Western canon

Dante, Homer and Virgil in Raphael's Parnassus fresco (1511), key figures in the Western canon

The Western canon is the body of books, music and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes work of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art and sculpture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit.

Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature."

A classic and the origin of the canon

A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.

In painting, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503–1506, is the archetypal masterpiece, though it was not produced for admission to a guild or academy.

A related word is masterpiece or chef d'œuvre, which in modern use refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill, or workmanship. Historically, the word refers to a work of a very high standard produced in order to obtain membership of a Guild or Academy.

The first "classic" writer was Aulus Gellius, a 2nd-century Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a Classicus scriptor, non proletarius ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon ("carpenter’s rule"). Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction, thus, being comprehended in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes ("the admitted", "the included") to identify the writers in the canon.

The debate

There has been an ongoing debate, over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s, much of which is rooted in critical theory, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism. In particular postmodern studies has argued that the body of scholarship is biased, because the main focus traditionally of the academic studies of history and Western culture, has only been on Europe and men. English professor Jay Stevenson argues:

[In] the postmodern period […] [t]raditional literature has been found to have been written by "dead white males" to serve the ideological aims of a conservative and repressive Anglo hegemony […] In an array of reactions against the race, gender, and class biases found to be woven into the tradition of Anglo lit, multicultural writers and political literary theorists have sought to expose, resist, and redress injustices and prejudices. These prejudices are often covert – disguised in literature and other discourses as positive ideals and objective truths – but they slant our sense of reality in favor of power and privilege.

With regard to literature University of Chicago professor, political philosopher and literary critic Allan Bloom in his bestselling 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, has disagreed strongly: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied." Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom (no relation) has also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1995 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions, though its implications continue to be debated.

Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle has written:

There is a certain irony in this [i.e., politicized objections to the canon] in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority; who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading? Searle's rebuttal suggests that "one obvious difficulty with it [i.e., arguments against hierarchical ranking of books] is that if it were valid, it would argue against any set of required readings whatever; indeed, any list you care to make about anything automatically creates two categories, those that are on the list and those that are not."

Charles Altieri states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society.

The canon of classical music

The term "classical music" did not appear until the early 19th century, in an attempt to distinctly canonize the period from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beethoven as a golden age. The earliest reference to "classical music" recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from about 1836.

In classical music, during the nineteenth century a "canon" developed which focussed on what was felt to be the most important works works written since 1600. In the 2000s, the standard concert repertoire of professional orchestras, chamber music groups and choirs tends to focus on works by a relatively small number of mainly 18th and 19th century male composers. Many of the works deemed to be part of the musical canon are from genres regarded as the most serious, such as the symphony, concerto, string quartet, and opera.

Since the early twentieth century non-Western music has begun to influence Western composers. In particular direct homages to Java gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.

Women composers

Main article: Women in music

Clara Schumann, (1819 – 1896), was a German musician and composer, considered one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era.

Almost all of the composers who are described in music textbooks on classical music, and whose works are widely performed as part of the standard concert repertoire are male composers, even though there has been a large number of women composers throughout the classical music period. Musicologist Marcia Citron has asked "[w]hy is music composed by women so marginal to the standard 'classical' repertoire?" Citron "examines the practices and attitudes that have led to the exclusion of women composers from the received 'canon' of performed musical works." She argues that in the 1800s, women composers typically wrote art songs for performance in small recitals rather than symphonies intended for performance with an orchestra in a large hall, with the latter works being seen as the most important genre for composers; since women composers did not write many symphonies, they were deemed to be not notable as composers. In the "Concise Oxford History of Music, Clara Schumann is one of the few female composers mentioned." Abbey Philips states that "[d]uring the 20th century the women who were composing/playing gained far less attention than their male counterparts."

