The Canon: A Critical Perspective

Why?

Kelly Todd Brewer

Hum 201, October 4, 2022
Matthew Arnold 1822-1888: acclaimed English
poet and social critic

“The classics and major works are the

best that has been said and thought”
 The Language that Describes the “Classics”
and “Major” Works

Supreme achievement
Highly representative of an epoch, an aesthetic system or a cultural
outlook
Famous and groundbreaking
A milestone in art and thought
The Western canon is kind of a survivor’s list
What makes a major work?

lasting effect (influence) on art, literature,

music, and culture in general

highly representative of an epoch, an

aesthetic system, or intellectual (cultural)
outlook

original and creative in expression

profound in meaning

universal in its message

 Major Works

1. A work that has survived over time

2. A work that has greatly influenced other works over time and has become a
model or a trailblazer.

3. A work of literature that transcends time, place and culture

4. Matthew Arnold, English critic, stated that a major work is the best that has
been written, composed, performed and immortalized.

5. Edward Said, a Palestinian literary critic, claimed that major works are those
works constantly reproduced in syllabi year after year and that major works
more often than not come from countries in power historically.
 The West—(and the Rest)

What do the areas colored in dark blue or lighter blue suggest?

 The Queen reviews the Kings African Rifles

How does Shakespeare get to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,

Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa?
 “The sun never sets on the British Empire”

What does this mean for the school curriculum or reading

Queen Victoria 1819-1901 list of the colonial subjects in the British Empire?

What do you think it looked like?

The gatekeepers of the fortress of high culture include influential critics, museum directors
and their boards of trustees, and far more lowly scholars and teachers. Indeed, a chief enforcer
of the canon appears in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high culture that in the
Victorian period took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of major
college anthologies in America. To appear in the Norton or Oxford anthology is to have
achieved, not exactly greatness but what is more important, certainly--status and accessibility
to a reading public. And that is why, of course, it matters that so few women writers have
managed to gain entrance to such anthologies.
Belonging to the canon confers status, social, political, economic, aesthetic, none of which
can easily be extricated from the others. Belonging to the canon is a guarantee of quality, and
that guarantee of high aesthetic quality serves as a promise, a contract, that announces to the
viewer, "Here is something to be enjoyed as an aesthetic object. Complex, difficult, privileged,
the object before you has been winnowed by the sensitive few and the not-so-sensitive many,
and it will repay your attention. You will receive pleasure; at least you're supposed to, and if
you don't, well, perhaps there's something off with your apparatus." Such an announcement of
status by the poem, painting, or building, sonata, or dance that has appeared ensconced
within a canon serves a powerful separating purpose: it immediately stands forth, different,
better, to be valued, loved, enjoyed. It is the wheat winnowed from the chaff, the rare survivor,
and it has all the privileges of such survival.

George P. Landow, https://victorianweb.org/gender/canon/litcan.html

Like the colonial power, like, say, France, Germany, or England,
the canonical work acts as a center -- the center of the
perceptual field, the center of values, the center of interest, the
center, in short, of a web of meaningful interrelations. The
noncanonical works act as colonies or as countries that are
unknown and out of sight and mind.
 The UN Security Council

Permanent member states: Unites States, Great Britain, France, China and Russia
 Alberti Memmi
The Colonizer and the Gayatri Spivak
Colonized “Can the Subaltern Speak”
Antonio Gramsci
(The concept of
hegemony)

Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks

The Wretched of the Earth

Chinua Achebe—Things Fall Apart

 Images from a Canadian Indian School

If they had a reading list, what do you think was on it?

“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”

--George Orwell

“The inequality is the price of civilization”

George Orwell