The imagination is a motive engine on its own, and in a revolution it has the power to unite the bottom of the top with the top of the bottom as intellectuals and artists come together with rural peasants and urban working classes. In the 1950s – following the publishing innovations of Penguin Books that were designed for the backpacks of soldiers in the two world wars, Signet Classics in New York began making classics and masterpieces available in cheap thirty-five cent paperbacks, so as an Irish working-class kid earning my own money in a grocery store after high school, I could afford to start buying books. I found the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita in a wire rack in my local drugstore, and once accustomed to the habit of buying books and going into bookstores, I bought an inexpensive, hardbound Modern Library edition of Moby-Dick and read all of it. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist became my bible in breaking away from the Catholic Church and exploring the Vedanta that Christopher Isherwood talked about in his introduction to the Gita. For privileged Ivy League professors struggling for tenure, the Canon may seem oppressive, but for working-class kids it was liberating. To escape South Central L.A., where it was unsafe to go out in the schoolyard if you were an intellectual, and to be able to sit under a tree in Marston Quad at Pomona College and read Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins was not to be oppressed by a discourse of domination. (Though I do notice that although Spivak questions the canon, she has a canon of her own and always privileges any mention of Marx or Foucault.)

You can see the positive side of the canon in George Steiner’s autobiography, Errata. Steiner attended the University of Chicago in its most charismatic time. After the end of the Second World War, when America had joined with Europe to defeat fascism, there was a need to articulate “Western Civilization,” both to prevent the United States from retreating back into its isolationism and “know nothing” contempt for European scholarship and culture, and to prevent McCarthyism from eliminating a new and ambitious meritocratic class. Robert M. Hutchins created his Great Books curriculum at Chicago, and Harvard began to transform itself from a New England college for gentlemen into a great and greatly ambitious university. Like Levis and Coca-Cola, Harvard became an instrument of American corporate globalization and is today the world’s most recognizable brand-name university. But back in the late 1940s, the new “Western Civ” curriculum was basically a miniaturization of civilization aimed at enculturating a whole new and expanding middle class. My parents were not educated beyond the eighth grade, because in industrial and immigrant America, “high” school was high because it was meant for the clerical and not the working class. University was only needed for the professional class of doctors, lawyers, and clergymen. But when FDR pulled America out of the Depression and saved the American capitalist system, he did so by extending government credit to the manufacturers. After the war, when a whole generation of hitherto unemployed men returned home with the new skill of having been trained to kill, there was a general fear of instability. The G.I. Bill, in essence, followed FDR’s move, but this time credit was extended to the consuming and not just the producing class. The soldiers went to college, and were given grants to buy homes, and out of that subsidy came the suburbs, the automobiles, the freeways paid for by the National Defense Act, and finally the shopping malls of a new postindustrial economy of credit cards and a Cold War-supported California aerospace defense industry. Along with that social experiment came the University of California, the largest experiment in public education in the history of the world. York University is basically a Canadian copy of this post-industrial innovation.