Exploring the 90's (and others!) 'literary canon'

May 7, 2023 8:42 AM

Matt Daniels for the Pudding used Open Syllabus to explore what books from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are being assigned in college-level classes. It’s a fascinating look at a new “turn-of-the-century literary canon” pulling out the top ten titles for each decade, both fiction and nonfiction.

How does a book become a present-day classic, enthusiastically assigned by educators? Among the things I considered were: was it heavily awarded? Did it have an outsized impact on culture? Does it pertain to a topic that the next generation should know?

Daniels used 3 data points to add context for the books:

New York Times Best Seller: was a book commercially successful when it published?

Goodreads Ranking: is it widely read today?

Literary Prizes: was it acclaimed by academics and critics?

The Top Fiction titles for the 1980s:

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
2. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
3. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)
4. Cathedral by Raymond Carver (1983)
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
6. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
7. Watchmen by Alan Moore (1987)
8. White Noise by Don DeLillo (1984)
9. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
10. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989)

The Top Fiction titles for the 1990s:

1. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)
2. Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros (1991)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)
4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (1997) (obligatory groan)
5. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
6. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)
7. The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)
8. Angels in America by Tony Kushner (1992)
9. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)
10. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (1993)

The Top Fiction titles for the 2000s:

1. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000)
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
3. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
5. Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (2007)
6. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
7. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003)
8. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)
9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007)
10. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006)

posted by Pachylad (41 comments total)

Meanwhile, for the nonfiction side:

The Top Nonfiction titles for the 1980s:

1. Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1989)
2. Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987)
3. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989)
4. A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (1988)
5. Renaissance Self-Fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt (1981)
6. Maus by Art Spiegelman (1980)
7. The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Jeanne Haraway (1985)
8. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’
9. Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez
10. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J. Ong

The Top Nonfiction titles for the 1990s:

1. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (1993)
2. “Mother Tongue” (essay) by Amy Tan (1990)
3. Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said (1993)
4. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (1995)
5. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness by Paul Gilroy (1993)
6. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison (1992)
7. The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha (1994)
8. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (1996)
9. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson (1991)
10. Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler (1993)

The Top Nonfiction titles for the 2000s:

1. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)
2. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (article) by Nicholas Carr (2008)
3. A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon (2006)
4. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (2008)
5. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
6. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser (2001)
7. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag (2003)
8. Undoing Gender by Judith Butler (2004)
9. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins (2006)
10. Language of New Media by Lev Manovich (2001)

posted by Pachylad at 8:46 AM on May 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wait a minute, isn't Persepolis a memoir, and thus non-fiction?

(Also, was assigned Beloved in a mid-90s college American lit class, so that checks out.)
posted by May Kasahara at 8:58 AM on May 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I love book lists, thanks. These would also be excellent book club choices.
posted by theora55 at 9:01 AM on May 7, 2023

This is interesting, thanks!

Because of the methodology, I assume the books that come to the top are the ones that show up in general education survey courses. So I'm trying to keep my disappointment with some of these choices in check: Anytime I want to say "That's stuff you'd assign to an unmotivated freshman," it's not a criticism. It is a reason it should be on the list.

But I really hope Gladwell is assigned solely to teach critical reading and how nonsensical claims can be made to look plausible. I worry it's not.
posted by mark k at 9:02 AM on May 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

Wait a minute, isn't Persepolis a memoir, and thus non-fiction?

That stood out to me too. Especially when Maus was labeled non-fiction (correctly) while still depicting everyone as animals. Did Satrapi ever say hers was a fictionalized account?
posted by Mchelly at 9:07 AM on May 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

And Fun Home was also filed correctly as non-fiction.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:31 AM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of the best courses I had in college was a Reading and Composition course in the South Asian Studies department that I registered for purely because it had seats and I had the absolute last possible Telebears appointment. There were roughly 25 people in the class. All but three were South Asian. None of us had two American parents. On day one, the instructor said "We're not reading White Teeth, you don't need to read about your own diaspora experiences, we're reading the books you would have read had you gone to school in India" (I believe a grand total of one person in the class had gone to school in India). I really do like White Teeth, but I would have sworn roughly half the R&C courses at Berkeley taught it. Lots and lots of Persepolis, too, though I've never actually read it.

