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Melissa Weiss
History?” I was initially interested in identifying methods for diversifying the canon of graphic design history by treating the methods developed by other, more established disciplines as case studies.3 That proved ambitious. I entered a rabbit hole and dug myself out with few conclusions but some interesting questions and connections. In search of successful models for diversifying a canon, I turned my attention to English literature. I studied English in college, so it was a natural starting place. I didn’t remember the canon being a particularly contentious issue when I was an undergraduate, but in my initial research for this essay, I discovered that early attempts to diversify the canon of English literature were incredibly fraught and continue to be debated within the field. In a New York Times article entitled “Revisiting the Canon Wars,” Rachel Donadio writes, “Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet twenty years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations.” Donadio goes on to explain that “the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.”4
Reflecting on the lines that divide scholars of English literature, I wondered: What would it mean to shift the focus away from a canon of graphic design history and toward “modes of inquiry and interpretation?” Scotford suggests that in addition to being a collection of work, the word canon can refer to “a basis for judgment.” This sense of the word canon reads similarly to a “mode of inquiry.” It also offers another way of thinking of a critical design practice: as the development of a self-conscious and intellectually driven way of looking and making. “Revisiting the Canon Wars” made it clear that English literature was not going to provide a clean and easy case study for diversifying the canon of graphic design history but I wasn’t ready to abandon my research. I wanted to know: What’s at stake? Why is diversifying the canon so contentious? Why is it so important? Scotford’s essay doesn’t spend much time with these questions. But literary scholars do. Nearly every essay I read about the English literature “canon wars” referenced one book, written in 1989: The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature.5 In the book’s preface, Terence Hawkes, a literary critic and Shakespearean scholar, speaks to the value of examining the canon critically: The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate, continuing construction.