I have spent the past two months learning how to use contemporary adolescent literature in a high school classroom. That makes me a danger to people like James D. Black, a teacher at Louisa County High School in Mineral, Virginia. In his essay, "The Monuments of a Culture", he writes "In a very real sense, our consciences are not our own, for as teachers we have an inescapable moral duty to speak for, teach, preserve, and renew the absolute best our culture has to offer."
             Hyperbole aside, Harold Bloom would agree with Black. In his interview on C-Span's Booktalk Bloom says "Either you believe that reading and teaching and thinking about the best that has been thought and written and said matters, and does everyone a great deal of good, or you do not." Or, put simply, "Take the best of what has been written as our text book."
             Now I believe that there can and should be a separate canon for Young Adult literature, and with that one stipulation withstanding I agree with Bloom. A teacher should strive to use the best of what has been written as the text for a class. This makes Bloom's essay "Elegy for the Canon" of great interest to me. In it Bloom explains how the modern definition of Canon, "a catalog of approved authors", became separate from its religious origins in the 18th century, with the acceptance of Shakespeare as the "Secular canon, or even the secular scripture (Pg24)."
             What is it about a playwright, dead almost 400 years, that makes him so important to read and relevant to our lives today? Who decided that Shakespeare, or any other author like Milton, was canonical? In his day, the "dominant social class chose [Shakespeare] (Pg 25)." He was a favorite of the aristocracy, plus he appealed to the burgeoning middle class. He captured the "great dimiurge, economic and social history," bending those creative, chaotic...