The canon of painting and sculpture

Main article: Art history

The backbone of the art history is a celebratory chronology of beautiful creations commissioned by public or religious bodies or wealthy individuals in western Europe. Such a "canon" remains prominent, as indicated by the selection of objects present in art history textbooks. Nonetheless, since the 20th century there has been an effort to re-define the discipline to be more inclusive of non-Western art, art made by women, and vernacular creativity. Pablo Picasso was for example, influenced by African art. From 1906 to 1909 he painted in a style which was strongly influenced by African sculpture and particularly traditional African masks. This proto-Cubist period following Picasso's Blue Period and Rose Period has also been called the Negro Period, or Black Period.

Aesthetics

Main article: Aesthetics

In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with the ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art's role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature.

The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century. Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the Realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the Objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the Relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans.

Feminism and the artistic canon

Linda Nochlin's 1971 groundbreaking essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", analyzes the embedded privilege in the predominantly white male, Western art world and argued that women's outsider status allowed them a unique viewpoint to not only critique women's position in art, but to additionally examine the discipline's underlying assumptions about gender and ability. Nochlin's essay develops the argument that both formal and social education restricted artistic development to men, preventing women (with rare exception) from honing their talents and gaining entry into the art world. In the 1970s, feminist art criticism continued this critique of the institutionalized sexism of art history, art museums, and galleries, as well as questioning which genres of art were deemed museum-worthy. This position is articulated by artist Judy Chicago:

[I]t is crucial to understand that one of the ways in which the importance of male experience is conveyed is through the art objects that are exhibited and preserved in our museums. Whereas men experience presence in our art institutions, women experience primarily absence, except in images that do not necessarily reflect women's own sense of themselves.

The literary canon

The Great Books of the Western World is an attempt to present the western canon in the pages of 60 volumes

The classic book

Main article: Classic book

With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras (including Calvino, T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve). The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Saint-Beuve .

The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but they are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" refers to a list of books considered to be "essential" and is presented in a variety of ways. It can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic’s imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's) or be the official reading list of an institution of higher learning.

The origins of the literary canon

The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopher John Searle has said, "In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised."

One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Maynard Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public.

An earlier attempt, had been made in 1909 by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, with the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books". ("The Hero as Man of Letters", 1840)

In Britain

The canon of British renaissance poetry

While the canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century, has always been in some form of flux, it is only towards the late 20th century that concerted efforts were made to challenge the canon. Questions that once did not even have to be made, such as where to put the limitations of periods, what geographical areas to include, what genres to include, what writers and what kinds of writers to include, are now central.

The central figures of the Elizabethan canon are Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. There have been few attempts to change this long established list because the cultural importance of these six is so great that even re-evaluations on grounds of literary merit has not dared to dislodge them from the curriculum. For this reason the challenges to the canon that have been made during the last century have mainly been concerned with the so-called "minor" poets.

John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser were major influences on 17th-century poetry. Spenser was the primary English influence on John Milton; while Donne was followed by other Metaphysical poets and Jonson by the Cavalier poets. Both Donne and Jonson influenced John Dryden, the leading poet of the late 17th century. However, Dryden condemned aspects of metaphysical poets in his criticism.

In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute, while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others.

The Lake Poets and other Romantics, at the beginning of the 19th century, were well-read in Renaissance poetry; Coleridge admired Donne, which is slightly unusual for this period. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed only in the Victorian period, with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury. A fairly representative idea of the "Victorian canon" is also given by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse (1919). The poems from this period are largely songs and apart from the major names, one sees the two pioneers Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, and a scattering of poems by other writers of the period. However, the authors of many poems are anonymous. Some poems, such as Thomas Sackville's Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates, were highly regarded (and therefore "in the canon") but they were omitted from the anthology as non-lyric.

Later revisions

T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the cannon of renaissance English literature in the 20th century.

T. S. Eliot's many essays on Elizabethan subjects were mainly concerned with the drama, but there are attempts to bring back long-forgotten poets to general attention, for example Sir John Davies, whose cause he championed in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926 (republished in On Poetry and Poets, 1957). Eliot's writing did much to bring the metaphysical poets, Donne in particular, back into favour.

