When Duke Magazine asked me to address the future of the literary canon, I agreed, but probably I shouldn't have. The truth is that I've never given much thought to the question of canon formation, not even during the years of the culture wars, when it was important to declare yourself for the canon as it stood (in which case you were said to be on the "right") or for "opening it up" (in which case you were said to be on the "left").

I've been a lifelong Democrat, have been called a Marxist by some high-placed defenders of the traditional humanistic curriculum (including the controversial former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney), and worked for Barack Obama's election. And (I almost wrote "but") I teach only so-called canonical writers. I've never thought that political and aesthetic values were in conflict, or understood how they could be. For me, at any rate, they are not.

I say "so-called canonical" because my specialty is modernism, and it seems wrong to me to call "canonical" writers who have been around for only 100 years or less. I teach the writers I'm passionate about and refuse to put on my syllabus—because I fear that I'd teach them badly—writers for whom I can summon no passion. Here's my more or less complete list of the former: Beckett, Chekhov, Conrad, DeLillo, Eliot, Ellison, Faulkner, Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Lampedusa, Mann, Pound, Stevens, Woolf, Yeats. (But what about…? And how about…? How can you possibly not…?)

To say that I teach these writers is misleading: I teach a very few select texts by masters of aesthetic excellence. "Masters," you may recall, was a highly contested word among cultural warriors. I used the word because the texts I teach seem to me to tell us about the world in ways too dense, too particular, too wayward to be captured by ideological abstractions from any place on the political spectrum. They tell us about our being in the world by creating pleasurably difficult artistic structures and textures in and through which—and only in and through which—we are given access to unique visions.

I'd say, if pushed, that they give us the most complex portraits out there of what it means to be human, not generally, but in specific historical circumstances, while recognizing that my colleagues in the other disciplines—in art history, in classics, in anthropology, in history, in philosophy—will offer strong claims of their own that I'd not be able to successfully turn back, even if I had the desire to do so, which I do not.

Where will my so-called modernist canon be in twenty-five years? Likely, just where it is today. The unanswerable question is, where will it be in two or three hundred years? I'm confident of this: Changes in my "canon" and the classic Western canon (Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, etc.) won't be effected by individuals at Duke or any other institution of "higher" learning engaged with each other in polemical struggle, but by long, slow, historical processes over which no individual, or university, can exercise determinative action.

Lentricchia A.M. '63, Ph.D. '66 has written more than twenty books of fiction and of literary criticism. His most recent novel, The Italian Actress, was published in 2008.