Actually, the course I took for R5A was good too, in Slavic Languages and Literatures, again selected purely on the basis of seats being available. One of the odd education cultural differences I encountered going to California was that it seemed like everyone took one or both AP English courses, while my school only taught one of them and it was common even for the most academically able students not to take it (we had "English electives" for seniors, where teachers had designed courses of their choosing over the years). I was kind of annoyed that I had to slog through two semesters of R&C as a result, but they really were the best of the courses I took solely to meet requirements. (The other was that it seems lots of CA high schools teach art history. My school officially listed it, but I don't think anyone signed up for it/it was every actually offered. It was weird to encounter all these people who were signing up for Art History courses because they'd had good previous experience with it.)
posted by hoyland at 10:00 AM on May 7, 2023

But I really hope Gladwell is assigned solely to teach critical reading and how nonsensical claims can be made to look plausible. I worry it's not.

mark k I was thinking exactly the same. If I discovered that one of my kids had been assigned Malcolm Gladwell, for any reason other than "look at how sneaky and problematic this pseudo-intellectualism is," I would march down to the registrar's office and get our money back.
posted by nushustu at 10:16 AM on May 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

5. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)

Hopefully they get copies with the ten year anniversary afterword because Ehrenreich mentions a university made the book assigned reading for students the same year they were fighting an effort by their cleaning staff to unionize.
posted by riruro at 10:19 AM on May 7, 2023 [34 favorites]

Why is there editorializing in the list of best-sellers of the 1990s?
posted by Ideefixe at 12:00 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

presumably because Rowling has beclowned herself through public transphobia for awhile now?
posted by dismas at 12:01 PM on May 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

Funny, just assessing my long-past formal education in the context of these lists. I was a lit major in college, did communications in post-bac—all of which for me spanned from the late 80s to the early 00s. I have read seven of the sixty listed books. Plus, an eighth was assigned, but I didn't read it; the seven I did read, I read independently, while not in school. And of those seven, five were comix or graphic novels. Interesting, that.
posted by not_on_display at 12:08 PM on May 7, 2023

lots of sherman alexie on these lists too, which I don't think is gonna be true given his publicly documented sexual harassment...
posted by dismas at 12:14 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I just love that Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999) is still being read.
It's so very good.
posted by djseafood at 12:20 PM on May 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Strong showing by Judith Butler, landing a book in each of the three NF lists.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:33 PM on May 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't think it's a secret that the "canon" of American literature is decided by what get assigned in high schools and colleges -- the right-wing folks certainly know this, which is why they're trying so hard to get books about LGBTQ and/or BIPOC and/or women expunged from school libraries and reading lists.

It's also not a surprise so few bestsellers are academic favorites. Bestsellers (he said, not a little self-consciously) are more likely to be broadly-written for a wide(r) audience rather than to be very specific to a lived experience, and the latter is what (correctly) gets put into academic settings, where courses are very often about specific lived experiences. This happens with any one book long enough, and over time you generate a (relatively) wide band of people who have a work in common, and one they think of as a "classic."
posted by jscalzi at 12:58 PM on May 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I just love that Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999) is still being read.

My son was just assigned it for his freshman high school English class. I had no idea that it was as well-regarded academically, and not just a book I loved.
posted by Mchelly at 1:32 PM on May 7, 2023

was it heavily awarded? Did it have an outsized impact on culture? Does it pertain to a topic that the next generation should know?

'Kitchen' by Banana Yoshimoto perfectly fits this criteria.
posted by clavdivs at 1:51 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Among the things I considered were: was it heavily awarded? Did it have an outsized impact on culture? Does it pertain to a topic that the next generation should know?

