- Email: [email protected]
The academic librarian and the hegemony of the canon
porteur Group, 1998. Online. Available: http:lwww.irds.org/ Metadata Registries Workshop, April 15-l 7, 1998. Online. Available: ftp://sdct-sunsrvl.ncsl.nist.gov/x318/other/registryworkshop/metaOO.htm National Committee on Information Technologystandards, Technical Committee L8. Data Representation, 1998. Online. Available: http:Nwww.lbl.govl-olkenfX3L8/
The Academic Librarian and the Hegemony of the Canon by John J. Doherty
C
ollection development is an integral part of the function of academic libraries to support the curricular and research needs of the academic groups within the libraries’ academic communities. Yet, because most libraries have such varied academic constituencies, the priorities for collection development are, by necessity, determined by the academic priorities of each department and unit that the libraries serve. To build a collection, collection development librarians make hard choices. In fiscally lean times, when collection development librarians have little to no discretionary monies, a standard collection of works specific to each discipline, or a canon, is a very powerful tool. It has been argued that such canons censor the works that fall outside of the prevailing norms, the hegemony of the discipline. HEGEMONY OF THE CANON Hegemony is defined as the intellectual and moral leadership of society through the molding of personal convictions into a replica of prevailing norms. This leadership is objectified in the ensemble of educational, religious, and associational institutions that make up society.’ One could take this general delinition a step further to say that the perpetual debate over the academic canon is a debate over the dominant influences in the academy. The point of a canon is “to underwrite the authority of a text, not merely with respect to its origin as against competitors in the field-this, technically, would simply be a question of authenticity-but with respect to the present and future in which it will reign or govern as a binding text.“* In his attempt to discover a new theory of library service, Michael Harris dismissed the pluralist and positivist foundations of library science as promulgating an illusory sense of understanding social reality. The reader, he maintained, should consider the library as an “institution embedded in a stratified ensemble of institutions” dedicated to the “creation, transmission, and reproduction of the hegemonic ideology.“3 Such an ideology is firmly founded in the region of high culture. Indeed, one can argue that the academy is, by definition, high culture and that the academic library is “an institution contrived to consume, preserve, transmit, and reproduce”4 that high culture which is best represented by the canon. While the importance of the prevailing economic and political interests in canon development cannot be underrated, the canon is mainly the manifestation of the mainstream disciplines that define it. Disciplines are historically exclusionary: “they use the power to exclude to punish those who violate their discursive limits, but they also use their institutionally sanctioned power to exclude in advance those who do not seem ‘normal’.” The counterpoint of exclusion is inclusion. In discussing the value of a text as it relates to its inclusion in the canon, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith says that texts that survive [those that are deemed of value and, thus, are canonical] “will tend to be those that appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies.“’
John J. Doherty is Undergraduate Reference Services Librarian, Cline Library, Northern 86077-6022
Arizona
University,
Box 6022,
.
Professor, Montana
State University
Flagstaff, Arizona
He was Assistant
Libraries, Bozeman.
