From: tmccarth@fraser.sfu.ca (Teresa Marie McCarthy)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 04:33:00 GMT

tmccarth@fraser.sfu.ca (Teresa Marie McCarthy) writes:

>tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox) writes:
>>	Anyone who thinks that canon formation takes place in an atmosphere
>>of enlightened objectivity simply has not been paying attention to its
>>history.  Through most of the canon's history, a number of extremely 
>>tendentious assumptions have guided the multiple processes by which some
>>works come to be included, others not.  

>>exclusion from the canon means exclusion from cultural centrality; to 
>>bring something into the canon is to certify it as worthy of the most intense
>>study, teaching, criticism.  



>>	In fact, given the necessary cultural pluralism of our times, we might 
>>learn to live with structures more flexible than a canon, more inclusive.  
>>Perhaps we could view these structures as horizontal, not vertical, and we 
>>could also respect the idea that there is nothing all of us must read.  As 
>>Northrop Frye (whose ingenuous notions of a canon have been mentioned in this 
>>discussion) noted, you can recognize the canonical nature of a work by the 
>>fact that you're embarrassed not to have read it; I'm suggesting that this
>>response has become simply irrelevant, that we must all define our own canons. 

>>	While we're at it, we might do so with a broad, generous notion of 
>>person and genre so that we do not exclude writers because of who they are or
>>works because they come from despised literary forms.

>This is what I was looking for!  Although the discussion on writers that have 
>been excluded from the canon is very interesting, I was more interested in 
>an alternative.  I think a "horizontal" method of looking at literature is
>interesting.

>  
>I'm also glad that the political nature of the canon has been acknowledged 
>in this discussion.  It isn't *canon-bashing* that brings a political 
>agenda into literature, but the creation of the canon itself.  Perhaps
>I shouldn't have used Amelia Lanyer as an example - I seem to have gotten
>myself labelled as a "Dead White Male Basher".  She just happenned to be
>on my mind at the moment.  A better example might have been the fate of
>Thomas Shadwell.  John Dryden caricatured him in _Mac Flecknoe_, and he's
>been largely ignored ever since.  In fact, this is the case which ZZ


I lost the rest of my reply - Sorry about that.

As I was saying, this is the case which started me thinking about the Canon and its implications.  I had a 2nd year Lit Professor who told us about _Mac Fleck- noe_ and said "I've read Shadwell, and he's not that bad." 

I've taken some Lit. Crit. and what we examined was the political agenda of thosthose creating the canon, as well as their attempts to define what is *good*.
The canon seems to do two things(for my purposes, obviously):  it defines what
belongs in a certain literary discourse, and it determines which works fit into
each discourse.  For example, Northrop Frye(here he is again) defined the way 
in which *Canadian* Literature is determined with his garrison theory.  In my
Can. Lit. classes in Secondary & 1st year, we discussed the works we looked at
with this theory in mind.  It took me a while to realize that you don't have to
freeze to death in order to be a character in a Canadian novel.

Okay,here's an example from a little farther back - Schiller's theory of the
beautiful and the sublime can be seen as an attempt to place himself on an 
equal footing as Goethe(as well as a way in looking at literature).

My point is(and I'm sure you are all wondering) that politics are an integral
part of the canon, and the canon is generally served up at face value to 
students(and everyone else) AS literature.  I'm not sure it's valuable to set
up personal canons and go on teaching the status quo - I think that students 
need to be given a certain amount of cynicism to go along with it.  





quo has to be taught with