I can tell this person has never taught because they left out the most important question: how long is it?
posted by betweenthebars at 3:46 PM on May 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I've read about 20 of the 30 fiction books, but Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga is the only one that I have absolutely never ever heard of the book or the author. Has anyone here read it? Enjoyed it?
posted by vunder at 3:52 PM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

This fits my experience of university and college teaching in the 1990s.
I did assign The Things They Carried, Understanding Comics,
I didn't assign my students to read Angels in America, but our little college produced it for the stage.

One student gave me a copy of The Giver as a present around 1999, too.

I also taught some of the 1980s' lists: Neuromancer, Maus, "Cyborg Manifesto."
posted by doctornemo at 4:28 PM on May 7, 2023

I was assigned Nervous Conditions in one of my English major pre-req classes at a big university in the midwest. I was very much in a "English literature should be getting at the Truth" phase which as you might expect (i) made me absolutely insufferable and (ii) lead me to favor Old Dead White Men as authors and frankly as culture. (It should not surprise you that I'm also a white male.) Nervous Conditions and the other readings in the course were a good corrective.
posted by getao at 4:33 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I can tell this person has never taught because they left out the most important question: how long is it?

People absolutely underestimate this as a factor. Part of the reason Frankenstein is a popular novel for lower-division surveys is because...it's short! Students can get through it in a week! Pride and Prejudice, not so much (and let's not even think about The Mysteries of Udolpho).
posted by thomas j wise at 5:39 PM on May 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

The ‘80s, ‘90s, etc. refers to the publication year of the books, not of the syllabii. Open Syllabus was not around then; these are not syllabii from the 1990s. (Most likely. Some faculty would re-use the same syllabus for decades. But they are almost certainly not the ones uploading to Open Syllabus; plus most universities have updated requirements for what sort of components/details about the course a syllabus should include over the years.)
posted by eviemath at 6:32 PM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

What on earth is up with the side-scrolling on that site? Every time I tried to "flip a page," two or three pages would turn. Way to make me close it in disgust.
posted by goatdog at 8:06 PM on May 7, 2023

it is absolutely not surprising that Harry Potter would be on that list; basically every millennial who wasn't already bookish was heavily encouraged to try the first one (which is short!) because it was believed in the 90s and early 2000s to encourage reluctant readers to branch out and try other books. History has certainly taught us that many Harry Potter fans do not appear to have read other books after all; the series became increasingly harder to recommend, especially given the author's advocacy in the 2020s.
posted by Merus at 9:29 PM on May 7, 2023

I'm 11/30 on the fiction lists, with another handful where I feel like I know the books will enough from adaptations and such that I have no need to read them. Hunger games, and Wizard People.

And 5/30 on non fiction, though there are a few where I apparently read the wrong book by the same author. (I picked thin air instead of the wild, fwiw.)
posted by kaibutsu at 10:34 PM on May 7, 2023

I've read 15 of these! I must read some Judith Butler...
posted by signsofrain at 11:29 PM on May 7, 2023

Surprised to see The Giver on a college list, we read it and did a serious study when I was in 8th grade. This is not a knock on the book, which I loved (and also just read again in German to help me learn the language, they say pick a book you know well in your mother tongue). But the concepts and ideas are quite shallow for a college level class.
posted by LizBoBiz at 12:07 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Most of these certainly look a lot more interesting than the canon I was presented with 40 or so years ago. Really glad to see Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri on the lists.

Could use a few more writers from the Muslim world, though. Just saying.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 1:25 AM on May 8, 2023

Re: Harry Potter showing up so much, one could reasonably be surprised given that these are more recent syllabi, containing books that were published in the decades listed, not syllabi that are themselves from the 1990s or 2000s, however.
posted by eviemath at 2:02 AM on May 8, 2023

Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" was in my fiction writing/English lit classes even in the late 80's.
posted by pthomas745 at 2:24 AM on May 8, 2023

This blog post from Open Syllabus points out that Harry Potter is often taught in education classes for future teachers, specifically as children’s literature. Maybe that applies to The Giver, too?
posted by smelendez at 4:36 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

If I discovered that one of my kids had been assigned Malcolm Gladwell, for any reason other than "look at how sneaky and problematic this pseudo-intellectualism is," I would march down to the registrar's office and get our money back.

