Chabon mentions Pynchon

[alice wellintown]

Exactly what I meant with my slightly ambiguous post; that is, the
trend away from giving such awards to living white males is guided by
the attempt to address or correct the practice of maintaing a
curriculum in which dead white males still dominate the cannon (the
works deemed to be either classics or worthy of study), and this
domination is driven by LWM domination of academic positions in the
humanities departments where literature is studied, where syllabi are
written.  In other words, while I agree that the "test of time"
consideration is a factor, it is politics, and I would characterize it
as conservtive, for it seeks to advance a tradtion at the expense of
what is novel and what is different, in other words, what is other
than DWM.

A student of philosophy is not going to find too many black authors or
females on a syllabus. Why is that? She may find Chinese or Japanese.
She may find Jewish philosophers, an entire course. But black
philosphers? Not likely. But philsophy is not literature, or physics
or mathematics. As women have dominated literature for some time now,
in writing and reading, and, as women continue to teach more, study
more, generally, and dispropotianately in English and Literature
studies,  this from the Pre-K level to the graduate school level, a
change seems inevitable. Will students, one day, be taught that that
Elizabeth Bishop is greater than Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and the rest? Or
will War & Peace, the turnings and turnings in the widening gyre, the
wasteland, simply remain the landscape of males, no country for mad
woemn in the attic?

> Likely because the "test of time" figures into the books on a typical syllabus.   I don't believe many "dead white males"  are eligible for the NBCA awards - I think they're for books written in the year of the award.
>
> Now I'm guessing at the bit about the syllabus  -  I had exactly one lit class in college - required.