Classics are Dead. Long Live the Classics!

Radical reformers killed the Western Canon...for now.

“The Canon Wars” sounds like the most exciting historical film ever made. Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s a highly destructive chapter in our cultural past. One many don’t know ever happened, although its fallout rains on us to this very day.

In the 80s and 90s, debate raged over the “Western Canon”—essentially meaning the best poems, plays, novels, and essays our civilization has to offer. Where there had once been near-total agreement on what made up the Canon, not to mention its high value and use, disagreements erupted 40 years ago over each aspect of it. Reformers asked, What part should the Canon play in educating students? Who should be considered “canonical”? Who gets to decide on the list? Do we even need a Canon in the first place?

The Combatants

On one side of the issue stood the conservatives. Their orthodox view of the Western Canon had dominated since the 1800s. Proponents (such as William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.) saw rising attacks on the Canon since the 1960s counterculture movement, and as a response they wrote vigorous defenses of the tradition. There are clearly masterpieces, they said, and these deserve our full attention.

John Searle summarized this stance well in a 1990 article:

[T]here is a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature, and it is essential to the liberal education of young men and women in the United States that they should receive some exposure to at least some of the great works in this intellectual tradition; they should, in Matthew Arnold’s overquoted words, “know the best that is known and thought in the world.”

The arguments given for this view—on the rare occasions when it was felt that arguments were even needed—were that knowledge of the tradition was essential to the self-understanding of educated Americans since the country, in an important sense, is the product of that tradition; that many of these works are historically important because of their influence; and that most of them, for example several works by Plato and Shakespeare, are of very high intellectual and artistic quality, to the point of being of universal human interest.¹

Opposed to the conservatives stood the self-avowed leftists. Or, as Harold Bloom famously labelled them, “The School of Resentment.” To them the Western Canon was bunk, a tool of privilege and power. They reviled the pro-Canon side’s “desire to close not only the American mind, but the American university, to all but a narrow and highly uniform elite with no commitment to either multiculturalism or educational democracy.”²

Their dogma held that classics were too “white,” too male, and too Eurocentric. They demanded an “opening up” to new voices representing “marginalized” groups, such as women, Blacks, gays, and non-European works. They found the Western Canon an ugly product of “the West’s relentless imperial expansion” and a “monumentalist cultural hierarchy that is historically as well as morally distortive.”³

Duke professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., summarized the position in the late 80s by claiming:

The teaching of literature [has become] the teaching of an aesthetic and political order, in which no women and people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or representation of their images, or hear the resonance of their cultural voices. The return of “the” canon, the high canon of Western masterpieces, represents the return of an order in which my people were the subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible, the unrepresented, and the unrepresentable.⁴

Gerald Graff of Northwestern punched even harder: “Speaking as a leftist, I too find it tempting to try to turn the curriculum into an instrument of social transformation.”⁵ Graff and his comrades believed this “social transformation” couldn’t be achieved by merely adding titles from preferred groups to the Canon, though. Only by abolishing it entirely.

And that’s exactly what they did. Throughout the 80s-90s the left waged war against the Western Canon, and ultimately they won. They killed it.

Death Playing the Violin by Frans Francken the Younger (1600)

The Aftermath

To say the Western Canon was “killed” is not to claim all canonical works were erased. This was not the result, either in educational institutions or the consciousness of the West. You will of course still find Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Dickens, Keats, and the usual suspects being widely read and studied today—though less frequently, and with far less reverence.

You see, the center did not hold. Most colleges, in particular, supplanted the once-universally admired “classics,” replacing most with “diverse” and modern works.

