As a group, English professors have long abandoned the concept of "classic literature." The idea of a literary canon is just too ideologically fraught. Historically, it has been the hegemonic construct of privileged white men who are only out to promote other privileged white men. The concept of "great books" is a disaster from the perspective of race, sex, and class, a totally discriminatory boondoggle designed to keep the patriarchal imperialists on top and to keep everyone else down. That's why, if you've looked at the course offerings in any old English department lately, you are likely to find lots of courses on women writers and writers of color, and lots of courses centered on the themes of identity, politics, power, and oppression. Sure, you'll still find courses on Shakespeare. The need to pull in large numbers of undergraduates pretty much guarantees that. But otherwise, you are looking at a politically correct mishmash. It's possible to teach a survey course in nineteenth-century American literature using only slave narratives, for example--no Emerson, no Melville, no Hawthorne, but all Frederick Douglass and Linda Brent, all the time. It's also entirely respectable to teach a course on the rise of the English novel as a course on women writers--no Defoe, no Richardson, no Dickens, but plenty of Austen, Bronte, Eliot, and, of course, the obligatory unreadable "minor women writers." I'm not speaking hypothetically here--I see this sort of thing done all the time.

The good news is that the canon is not dead yet. Since English professors don't want it, Oprah Winfrey has decided to make it her special new provenance. She has revived her famous book club with the aim of reviving interest in literary classics. Of course, some concerned English professors are sniffing a bit about Oprah's undertaking--especially after she kicked off the project with John Steinbeck's potboiler, East of Eden. Telling her audience that "We think it might be the best novel we've ever read!", Winfrey singlehandedly caused the book's sales to spike. Within a day, the novel's Amazon.com sales rank had risen from 2,352 to 2. "She's crazy," University of Louisville English professor Dennis Hall told a local paper. "If she says 'East of Eden' is one of the best novels she's ever read, either her tastes are very narrowly defined or she hasn't read many good novels."

But it's hard to get too snooty about Oprah's enthusiastic literary populism when your own profession has discarded the notion of the classic for being elitist. Possibly without knowing it, Oprah has hoist the troubled and misguided profession of letters on its own ideological petard. "It's very hard to say Oprah is wrong," said Louisville English professor and literary theorist Matthew Biberman. "She seems to be reinventing the notion of a classic." Some even think Oprah might be the future of English: "The literary elite persist in dismissing Oprah and her readers ... (as) lowbrow, unworthy of serious attention," said Mark Hall, who teaches rhetoric and composition at Cal State Chico. "As a teacher, however, I struggle to engage my students in reading, and so I wonder if academics might learn something from Winfrey about how to tap into the interests of general readers. ... In my experience, the treatment of literature in the classroom often kills the joy of reading for many students. By contrast, Winfrey fosters the deeply felt pleasure that hooks readers and keeps them engaged."

He may be right. Personally, I loved East of Eden. When I read it as a college freshman--during time stolen from homework and athletic practice--I thought it was the best novel I ever read. I used to dream about quitting my job and running off to work on the Oprah show, thinking that at least this was someone who actually speaks to people and actually gets them to want to read. I wasn't seeing much of that in my, ahem, line of work. Whatever you think of her taste, we need people like her.