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Originally Posted by onesnowyowl
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.
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I agree, Owl. I personally loved Things Fall Apart, and I took an entire African Literature course, after my BA, because I wanted to study more literature from that continent. I am not one to balk at reading international literature; I'm an anthropologist, after all! I think it's crucial for every person to be exposed to a wide array of good literature from all backgrounds.
However, my point is not to debate the politics of teaching otherwise marginalized literature. It's that kids want to read easy literature, and they bitch and moan about it when it's not spoon-fed to them... and many teachers and school districts cave in to some extent, so "at least the kids are reading" (even if the material is far below their cognitive ability). In that sense, the canon alone is not just changing, it's the *attitude* towards the classics... in a classroom, if kids get one or two easy, contemporary novels to read, and then you introduce a classic to them, they whine and cry that they aren't smart enough, they don't get it, someone needs to help them (or they just give up and fail). Most of them end up skimming anyway, writing the papers the night before, and not really engaging deeply in the material. I see this time and time again at both the HS and college level. People want education to be easy, period. I don't like that.