September
1998
403
The establishment can be the state, the academy, or any socially, economically, or politically established class. Indeed, academic departments, curricula, subjects, and even faculty can become de facto establishments, both locally and nationally. One only has to view the sometimes acrimonious academic debates over the value of interdisciplinary studies to witness this. The canon, therefore, reflects the “elitism and exclusivity”7 of a discipline. In American Literature, for example, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman remain as much a part of the mainstream curriculum in the 1990s as they were decades ago. It can be noted today that there is a progression toward the inclusion of works by African-American and feminist authors in the American Literature canon. However, one can also note the backlash against the “political correctness” of the evolving canon by “right-wing” gr0ups.s Such attempts to establish the true canon may be considered a manifestation of Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position”’ by the elitist elements of the establishment between the perceived truths and falsehoods. Umberto Eco suggests that the librarian is the ultimate overseer of such exclusivity: Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. lo
Here Eco speaks of a librarian, a “priest of the book,” using his or her position to fight a “rear-guard action against a new age. “” Jorge, the librarian, hides a book that, if discovered, would change his comfortable canon, the one that agrees with his ideology. Jorge was wary of those things that went against his version of the canon, a version that allowed for no addition. ENFORCER OF THE CANON Librarians, because of their education and traditional view of culture, hold a similar sense of wariness. In the three types of collection evaluation the library is likely to use, I2 one may see a strong role for the establishment. Subject specialists in libraries are immersed in the canon: for example, the librarian responsible for the American Literature collection tends to have expertise established at the undergraduate (and, increasingly, the graduate) level. Thus, it can be said that the subject specialist is, in part, a product of the discipline, with all the exclusionary and elitist limits that come with the label. Evaluating the collection against its use is also dependant upon the discipline, for the collection’s use is dictated a great deal by the class assignments issued by the faculty. Finally, checking the collection against recognized standards is discipline oriented. For example, the Research Library Group (RLG) Conspectus13 is a widely used collection evaluation tool that is favored by consensus within particular academic user groups. Standards perpetuate a static canon. These structural limits of academic collection development can influence the perpetuation of the static canon. Therefore, the role that the librarian plays can be hegemonic and, further, can maintain the supremacy of the canon through the traditional definition of the role of the academic library as a support to the academic curriculum. For example, the collection development office examines the curriculum and syllabi of courses offered. Based on the information derived therefrom, the librarian produces a collection development policy that will adequately support the institution’s program of instruction.
404
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
The professional accreditation process is also a champion of the establishment, since it provides assistance to the institution undergoing examination by supplying a self-study handbook and standards that give the criteria for library services and collections. For example, accreditation as a process usually involves, for the library profession, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, or both. These organizations agree upon and apply standards that offer direction and guidance to collection development and evaluation. For specific academic disciplines, this involves their own professional accrediting organizations, and usually includes consideration of the library collections that support the curriculum. The role of the academic library, however, ultimately goes beyond mere support of the instructional needs of its host institution. After all, it is the nature of any library to collect materials that go beyond current needs. The academic library, especially a larger research library, has a role in maintaining essential materials for the academic needs of its constituency and an archival, or historical, responsibility for preserving the materials of civilization.‘4 While declining budgets and rising publication costs have forced even the larger libraries to reconsider this, some are still building such ‘tjust-in-case” collections.‘5 This role implies both selectivity and completeness, or at least an effort toward completeness. Collecting canonical works is definitely a process of maintenance as well as building. It is also somewhat archival in function, but does not meet every requirement of preserving the materials of civilization; the exclusionary nature of the canon, after all, cannot represent the whole of a given society. THE EVOLVING CANON Canons, however, are evolutionary, even though they may seem concrete and stable at any given point. Prior to the 1920s Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman were not a part of the received canon. Thus, something that is currently in place as canonical may not be in 100 years, 50 years, or even 10 years. There is an infh-mation dialectic between academic libraries and the faculty and departments that they serve. Librarians might consider themselves facilitators of exploration by collecting material that is currently non-canonical. By doing so they can facilitate the evolution of the canon. This is, I believe, the true historical responsibility of academic libraries. It is a function that goes much further than just collecting the knowledge of civilization: it is the difference between collecting and collection building. In saying this, though, the concept of the canon is here to stay. A dilemma faced by anti-canonists when considering how to challenge the traditional canon is how to do so without merely reproducing an alternate canon. A post-modernist, anarchic view of the canon would lead to a chaotic curriculum with little direction. For example, in the Humanities the canon is inherent, since the structure of the disciplines is based on the examination of the canonical works. The sciences are structured in such a way that an outdated work is no longer of active value, and therefore non-canonical-the canon defines itself through the nature of the disciplines. The hegemony in the sciences, however, can be said to be Western: a recent survey of scientists and journal editors in developing countries discusses “structural obstacles and subtle prejudices” that prevent them from sharing their research with the world.16
The canon in academic libraries assists the collection development librarian in meeting some of the tasks that must be performed. Looking at the canon debate in light of the concept of hegemony allows librarians to question if the traditional canon is the last word in collection development, even in such lean times. The academic library has an obligation to the future, which the current canons do not always meet. If the academic library is to fulfill its role then it might examine this concept and try to learn something from it.
