In the Canon's Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars Book

Curriculum reform, changing the canon, multiculturalism, feminism, multiculturalism-n-feminism, the culture wars, political correctness are the issues with which this book is concerned to have multiple labels, bestowed on different sides of a debate that began in the academy but that has become a matter of civic interest. It is a debate that involves definitions of culture: what it is or is not, who makes it, what it is for, how it is taught, and who gets to decide. Always political in one sense, the issues that fall under this heading have acquired new political dimensions as they have moved from the campus into the arena of public policy, where they embrace not only higher education, but media, censorship, and public attitudes toward everything from religion to sexuality. Most of the well known books on these issues including bestsellers by Alan Bloom and Dinesh dSouza come from the far right. They claim that people like Lillian Robinson, active in feminist and cultural studies for a quarter of a century, have taken over our universities. Robinson counters that the right is so frightened at losing its strangle-hold on the culture that it misrepresents a foothold as hegemony. She also thinks that foothold multicultural, feminist, socially aware is a necessary and life-giving direction for higher education. "In the Canons Mouth" brings together the articles, reviews, and lectures on the culture wars that Lillian Robinson produced between 1982 and 1996. Originally published in academic journals and magazines of opinion on the left and the right, delivered as lectures at American campuses from Maine to Hawaii and Texas to Indiana, or presented abroad in Japan, Mexico, and Thailand, these pieces are salvos in the culture wars. Topics addressed include such issues as separating the politics and the aesthetics of feminist challenges to the canon, how to make a honest anthology and how not to, and inquiring how government censors get away with calling university reformers the real censors. The essays are uniformly concerned, forthright, radical, literate, and witty.Read More