Take three up-close and personal dramatizations of how this looked in practice during and after the Canon Wars:

Snippet A:

Picture an English major in 1992 sitting down in “Early American Literature Through 1900,” a junior-level survey course. It’s day one, and he’s excited to deep-dive into Bradstreet, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain–all the greats. But when the syllabus is handed out, he’s startled to see none are on it. In fact, front to back are names he’s never heard of, and among the required texts is no Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter, but an anthology of Native American tales and songs. The professor—a Native American himself—begins class by boldly announcing, “Welcome. I know what you’ve signed up for, but in this class you’re going to read real American Literature…”

Snippet B:

Now shift to a graduate student in 2005 in his American Literature and Culture seminar. It’s taught by a PhD whose dissertation centered on the underlying themes in Leave it to Beaver. He argues that Shakespeare is a pop culture artifact, no better or worse than any other. The class is assigned a biography of P.T. Barnum and to analyze the 1985 Mister Mister rock song, “Broken Wings.”

Snippet C:

Finally, consider another English major in 2022. He sits down in his American Literature survey course–a single, comprehensive class for all American lit. The only one offered by the university. He finds the assigned reading list is abridged to make room for obscure authors from “underrepresented” groups. The prof justifies this by telling the class, “Literature is more than dead white men.”

To my thinking, the above three cases, the same yet different, each around fifteen years apart, speak volumes. The first two I experienced personally (at Michigan State and then the University of Michigan-Flint), while the third student was my son (at Olivet College).

Today such incidents repeat all across the country. Right now. The trend to offset or downplay serious academic study–even appreciation of long-acknowledged classics is firmly entrenched in academia. If you know any current college students, just ask them what books they’re assigned in their literature classes. In most cases, I wager you’ll see exactly what I mean.

A Case Study

A fair counterpoint to the above is that mine are just anecdotes, and as they say, the plural of “anecdote” is not data. So let’s take a more objective approach.

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that crawls publicly-accessible university websites to collect and analyze university course syllabi. Of the 81,818 fiction titles listed in U.S. literature syllabi between 2015 to 2020, the 25 most commonly assigned were:

1. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

2. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

3. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner

4. “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin

5. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

6. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

7. The Norton Introduction to Literature

8. “Prufrock and Other Poems” by TS Eliot

9. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

10. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

11. “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorn

12. “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker

13. Cathedral Stories by Raymond Carver

14. “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

15. Short stories by Edgar Allen Poe

16. The Canterbury Tales

17. Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin

18. “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka’s

19. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

20. Paradise Lost by John Milton

21. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

22. “Araby” by James Joyce

23. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates

24. Beloved by Toni Morrison

25. “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid⁶

It’s disappointing Open Syllabus’s dataset ends in 2020 because I’m confident the shift away from the Western Canon has accelerated like never before in the six years since, partly due to lockdown-era DEI initiatives, mixed with the so-called “racial reckoning” of the George Floyd riots. But even so, I suspect this was just gasoline thrown on an already-roaring inferno. Anti-Canon advocates had been slash-and-burning territory for decades before Covid, and showed no signs of slowing.

But let’s focus on the data we have.

At first glance, the “top 25” list actually doesn’t seem too bad. We do indeed find many established classics–and even those one might call “questionable” are still (generally) excellent. I like nearly all of them. I even used many to great effect back when I taught high school seniors. (Then again, they were in the textbook anthology we used–which is pretty telling in and of itself.)

Still, there are obvious “tells” in the list that prove conservatives lost the Canon Wars.

First, notice how contemporary the majority of selections are, as well as how overwhelmingly American. Why is this? My guess is for ease of instruction. Relatability. While I love “The Lottery” and “A Rose for Emily,” neither should be that challenging for a college freshman. Classicists argue students should understand the full scope of Western literature and thought, and that this requires they read long, old books—in other words, being challenged. Apparently college profs don’t agree. Tough classics like Shakespeare and Dante are notably absent from the list, and both the Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost sit there like day-old tuna fish on pizza. Completely out of place. “Cultural transmission and literary appreciation be damned,” colleges seem to say, “we gotta get these kids reading them some Oates and Walker; frickin’ Dante’s way too hard, anyway.”

