz cultural

299RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONmust pitch any particular textbook, anthology, or edition toward the largestpossible number of potential purchasers.As Richard Ohmann has so chillingly demonstrated in "The Shaping ofa Canon: U.S. Fiction, L960-L975," the constraints of the marketplace haveeven more direct control of recent fiction. both bestsellers and those fewbooks that make their way into the college curriculum. The combination ofmonopoly capitalism and a centralized cultural establishment, entrenched ina very few New York-based periodicals has meant that for a contemporarynovel to "lodge itselfin our culture as precanonical-as 'literature,"'howeverbriefly, it had to be "selected, in turn, by an agent, an editor, a publicity department,a review editor (especially the one at the Sunday New York Timesl,the New York metropolitan book buyers whose patronage [is] necessary tocommercial success, critics writing for gatekeeper intellectual journals, academiccritics, and college teachers" (381). Once published, "the single mostimportant boost" for a novel is a "prominent review inthe Sunday New YorkTimes," which, Ohmann's statistics suggest, heavily favors the largest advertisers,particulariy Random House (380).Historians of print technology have long argued that the cost of booktechnology necessitate standardization, and although education benefits inmany ways from such standardization, it is also inevitably harmed by it aswell. Most of the great books courses, which had so much to offer within alltheir limitations, require some fixed text or set of texts.TAlthough hypertext can hardly provide a universal panacea for all the illsof American education, it does allow one to individualize any corpus ofmaterials by allowing reader and writer to connect them to other contexts. Infact, the connectivity, virtual presence, and shifting of the balance betweenwriter and reader that permit interdisciplinary team teaching to do away withthis kind of time lag at the same time permit one to preserve the best parts ofbook technology and its associated culture. Let me give an example of what Imean. Suppose, as is the case, that I am teaching a survey course in Englishliterature, and I wish to include works by women. A few years ago, if oneturnedto the Oxford or Norton anthologies, one received the impression thatsomeone had quite consciously exduded the presence ofwomen from themandtherefore from most beginning undergraduates' sense of literature. Onecould of course complain, and in fact many did. After a number of years, say,seven or eight, a few suitable texts began to appear in these anthologies,though Norton also took the route of publishing an anthology of women's literaturein English. This new presence of women is certainly better than theformer nonpresence of women, but it takes and is taking a long time. What