Arguments about the literary are usually conducted as though the list were the issue.
The list is the visible part of a mechanism that decides what is taught, printed and remembered.
A is not a judgement issued once but a set of practices renewed every year.
Works remain in because they are set on courses, and they are set on courses because criticism exists about them.
That is self-reinforcing and explains why additions are slow while removals are almost impossible.
Defenders of a traditional list frequently argue from quality, which is the weakest available ground.
Quality does not explain why works of comparable by women and by colonised writers left for a century.
The stronger argument from tradition is about rather than .
A society gains something when many of its members have read the same difficult book.
That argument, taken seriously, is an argument for a rather than for any particular one.
design has largely moved past the binary of replacement and preservation.
texts is now the common practice, and it does more analytical work than either option alone.
Reading a ical novel alongside a contemporary response makes the assumptions of both visible.
Students who are asked what a text assumes rather than whether it is great produce better criticism.
The constraint on all of this is time rather than ideology.
A course has twelve weeks, and every addition is a removal whether or not anybody says so.
Pretending otherwise has allowed the argument to proceed without anybody defending what was dropped.
An honest debate begins with the list of what will no longer be read.