Of Canonicity, Habib Ajroud; The Authors of Authority / The Survivors of School, Laura Rice; Political Correctness in Literary Studies, Mark Lilly; The Changing Shape of the Medieval Literary Canon, Claire Marshall; Citizenship and Education in a Plural Society, Peter Figueroa; Victims and Statistics: Suffering and Political Utility, Anne Murray; Linguistic Differentiation in Tunisia: Status and Solidarity Dimensions, Sarah Lawson-Sako and Itesh Sachdev; Words that Die: Thematizing Change in Aghani Mihyar Al Dimashqi, Adnan Haydar; The Obstacle of Canon: Misreadings of a Genre, Muhsin J Musawi; By Word of Hand: A Reading of Robinson Crusoe, Habib Ajroud; Authority in Paradise Lost, Janet Fouli; The “Authorized Transgression” of Convention in the Fiction of John Hawkes, Nessima Tarchouna; Of Time and Canonicity in the The Iceman Cometh, Dorra Asli; Textualizing/Theorizing Africa: W(h)ither the Canon?, Nabil Cherni; Gender and Form in a Post-Modern Narrative: A Reading of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Hayet Tabbane; Visualising Culture: Orientalising the Orient, Anne Abichou.
ABSTRACT:
Thirty odd years of crisis cannot ‘reasonably’ be expected to beget certainty. But human beings have always been able, despite the absence of a thoroughly reliable theory, to carry out revolutions and establish stability anew. Understandably, our objective should be more interesting and challenging than some of today’s technocratic-cum-economic orientations, and less vociferous than the pointless recriminations of neoconservatives. For us aliens to Englishdom, at any rate, one thing is certain: in our English departments we simply refuse to be confined to English for Subaltern Purposes.
This should not imply that we are to have no rules, no guidelines. This cannot mean that we shall make no selection, for, as Samuel Weber points out, selection is at the heart of any process of concentration, though no centre can exist without a periphery. We can no more do away with institutional consecration elsewhere than confine ourselves to what institutions no matter how respectable or academics no matter how reputable have decided in English-speaking countries for or against a canon in English literature. The very multidisciplinary character of our English departments in Tunisia fortunately makes it incumbent upon us to orient ourselves in this respect towards practice and openness. Following the suggestion of Robert Scholes, perhaps the wisest course we could take would lie in “shifting our concerns as English teachers from a curriculum oriented to a literary canon toward a curriculum in textual studies.” The first step would then be to move away from the quasi-sacred nature of literature. There is no sacred literary truth to be discovered, and no sacred method for such a holy undertaking. We should aim for what gain may be derived by the student through “questioning the text” and “the values proffered by the texts” studied. But in our pursuit of understanding, appreciation and explication of the literary artefact, despite ‘the frailty of knowledge’ or “what philosophers call the “problem of knowledge,” we must keep in mind that because truth is attainable through communication, the word belongs in the world, and that the function of literature and literary criticism is not to sever the one from the other.