CONCLUSION Collection development theory and practice is very much defined by the library’s maintenance and archival functions and practices, and as such attempts a solution toward the primacy of the traditional, static canon. Academia, however, needs to look more closely at the canon and decide how best to develop it to be more inclusive. Librarians can play a role in this by facilitating a partnership with the academy that will allow a radical reassessment of the canon to bring about a balance between what is canonical and non-canonical. Librarians can (and in some cases, do) force the canon to evolve and become more inclusive in, for example, areas of gender, race, non-western cultures, and religion. There are several ways in which librarians do this: they can look for works that are non-canonical, especially if these works do not appear on class reading lists; acquire similar non-canonical works while collecting the canonical works that curricular and research needs of the institution demand; and move beyond the traditional genres in search of newer items. This, of course, can be done only within the confines of available and often limited funds. Such a strategy could be seen as an assault on the bastion of “quality literature” and “high culture” by bringing popular culture into the academic fray. Traditionalists in the academy have rarely focused upon popular texts as they “tend to act as disciplinary prefects, for their traditional role is threatened by popular productivity and by popular discrimination.“” The argument for retaining a canon is that it is neither insignificant nor irrelevant to scholarship. Were it so, “it would probably die a quiet death due to neglect or apathy.“‘8 Academic librarians have typically defined their collections in terms of the in-demand works. Librarians however, are drawing the lines in the canon debate for their own “war of position.” The first step in this process is to become aware of, and to educate others in, the “war of position” that the canonists have been waging for so long. To counter this, collection development can strive harder to focus its priorities on how to canonize the noncanonical through education and a moderate reformation in the canon. This allows it to evolve by promoting a process of critical thinking that is not always engendered by the standard, uniform, stable canon. The evolving canon results in a “war of position” between those who value one text over another that can encourage fruitful, independent critical thinking. Fostering such abilities is, after all, a major goal of higher education and, by implication, the academy.
Acknowledgment:
The author would like to thank the following for reading and discussing the ideas in this work during the various stages of its development. Their assistance was invaluable: the editors and reviewers of JAL, Mary Bushing, Bruce Morton, Janet Owens, Charley Seavey, and Anne Doherty. The opinions herein expressed remain those of the author.
NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 198 I), p. 24. This concept was promulgated in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. It is an abrupt departure from the Marxist-Leninist view of communism. It means that “people of all non-exploiting classes give their consent to the philosophy of praxis” through education and understanding rather than manipulation or imposition by “a party elite” (Robert Bocock, Hegemony (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1986), p. 22). The exciting notion behind this concept, and one that most philosophers see as Gramsci’s greatest contribution to neo-Marxist theory, is that of consent. Gramsci specifically avoids the idea of coercion, whether it is violent or otherwise. Hegemony, however, is primarily a strategy for “the gaining of the active consent of the masses through their self-organization, starting from civil society” (Christine Buci-Glucksman, “Hegemony and Consent: A Political Strategy,” in Approaches to Gramsci, edited by Anne Showstack Sassoon (London: Writers and Readers, 1982) p. 119). 2. Gerald Bruns, “Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures,” in Canons, edited by Robert von Hallberg (Chigaco: University of Chigaco Press, 1984) p. 67. For collection development librarians, of course, the conflicting needs of the present and the future presents a major dilemma. The biases that shape and perpetuate the canon compound this dilemma. 3. Michael H. Harris, “State, Class, and Cultural Reproduction: Toward a Theory of Library Service in the United States,” Advances in Librarianship 14 (1986): 241. 4. Ibid., p. 242. 5. David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994) p. 9. 6. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, “Contingencies of Value,” in Canons, p. 34. 7. Shumway, Creating American Civilization, p. 188. 8. Ibid., p. 350. 9. “[Antonio] Gramsci’s advance over Lenin was to develop a strategy for use within the Western European societies, based on the distinction he made between a ‘war of movement’ which had been based on a direct assault on the state, and on a ‘war of position’ which was applicable in Western Europe.” Bocock, Hegemony, p. 27. IO. Umberto Eco, The Name ofthe Rose (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), p. 491. Il. Jeffrey Garrett, “Missing Eco: On Reading The Name of the Rose as Library Criticism,” The Library Quarterly 61 (October 1991): 383. Garrett notes the surprising silence of librarians regarding the central role the library has to play in Eco’s novel. He considers this may be due to the casting of the librarian as the villain. 