Secondly, I’m smelling agenda-driven choices all over the list. If, as I contend, professors are picking for ease in instruction, I suspect them killing two birds with one stone by selecting not only simpler but “diverse” texts, thus also forwarding the progressive agenda.

For instance, why in tarnation is “The Yellow Wallpaper” perched there at the top of this list? This is the most commonly studied work in American colleges? I of course don’t mind that story; it has many literary merits. I’ve taught it myself. But…really? Number one in all US colleges? My suspicion is that its “down with the patriarchy” gist squares well with most liberal college professors’ beliefs. This bent might likewise explain other choices, too (“A Rose for Emily,” “Story of an Hour,” possibly “Hills Like White Elephants,” etc.) Even Frankenstein, a hands-down achievement of a novel, can be pounded into the round hole of feminism (etc.), thus earning its sweet #2 slot.

And on top of feminism, the agenda’s also revealed in the list’s African-American authors, namely Sonny’s Blues, “Girl,” Beloved, and “Everyday Use.” Aside from Their Eyes Were Watching God, are any really worthy of their top-spots? Again, none are “poor” (though, ug, that Baldwin…) but I’m looking fish-eyed at this. Gates once again echoes in my head about Blacks being “subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible, the unrepresented, and the unrepresentable.” This list seems aimed toward somehow “correcting” that “historical injustice.”

Third and finally, I wonder if this chart is somewhat misleading. I’m no statistician (far from it), but could analyzing popularly-assigned novels and stories paint a slightly skewed picture? For instance, what if universities each assign wildly different books, so there’s no consensus? “Most popular” would then become little more than coincidence. Any cluster would present like dominance.

Imagine a survey of 100 people in which underwater basket weaving is revealed the #1 pastime–but only because a whopping three people do it, versus the ninety-seven others who each have different hobbies. This appears similar to the syllabi data: of the 81,818 fiction titles in all syllabi, the #1 position won by appearing 2,046 times. A paltry 0.025%. Imagine how low #10 or #25 are…

Should we be surprised that professors aren’t on the same page? Without a Canon guiding them, there’s no longer agreement on the best books that everyone should read. That’s what the Canon was for. And worse, the guideposts for what makes quality fiction in the first place have been ripped from the ground, so now everyone can justify whatever they want to teach in the moment. Profs fill their trays from a literary buffet–and it’s a long, sloppy buffet, lacking even sneeze guards.

It’s hard to confirm all my suppositions without reverting back to anecdotes, but when I call up Open Syllabus’ data for one school, the University of Michigan, I see what we’d expect: overwhelming population by “one offs” that I imagine few other schools also assign (ex: Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai (2002) bizarrely tops their list.)

Maybe the National Association of Scholars also lends weight, as their 2019 study of college-assigned summer books proves a dizzying mix. We find both popular and obscure novels spanning a wide range of ethnicities, national origins, genders, and alternative lifestyles. Despite the variety, however, the clumping around progressive darlings is a clear indication of the colleges’ mission, with the top categories being civil rights/slavery (shocker), followed by crime/punishment and (wait for it) immigration.⁷

Ideology Over Quality

In his shot-across-the-bow book The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom codified the conservative perspective. He whipped up national attention for the Canon Wars by publicizing it outside just academia where the battle had been raging since the 60s and 70s.

Although Bloom caused quite a kerfuffle, it appears he had little impact other than to rally the left, giftwrapping them a truly snobby white man to burn in effigy. They needn’t have. Bloom’s book was written as an “elegy” for the Canon more than a defense of it: he clearly pronounced the academy lost. If the Western Canon was gasping its last breath by 1994, it died completely by the 2000s.

