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Originally Posted by politicophile
When I was in high school, the process of countering for white-male-ness had already begun. In the same class I read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Hamlet", I was also forced to suffer through "Things Fall Apart", a vastly inferior novel. Facts are facts: the greatest authors of all time (at the very least until 50 years ago) were all white men. Teachers can feel free to deny this obvious point, but the consequence is that the quality of literature in schools gets worse and worse.
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You're comparing apples and oranges. Chinua Achebe's novel, "Things Fall Apart" is brilliant for what it is. Attempting to compare it to "Pride and Prejudice" and "Hamlet" is doing "Things Fall Apart" a great disservice, as all of those works are the product of their time and place. "Things Fall Apart" is a good commentary on the consequences of colonialism. Consider that it was published in 1958. As a student and teacher of English, I would never attempt to compare those three works of literature--I would not compare "Pride and Prejuice" and "Hamlet" to each other either.
The fact is, there have been some positive changes in the canon recently, but we can't expect to revise the canon overnight and not have some problems. We're still discovering works that are worthwhile by women and people of color. While some of them aren't brilliant works of literature ala Shakespeare, something like Mary Rowlandson gives us a further understanding of what it was like to be there then, and to be a woman in the time she lived. The same applies to works by people of color: reading Frederick Douglass' biography lets us see the world from his eyes. To me, that's what I love about literature: the ability to step into someone else's shoes. And I like to step into shoes that don't always belong to white males.