12. The three types of evaluation, as noted by F. W. Lancaster, are: expert judgement, or evaluation by subject specialists; checking the collection against an accepted standard bibliography or list; and, evaluating the collection’s strengths and weaknesses from present patterns of use. F. W. Lancaster, IfYou Want to Evaluate Your Library . (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1993) pp. 28, 29,5 I. 13. “The Conspectus consists of an exhaustive division of knowledge through which libraries report the strength of their collections and their current reading levels. The combined values from many different libraries comprise a topical map of overall coverage.” Dan C. Hazen, “Cooperative Collection Development: Compelling Theory, Inconsequential Results?, ” in Collection Management for the 21” Century: A Handbook for Librarians, edited by G.E. Gorman & Ruth H. Miller (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997) p. 270. 14. Ross Atkinson, “Old Forms, New Forms: The Challenge of Collection Development,” College & Research Libraries 50 (1989): 508. 15. William S. Monroe, “The Role of Selection in Collection Development: Past, Present, and Future,” in Collection Management for the 21” Century, p. I 12.
September 1998
405
16. W. Watt Gibbs, “Lost Science in the Third World,” Scientz@ American 273 (August 1995): 92. In the same article, one scientist comments: “Since Western research libraries acquire only journals with a high impact, they do not subscribe to journals outside of the magic circle of citation analysis. It is clear that we have a selfperpetuating and closed system of review and citation” (p. 94). 17. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989) pp. 105 106. 18. Brian Quinn, “Some Implications of the Canon Debate for Collection Development,” Collection Building 14 (1994): 3.
406
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
The Academic Librarian and the Hegemony of the Canon by John J. Doherty
C
ollection development is an integral part of the function of academic libraries to support the curricular and research needs of the academic groups within the libraries’ academic communities. Yet, because most libraries have such varied academic constituencies, the priorities for collection development are, by necessity, determined by the academic priorities of each department and unit that the libraries serve. To build a collection, collection development librarians make hard choices. In fiscally lean times, when collection development librarians have little to no discretionary monies, a standard collection of works specific to each discipline, or a canon, is a very powerful tool. It has been argued that such canons censor the works that fall outside of the prevailing norms, the hegemony of the discipline. HEGEMONY OF THE CANON Hegemony is defined as the intellectual and moral leadership of society through the molding of personal convictions into a replica of prevailing norms. This leadership is objectified in the ensemble of educational, religious, and associational institutions that make up society.’ One could take this general delinition a step further to say that the perpetual debate over the academic canon is a debate over the dominant influences in the academy. The point of a canon is “to underwrite the authority of a text, not merely with respect to its origin as against competitors in the field-this, technically, would simply be a question of authenticity-but with respect to the present and future in which it will reign or govern as a binding text.“* In his attempt to discover a new theory of library service, Michael Harris dismissed the pluralist and positivist foundations of library science as promulgating an illusory sense of understanding social reality. The reader, he maintained, should consider the library as an “institution embedded in a stratified ensemble of institutions” dedicated to the “creation, transmission, and reproduction of the hegemonic ideology.“3 Such an ideology is firmly founded in the region of high culture. Indeed, one can argue that the academy is, by definition, high culture and that the academic library is “an institution contrived to consume, preserve, transmit, and reproduce”4 that high culture which is best represented by the canon. While the importance of the prevailing economic and political interests in canon development cannot be underrated, the canon is mainly the manifestation of the mainstream disciplines that define it. Disciplines are historically exclusionary: “they use the power to exclude to punish those who violate their discursive limits, but they also use their institutionally sanctioned power to exclude in advance those who do not seem ‘normal’.” The counterpoint of exclusion is inclusion. In discussing the value of a text as it relates to its inclusion in the canon, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith says that texts that survive [those that are deemed of value and, thus, are canonical] “will tend to be those that appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies.“’
John J. Doherty is Undergraduate Reference Services Librarian, Cline Library, Northern 86077-6022
Arizona
University,
Box 6022,
Professor, Montana
State University
Flagstaff, Arizona
He was Assistant
Libraries, Bozeman.