Yeah, you wouldn't want your adult children to be infantilised by reading Malcolm Gladwell. Instead they should be infantilised by you micro-managing their college education.
posted by atrazine at 7:27 AM on May 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Assigning Malcolm Gladwell in higher ed is tantamount to fraud.
posted by sinfony at 7:37 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Higher ed is filled to the brim with flim flammery of all sorts.

Malcolm Gladwell could easily be assigned in a non-fiction composition class as an example of creative nonfiction if one didn't just want to assign McPhee (wrong choice - McPhee wall to wall I say, but oh well). Obviously it wouldn't be appropriate to assign it to read uncritically.
posted by atrazine at 8:26 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was interesting. It got me wondering about the "flow" of literature, from college to high school. Right now my sons are reading "The Things They Carried" for AP English Language as juniors, and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was part of last year's syllabus. And I'm pretty sure they had The Giver in first-year English, maybe even eighth grade.
posted by martin q blank at 9:10 AM on May 8, 2023

I can tell this person has never taught because they left out the most important question: how long is it?

maybe it was because I have an English + History BA but I'm pretty sure that after the 100 level, not a single prof in any of my classes cared about this

and I'm pretty sure that a lot of my profs at the 100 level also didn't care - had to read Pinker's The Language Instinct for one class that was, in retrospect, such a waste of money, time, and mental energy. it's everyday where I'll say something that likely originated from this class that my partner, who is a licensed psych, won't correct me on and also go on a lil mini-rant about the bs low quality studies that comprises so much of neuroscience lol
posted by paimapi at 9:31 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, you wouldn't want your adult children to be infantilised by reading Malcolm Gladwell. Instead they should be infantilised by you micro-managing their college education.

OHOHO YOU GOT ME GOOD BUDDY. A MILLION INTERNET SNARK POINTS FOR THIS GUY AMIRITE?

In all seriousness, I have one kid in college and one right around the corner. Now, I see that you're in London and I will say that I had a hand in Her Majesty's government trying to help the Student Loan Company. So I know that most British citizens and many of their former colonies can get something to the tune of 8,000 pounds to help defray the cost of higher ed. But where I am, in the shithole known as the USA, a college education is really fucking expensive, and also the quality of said education can be very hit-or-miss. And the thing that boggles my mind the most is how shitty students get treated by faculty. I work a regular job, and let me tell you, if someone talked to me the way that faculty talks to students, someone would be out of a job, and it would probably be me because if we can't treat each other like human adults then get the fuck away from me because the alternative is we act like animals and so now you're choosing to live in a stupid wild west kill-or-be-killed environment, ya doofus. But it doesn't happen in schools, because of the power imbalance, and also because these kids don't know what's acceptable behavior.

SO. GIVEN THAT. I stand by my earlier statement. That's not micromanaging, it's just continuing to help my kid. If you have kids, and you just dumped them at uni and said "good luck" and never worried whether they were making it in the world any more because they had matriculated to young adulthood or whatever, might I respond to your above statement with my own version of "no YOU are" by saying that you are a bad parent.

PISTOLS AT DAWN SIRRAH.
posted by nushustu at 1:36 PM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Great website a lot of info there.

Does anyone know how often they update? Currently, it looks like 2018 is the last year of data? Would love to see how things shifted in the past few years.
posted by chaz at 2:03 PM on May 8, 2023

Nah, I'll just send my kids to a real university and not like, a converted veterinary supply store or whatever it is the US has outside of New England. That way I know that the academics ignoring them in order to focus on their research will be absolutely top notch. As long as they can row and down a yard of port, they'll be fine.
posted by atrazine at 3:51 AM on May 9, 2023 [2 favorites]