But nature abhors a vacuum. Though progressives claimed (and still claim) we need to flush the Western Canon, that was (and is) just lip service. As Bloom clearly saw:

“Idealism”…is now the fashion in our schools and colleges, where all aesthetic and most intellectual standards are being abandoned in the name of social harmony and the remedying of historical injustice. Pragmatically, the “expansion of the Canon” has meant the destruction of the Canon, since what is being taught includes by no means the best writers who happen to be women, African, Hispanic, or Asian, but rather the writers who offer little but the resentment they have developed as part of their sense of identity. There is no strangeness and no originality in such resentment…⁸

This needs to be emphasized: if the past 30 years of Canon War fallout has shown us anything, it’s what Bloom saw clearly in his time: the left is not as much interested in an “open,” “representational,” or “multicultural” Canon of best authors, but a Canon promoting their own ideology.

Teaching those authors who are female, Black, Latino, gay (etc.) and who also write high-quality work (and there are certainly plenty of those, as Bloom himself gladly admitted) is not the left’s mission. No, they want to shift the criteria for “great” to ideology. Their ideology. Meaning an agenda-driven, anti-Western, “anticolonial,” “antiracist” activism. Though they’ve quite effectively dropped nuclear warheads on the Western Canon since their 1980s chant of “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go,” they’ve slowly been building their own criteria–one founded not on aesthetics but on radical, self-serving principles.

While a handful of leftists may be sincere in wanting more inclusivity and fairness, it seems beyond doubt they’re most interested in power. They wanted to be the new elites.

And from what I can tell, they’ve done it.

Okay… What’s It Matter?

You might ask, “Who cares about some college profs arguing about books?”

I’m glad you asked.

Although the Canon Wars’ battlegrounds were the halls of higher learning, ripples from the conflict has spread. They’re still spreading to this day. For example, to those in K-12 public education such as myself, it’s loomed for decades, steadily building strength, even speeding up. For me, a flashpoint came in 2021 or so, when Michigan’s former state superintendent of schools, Mike Rice, railed at an educator conference that “we should not be teaching the same books we ourselves were taught in school.” Period. So simple, so “reasonable,” it was a shockingly pragmatic motto to spit at the power, purpose, and need of a Western Canon.

Harvard clearly agrees with Rice’s sentiment. In late 2025 the Harvard Gazette bemoaned an NCTE report indicating middle and high school English teachers still taught like it’s 1989–or even 1964.⁹

NCTE ranking of books taught in grades 6-12

Labeling this “curricular stagnation,” the article makes a strange leap in logic: because students now live in a non-homogeneous age of smartphones and AI, they can’t (and shouldn’t) read authors from generations past. Students would be better to abandon the classics because…

Some worry that — in a diverse and polarized nation — books that once felt accessible now feel remote or impenetrable, or that cultural conservatism or education bureaucracies have kept the curriculum from a healthy evolution.

Now nearing the end of a long career in public education, I recall many, many iterations of this argument. In fact, one of my first experiences as a student teacher in 1995 was a high school English department being commanded by the principal to drop the Odyssey because it was too difficult. Impoverished students couldn’t “relate” to it, he said. Their test scores would increase with “accessible” texts. Thank goodness those teachers fought back, winning the day for Homer, but this dark scene’s been on repeat, replaying over and over for the next 30 years within both the schools I worked as well as all across the country.

And despite the NCTE’s report, it’s clear the losses are starting to rack up. Shaky literature like The Hate U Give and “instant classics” like The House on Mango Street or that luminary Tah-Nehisi Coates are slowly but surely eclipsing tradition. Even the Advanced Placement (AP) Literature recommendation list—once a bulwark of the Canon-has “opened up” to be more “representational,” including a slew of newer, odder works. Which makes sad sense, since that class is intended to mimic collegiate work.

So, while selections from the Western Canon may seem to persist in K-12 public schools right now, it’s shifting. When in another 20 years NCTE re-runs their study, I predict Harvard’s liberals will be highly satisfied with the new findings.

Just one last point on the K-12 education front:

Unlike the radical leftists who began storming universities in the 80s and now hold tenure, I know many, many well-meaning, conscientious public school English teachers who are sincere, caring, thoughtful educators. These are not “faceless enemies” to me, but colleagues I respect. Sure, I staunchly disagree with the “diversify literature” trend which many have been duped into supporting, but it’s hard not to empathize. For as much as anti-Canon ideology bleeds into their classrooms, most teachers are not themselves ideologues. A few are, sure, but most aren’t.