September
1998
403
The establishment can be the state, the academy, or any socially, economically, or politically established class. Indeed, academic departments, curricula, subjects, and even faculty can become de facto establishments, both locally and nationally. One only has to view the sometimes acrimonious academic debates over the value of interdisciplinary studies to witness this. The canon, therefore, reflects the “elitism and exclusivity”7 of a discipline. In American Literature, for example, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman remain as much a part of the mainstream curriculum in the 1990s as they were decades ago. It can be noted today that there is a progression toward the inclusion of works by African-American and feminist authors in the American Literature canon. However, one can also note the backlash against the “political correctness” of the evolving canon by “right-wing” gr0ups.s Such attempts to establish the true canon may be considered a manifestation of Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position”’ by the elitist elements of the establishment between the perceived truths and falsehoods. Umberto Eco suggests that the librarian is the ultimate overseer of such exclusivity: Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. lo
Here Eco speaks of a librarian, a “priest of the book,” using his or her position to fight a “rear-guard action against a new age. “” Jorge, the librarian, hides a book that, if discovered, would change his comfortable canon, the one that agrees with his ideology. Jorge was wary of those things that went against his version of the canon, a version that allowed for no addition. ENFORCER OF THE CANON Librarians, because of their education and traditional view of culture, hold a similar sense of wariness. In the three types of collection evaluation the library is likely to use, I2 one may see a strong role for the establishment. Subject specialists in libraries are immersed in the canon: for example, the librarian responsible for the American Literature collection tends to have expertise established at the undergraduate (and, increasingly, the graduate) level. Thus, it can be said that the subject specialist is, in part, a product of the discipline, with all the exclusionary and elitist limits that come with the label. Evaluating the collection against its use is also dependant upon the discipline, for the collection’s use is dictated a great deal by the class assignments issued by the faculty. Finally, checking the collection against recognized standards is discipline oriented. For example, the Research Library Group (RLG) Conspectus13 is a widely used collection evaluation tool that is favored by consensus within particular academic user groups. Standards perpetuate a static canon. These structural limits of academic collection development can influence the perpetuation of the static canon. Therefore, the role that the librarian plays can be hegemonic and, further, can maintain the supremacy of the canon through the traditional definition of the role of the academic library as a support to the academic curriculum. For example, the collection development office examines the curriculum and syllabi of courses offered. Based on the information derived therefrom, the librarian produces a collection development policy that will adequately support the institution’s program of instruction.