The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939, an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry. In this canon he excludes the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and instead turns his eye to a Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement, which he claims has been overlooked and undervalued. The most underrated member of this movement he deems to have been George Gascoigne (1525–1577), who "deserves to be ranked...among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher". Other members were Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), Barnabe Googe (1540–1594), and George Turberville (1540–1610).

Characteristic of this movement is that a poem has

a theme usually broad, simple, and obvious, even tending toward the proverbial, but usually a theme of some importance, humanly speaking; a feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject; a rhetoric restrained to a similar minimum, the poet being interested in his rhetoric as a means of stating his matter as economically as possible, and not, as are the Petrarchans, in the pleasures of rhetoric for its own sake. There is also in the school a strong tendency towards aphoristic statement.

Both Eliot and Winters were very much in favour of the established canon. Towards the end of the 20th century however, the canon was increasingly under fire, both by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers, and by those who wished to abolish it altogether.

The literary canon in the 20th century

Feminism and the literary canon

See also: Écriture féminine, List of American feminist literature, List of feminist literature and List of feminist poets

The feminist movement produced both feminist fiction and non-fiction, and created new interest in women's writing. It also prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical and academic contributions in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Much of the early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early 20th century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender's study, issued a companion line of 18th-century novels written by women. More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue 18th and 19th century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women's novels. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf, is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

Expansion of the canon in the 20th century

The widespread interest in women's writing is related to a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literatures, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary", such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and subgenres have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the "female gothic" or women's science fiction.

According to Elyce Rae Helford, "Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice." Feminist science fiction is sometimes taught at the university level to explore the role of social constructs in understanding gender. Notable texts of this kind are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1970), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (1985).

Sources containing canonical lists

A montage of composers, all of whom have notable pieces in the canon of classical music. From left to right:
Top row: Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven;
second row: Gioachino Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi;
third row: Johann Strauss II, Johannes Brahms, Georges Bizet, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák;
bottom row: Edvard Grieg, Edward Elgar, Sergei Rachmaninoff, George Gershwin, Aram Khachaturian

20th century art

Painting the Century: 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900–2000

English literature

• Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
• Great Books of the Western World
• The Harvard Classics
• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century – books of the 20th century
• Modern Library 100 Best Novels – English-language novels of the 20th century
• ZEIT-Bibliothek der 100 Bücher German Die Zeit list of 100 books
• Library of America, classic American literature

More comprehensive collections:

• Everyman's Library (Modern works)
• The Modern Library
• Penguin Classics
• Oxford World's Classics
• Routledge Classics
• Verso Books' Radical Thinkers
• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

University reading lists

• Brigham Young University's Honors Program's Great Works List
• Catholic University of Portugal program in political science
• St. John's College Great Books reading list (established by Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr)
• Trinity Western University's Great Books Reading List

Contemporary anthologies of renaissance literature

The preface to the Blackwell anthology of Renaissance Literature from 2003 acknowledges the importance of online access to literary texts on the selection of what to include, meaning that the selection can be made on basis of functionality rather than representativity". This anthology has made its selection based on three principles. One is "unabashedly canonical", meaning that Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson have been given the space prospective users would expect. A second principle is "non-canonical", giving women writers such as Anne Askew, Elizabeth Cary, Emilia Lanier, Martha Moulsworth, and Lady Mary Wroth a representative selection. It also includes texts that may not be representative of the qualitatively best efforts of Renaissance literature, but of the quantitatively most numerous texts, such as homilies and erotica. A third principle has been thematic, so that the anthology aims to include texts that bring light on issues of special interest to contemporary scholars.

The Blackwell anthology is still firmly organised round authors, however. A different strategy has been observed by The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse from 1992". Here the texts are organised according to topic, under the headings The Public World, Images of Love, Topographies, Friends, Patrons and the Good Life, Church, State and Belief, Elegy and Epitaph, Translation, Writer, Language and Public. It is arguable that such an approach is more suitable for the interested reader than for the student. While the two anthologies are not directly comparable, since the Blackwell anthology also includes prose, and the Penguin goes up to 1659, it is telling that while the larger Blackwell anthology contains work by 48 poets, seven of which are women, the Penguin anthology contains 374 poems by 109 poets, including 13 women and one poet each in Welsh Siôn Phylip and Irish Eochaidh Ó Heóghusa.