In fact, many first became English teachers because they themselves loved the classics. They find them important. However, when the rubber hits the road in their classrooms each day, they see firsthand how their students struggle to read. They hear them complain about reading even one paragraph, and bragging they never read on their own. School is a chore to these kids, and most never developed the grit nor discipline to do… well, much of anything that’s not “fun” (aka, on a smartphone.)

Classroom teachers are thus in a bind, desperate to find a fix because they care. That and because testing is so high-stakes, reflecting on their teaching. And lo and behold, what’s a quick way to fix it? Easy: assign highly-engaging books written at students’ current (meagre) reading levels, rather than Orwell, Shakespeare, or Homer. Teachers don’t see this as lowering the bar, but of fitting the need, of meeting kids “where they are.” Plus undeniable education research (an oxymoron) reassures them “engagement” means mirroring students perceived selves—that to support students and teach them better we must allow students to “see themselves” in what they read. So that’s what teachers do. To hell with a challenge and to hell with Western culture.

Yes, I understand these hardworking, well-meaning educators. I robustly disagree with the solution they’ve landed on, but I understand it.

Long Live the Western Canon!

In the end, the agreed-upon Canon of masterworks is effectively dead. Bloom warned 30 years ago, “we are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences in the name of social justice.”¹⁰ He was right, they’ve been all-but destroyed, and now warty, patch-coated trolls dance a jig on the Canon’s grave.

But is it really dead?

Now that I’ve laid out this situation in all its doom and gloom, I actually have to admit to nurturing a strange, sunny view of it. I think the Western Canon will continue on, albeit in a different way. Classics are not chosen by elites or academics, and so they can neither be murdered nor rescued by them. Whether supported by the stodgy old professors circa 1900 or stabbed by fist-pumping counterculture radicals, the classics trudge on.

In fact, the great works of our culture are not really even on some “list.” They dwell amorphously in our cultural consciousness, rising to the top like cream and staying there due to the inherent power of their aesthetic genius. Shakespeare cannot be dethroned via academic infighting because he was never enthroned by them in the first place: he won an election. 400 elections, actually: one for every year that serious and intelligent readers across the West voted him the best we’ve ever produced. Same for Dante. And Chaucer. And Homer. And Joyce. And Austen, Dickens, and the all rest.

Greatness will out.

True, some may not be unanimously chosen. For others (such as Tolkien and McCarthy), only time will tell . But it’s we the people who decide for ourselves. Both in isolation and together. Over the centuries.

This is not to say I’m happy with the current situation. Because I’m not. I wish higher learning supported the classics and the culture rather than tearing them down. And moreover, I worry about the future of reading in our society, as it’s clearly on the decline–to everyone’s detriment. Of course I hope both will make a comeback, and I do my little part to ensure it’s so. But as that great philosopher Doris Day sang, “que sera, sera; whatever will be will be.”

Canonical authors are survivors. They’ll be here either way, speaking to us long into the future, inspiring and perplexing us, telling us both about their times and our own.

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Thanks for stopping by the Reading Room! What are your thoughts, experiences, and arguments about the Western Canon and the Canon Wars? I always appreciate help refining my (kooky) reasoning.

1. Searle, John. “The Storm Over the University.” The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.

2. Searle.

3. Searle.

4. Searle.

5. Searle.

6. Open Syllabus Analytics entry for “English Literature” in “United States,” 2015-2020.

7. Randall, David. Beach Books 2018-2019. National Association of Scholars. Sept 19, 2019.

8. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. Harcourt Brace, 1994. Pg 7.

9. Larkin, Max. “Reading Like It’s 1989.” Harvard Gazette. Aug 15, 2025.

10. Bloom, pg.35.