404
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
The professional accreditation process is also a champion of the establishment, since it provides assistance to the institution undergoing examination by supplying a self-study handbook and standards that give the criteria for library services and collections. For example, accreditation as a process usually involves, for the library profession, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, or both. These organizations agree upon and apply standards that offer direction and guidance to collection development and evaluation. For specific academic disciplines, this involves their own professional accrediting organizations, and usually includes consideration of the library collections that support the curriculum. The role of the academic library, however, ultimately goes beyond mere support of the instructional needs of its host institution. After all, it is the nature of any library to collect materials that go beyond current needs. The academic library, especially a larger research library, has a role in maintaining essential materials for the academic needs of its constituency and an archival, or historical, responsibility for preserving the materials of civilization.‘4 While declining budgets and rising publication costs have forced even the larger libraries to reconsider this, some are still building such ‘tjust-in-case” collections.‘5 This role implies both selectivity and completeness, or at least an effort toward completeness. Collecting canonical works is definitely a process of maintenance as well as building. It is also somewhat archival in function, but does not meet every requirement of preserving the materials of civilization; the exclusionary nature of the canon, after all, cannot represent the whole of a given society. THE EVOLVING CANON Canons, however, are evolutionary, even though they may seem concrete and stable at any given point. Prior to the 1920s Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman were not a part of the received canon. Thus, something that is currently in place as canonical may not be in 100 years, 50 years, or even 10 years. There is an infh-mation dialectic between academic libraries and the faculty and departments that they serve. Librarians might consider themselves facilitators of exploration by collecting material that is currently non-canonical. By doing so they can facilitate the evolution of the canon. This is, I believe, the true historical responsibility of academic libraries. It is a function that goes much further than just collecting the knowledge of civilization: it is the difference between collecting and collection building. In saying this, though, the concept of the canon is here to stay. A dilemma faced by anti-canonists when considering how to challenge the traditional canon is how to do so without merely reproducing an alternate canon. A post-modernist, anarchic view of the canon would lead to a chaotic curriculum with little direction. For example, in the Humanities the canon is inherent, since the structure of the disciplines is based on the examination of the canonical works. The sciences are structured in such a way that an outdated work is no longer of active value, and therefore non-canonical-the canon defines itself through the nature of the disciplines. The hegemony in the sciences, however, can be said to be Western: a recent survey of scientists and journal editors in developing countries discusses “structural obstacles and subtle prejudices” that prevent them from sharing their research with the world.16
The canon in academic libraries assists the collection development librarian in meeting some of the tasks that must be performed. Looking at the canon debate in light of the concept of hegemony allows librarians to question if the traditional canon is the last word in collection development, even in such lean times. The academic library has an obligation to the future, which the current canons do not always meet. If the academic library is to fulfill its role then it might examine this concept and try to learn something from it.
CONCLUSION Collection development theory and practice is very much defined by the library’s maintenance and archival functions and practices, and as such attempts a solution toward the primacy of the traditional, static canon. Academia, however, needs to look more closely at the canon and decide how best to develop it to be more inclusive. Librarians can play a role in this by facilitating a partnership with the academy that will allow a radical reassessment of the canon to bring about a balance between what is canonical and non-canonical. Librarians can (and in some cases, do) force the canon to evolve and become more inclusive in, for example, areas of gender, race, non-western cultures, and religion. There are several ways in which librarians do this: they can look for works that are non-canonical, especially if these works do not appear on class reading lists; acquire similar non-canonical works while collecting the canonical works that curricular and research needs of the institution demand; and move beyond the traditional genres in search of newer items. This, of course, can be done only within the confines of available and often limited funds. Such a strategy could be seen as an assault on the bastion of “quality literature” and “high culture” by bringing popular culture into the academic fray. Traditionalists in the academy have rarely focused upon popular texts as they “tend to act as disciplinary prefects, for their traditional role is threatened by popular productivity and by popular discrimination.“” The argument for retaining a canon is that it is neither insignificant nor irrelevant to scholarship. Were it so, “it would probably die a quiet death due to neglect or apathy.“‘8 Academic librarians have typically defined their collections in terms of the in-demand works. Librarians however, are drawing the lines in the canon debate for their own “war of position.” The first step in this process is to become aware of, and to educate others in, the “war of position” that the canonists have been waging for so long. To counter this, collection development can strive harder to focus its priorities on how to canonize the noncanonical through education and a moderate reformation in the canon. This allows it to evolve by promoting a process of critical thinking that is not always engendered by the standard, uniform, stable canon. The evolving canon results in a “war of position” between those who value one text over another that can encourage fruitful, independent critical thinking. Fostering such abilities is, after all, a major goal of higher education and, by implication, the academy.