German literature

The Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century

The Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century is a list of books compiled in 1999 by Literaturhaus München and Bertelsmann, in which 99 prominent German authors, literary critics, and scholars of German ranked the most significant German-language novels of the twentieth century.

The group brought together 33 experts from each of the three categories. Each was allowed to name three books as having been the most important of the century. Cited by the group were five titles by both Franz Kafka and Arno Schmidt, four by Robert Walser, and three by Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Anna Seghers and Joseph Roth.

Der Kanon or more precisely "Marcel-Reich-Ranickis Kanon" is a large anthology of exemplary works of German literature.

French literature

See Key texts of French literature

• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

Dutch literature

Canon of Dutch Literature

The Canon of Dutch Literature comprises a list of 1000 works of Dutch Literature culturally important to the cultural heritage of the Low Countries, and is published on the DBNL. Several of these works are lists themselves; such as early dictionaries, lists of songs, recipes, biographies or encyclopedic compilations of information such as mathematical, scientific, medical or plant reference books. Other items include early translations of literature from other countries, history books, and first-hand diaries and published correspondence. Notable original works can be found by author name.

Scandinavia

The Danish Culture Canon

The Danish Culture Canon consists of 108 works of cultural excellence in eight categories: architecture, visual arts, design and crafts, film, literature, music, performing arts, and children's culture. An initiative of Brian Mikkelsen in 2004, it was developed by a series of committees under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Culture in 2006–2007 as "a collection and presentation of the greatest, most important works of Denmark's cultural heritage." Each category contains 12 works although music contains 12 works of score music and 12 of popular music and the literature section's 12th item is an anthology of 24 works.

Sweden

Världsbiblioteket (The World Library) was a Swedish list of the 100 best books in the world, created in 1991 by the Swedish literary magazine Tidningen Boken. The list was compiled through votes from members of the Svenska Akademien, Swedish Crime Writers' Academy, librarian, authors and others. Approximately 30 of the books were Swedish.

Norway

• Bokklubben World Library.

Bibliography

• Hirsch, E. D.; Trefil, James; Kett, Joseph F. (1988). The dictionary of cultural literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780395437483. 
• Guillory, John (1993). Cultural capital the problem of literary canon formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226310442. 
• Knox, Bernard (1994). The oldest dead white European males and other reflections on the classics. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393312331. 
• Bloom, Harold (1995). The Western canon: the books and school of the ages. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 9781573225144. 
• Owens, W. R. (1996). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, and the Canon. New York: Routledge in association with the Open University. ISBN 9780415135757. 
• Bloom, Harold (1998). Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 9781573227513. 
• Ross, Trevor (1998). The making of the English literary canon from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Montreal Que: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 9780773520806. 
• Morrissey, Lee (2005). Debating the Canon: a Reader from Addison to Nafisi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781403968203. 
• Owens, W. R. (2009), "The Canon and the curriculum", in Gupta, Suman; Katsarska, Milena, English studies on this side: post-2007 reckonings, Plovdiv, Bulgaria: Plovdiv University Press, pp. 47–59, ISBN 9789544235680. 
• Gorak, Jan (2013). The making of the modern canon: genesis and crisis of a literary idea. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781472513274. 
• Carpeaux, Otto Maria (2014). Historia da literatura ocidental [The History of Western Literature] (in Portuguese). Rio de Janeiro: LeYa. ISBN 9788544101179. OCLC 889331083. 

See also

• Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books
• Censorship
  • List of books banned by governments
• Chinese classics
• Great Conversation
• List of Nobel laureates in Literature
• Women's writing
• World literature

External links

• "The English Literary Canon – a work in progress"
• "Great Books Lists: Lists of Classics, Eastern and Western": this has numerous lists, including Harold Bloom's
• "Infinite Canons: A Few Axioms and Questions, and in Addition, a Proposed Definition. A response to Harold Bloom"
• University Women Writers Project