Modernist classics entering university curricula in the 1960s simultaneously canonized and defused them

Evidence

I think we now have to talk about the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period. This release was something a good deal more momentous than a mere generational change (any number of generations having succeeded themselves during the gradually canonical reign of the modern proper), although it also did something to the collective sense of what “generations” were in the first place. One cannot too often symbolically underscore the moment (in most U.S. universities, the late 1950s or early 1960s) in which the modern “classics” entered the school system and the college reading lists (before that, we read Pound on our own, English departments only laboriously reaching Tennyson). This was a kind of revolution in its own way, with unexpected consequences, forcing the recognition of the modern texts at the same time that it defused them, like former radicals finally appointed to the cabinet. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 684

Categorization

• QUESTION: Jameson’s periodization marker — the 1960s canonization of modernism — offers a concrete, testable claim: does the same defusing dynamic hold for whatever canon formation is happening now?
• SEED: An essay angle: what happens when countercultural forms get canonized — from modernist poetry in the 60s to, say, hip-hop in today’s curricula — and whether canonization always defuses.
• XREF: connects to: Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 23; Sixties texts are now dated precisely by straddling modern and postmodern paradigms — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 89