Acknowledgment:
The author would like to thank the following for reading and discussing the ideas in this work during the various stages of its development. Their assistance was invaluable: the editors and reviewers of JAL, Mary Bushing, Bruce Morton, Janet Owens, Charley Seavey, and Anne Doherty. The opinions herein expressed remain those of the author.
NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 198 I), p. 24. This concept was promulgated in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. It is an abrupt departure from the Marxist-Leninist view of communism. It means that “people of all non-exploiting classes give their consent to the philosophy of praxis” through education and understanding rather than manipulation or imposition by “a party elite” (Robert Bocock, Hegemony (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1986), p. 22). The exciting notion behind this concept, and one that most philosophers see as Gramsci’s greatest contribution to neo-Marxist theory, is that of consent. Gramsci specifically avoids the idea of coercion, whether it is violent or otherwise. Hegemony, however, is primarily a strategy for “the gaining of the active consent of the masses through their self-organization, starting from civil society” (Christine Buci-Glucksman, “Hegemony and Consent: A Political Strategy,” in Approaches to Gramsci, edited by Anne Showstack Sassoon (London: Writers and Readers, 1982) p. 119). 2. Gerald Bruns, “Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures,” in Canons, edited by Robert von Hallberg (Chigaco: University of Chigaco Press, 1984) p. 67. For collection development librarians, of course, the conflicting needs of the present and the future presents a major dilemma. The biases that shape and perpetuate the canon compound this dilemma. 3. Michael H. Harris, “State, Class, and Cultural Reproduction: Toward a Theory of Library Service in the United States,” Advances in Librarianship 14 (1986): 241. 4. Ibid., p. 242. 5. David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994) p. 9. 6. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, “Contingencies of Value,” in Canons, p. 34. 7. Shumway, Creating American Civilization, p. 188. 8. Ibid., p. 350. 9. “[Antonio] Gramsci’s advance over Lenin was to develop a strategy for use within the Western European societies, based on the distinction he made between a ‘war of movement’ which had been based on a direct assault on the state, and on a ‘war of position’ which was applicable in Western Europe.” Bocock, Hegemony, p. 27. IO. Umberto Eco, The Name ofthe Rose (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), p. 491. Il. Jeffrey Garrett, “Missing Eco: On Reading The Name of the Rose as Library Criticism,” The Library Quarterly 61 (October 1991): 383. Garrett notes the surprising silence of librarians regarding the central role the library has to play in Eco’s novel. He considers this may be due to the casting of the librarian as the villain. 12. The three types of evaluation, as noted by F. W. Lancaster, are: expert judgement, or evaluation by subject specialists; checking the collection against an accepted standard bibliography or list; and, evaluating the collection’s strengths and weaknesses from present patterns of use. F. W. Lancaster, IfYou Want to Evaluate Your Library . (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1993) pp. 28, 29,5 I. 13. “The Conspectus consists of an exhaustive division of knowledge through which libraries report the strength of their collections and their current reading levels. The combined values from many different libraries comprise a topical map of overall coverage.” Dan C. Hazen, “Cooperative Collection Development: Compelling Theory, Inconsequential Results?, ” in Collection Management for the 21” Century: A Handbook for Librarians, edited by G.E. Gorman & Ruth H. Miller (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997) p. 270. 14. Ross Atkinson, “Old Forms, New Forms: The Challenge of Collection Development,” College & Research Libraries 50 (1989): 508. 15. William S. Monroe, “The Role of Selection in Collection Development: Past, Present, and Future,” in Collection Management for the 21” Century, p. I 12.
September 1998
405
16. W. Watt Gibbs, “Lost Science in the Third World,” Scientz@ American 273 (August 1995): 92. In the same article, one scientist comments: “Since Western research libraries acquire only journals with a high impact, they do not subscribe to journals outside of the magic circle of citation analysis. It is clear that we have a selfperpetuating and closed system of review and citation” (p. 94). 17. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989) pp. 105 106. 18. Brian Quinn, “Some Implications of the Canon Debate for Collection Development,” Collection Building 14 (1994): 3.
406
The Journal of Academic Librarianship