Defining the Canon
In a broad point of view canon refers to an authoritative list or collection of literary heritage that includes wide range of fact and fiction. The keepers or authority when it comes to canon are the high cultured and most influential critics, scholars and literary authors (, 1995). The definition of canon ultimately derives from the ancient Greek word kanna, which referred to useful types of reed, the straight stalk of marsh plants with firm stems. The related Greek term kanon metaphorically and metonymically extends that use to include straight rod, bar, or ruler, as well as rule, standard, and model. In architecture it acquired the meaning of the right measure and, in the arts, corrects proportion (, 1989). The latter sense was developed most explicitly in antiquity by the celebrated sculptor Polykleitos.
Canon is significant in the field of literature studies especially to language because it provides culture and national identity. Canonical texts also have been the basis of Standard English language (, 1984). Literary 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 reader has to enjoy some aesthetic objects. 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, and enjoyed. It is the wheat winnowed from the mock, the exceptional survivor, and it has all the privileges of such survival (, 1973).
Traditional Canon
Around the beginning of the first millennium, the discrimination between "ancient" and "modern," classic and contemporary, major and minor, authors was beginning to be formulated, and the first explicit distinction of a whole literary canon, as a collected body of texts, was made. In the first century A.D., Quintilian already counted Cicero among the antiqui, and in the second century, coined the term classicus to differentiate the ancient model authors. In his celebrated study, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (, 1993).
The canon was implicit to be a complete list of books for study, such as those of Christian literature. The long history of the formation of the authoritative biblical canon, not officially finalized until the sixteenth century, has been recounted elsewhere (, 1993). Of more relevance here is the subtle shift in definition: Without abandoning the sense of artistic or moral exemplars, the early medieval.
Canon became a list of works for pedagogical instruction in the liberal arts, and especially in grammar, the study of which involved literature as much as linguistic practice per se.The authors studied in medieval schools included pagan and Christian writers, both of which were taken as authorities. Indeed, it was characteristic of the early Middle Ages that all auctores, or curriculum authors, were perceived as equally valuable, that each one was believed to be timeless. Lists of selected auctores were devised as examples to learn from and to follow, and although the lists differ in points of detail and were periodically challenged, a remarkable degree of consistency is also evident, as certain authors reappear on list after list across Europe from the fifth to the thirteenth century and beyond. The great list of English Literary canon should include: Aesop, Homer, Plato, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Statius, Cato, Juvenal, and Boethius (, 1999). As late as the fourteenth century, the esteem in which many of the same writers were held was confirmed in Dante's Inferno (, ll.88-90) and Purgatorio (, ll.97-108), as well as Chaucer's The House of Fame (.1460-1519).
Various debates about Literary Canon
Even though there is no particular general list of authors who are "in" our culture's literary canon, and in this sense the literary canon differs from "the books of the Bible officially recognized by the Church" (66 books for Protestants, 82 books for Catholics), canonized authors are those writers who are most normally educated in literary surveys and who are generally included in literary anthologies ( , 1999).
The variety of English literature" (but do predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle class male authors represent variety? (, 1983) The authors being taught, and thus selected for the anthology, represent "the greatness . . . of English literature" (but how is "greatness" defined, and who is privileged to define it?); that the anthology is a disinterested facilitator of what teachers want to teach "the product of more than a decade of experimentation" by editors "who then proceeded to test the book in their continued teaching" (but to what extent does the anthology actually create the course once the anthology is put into circulation as "a product"? Why has the literary canon consisted mainly of male writers (and here we should qualify, "of white, middle-class and upper middle-class male writers")?
· What have been the standards by which the works of women (along with non-white males and the economically-disenfranchised) have been judged?
· Can women, or minorities, or working-class writers be comfortably added to the canon? Does the conception of a literary canon change as such writers are introduced?
· Does the existence of a literary canon serve any useful purpose? Does it provide the needs of women or other marginalized groups of people (minorities and homosexuals, for example?)?
· To what extent does the notion of a literary canon create marginalization?
· Is it inevitable that there be a literary canon, or does the attempt to canonize some writers and leave out others serve an often unrecognized political purpose?
An effort to overcome the problems associated with tokenism and supplementation, some feminists have compiled anthologies of women writers. Designed to serve as a "core-curriculum" text for the many courses in literature by women that have been developed in the past decade, this collection includes examples of women's work in every genre and period (, 1989).
Offering itself as separate but equal, it appears to some a ghetto for women's writing, excusing the "standard" anthologies for their neglect of women authors instead of challenging the assumptions that make the standard anthologies standard (, 1984). More importantly, perhaps, the creation of a new set of accepted and acceptable texts results and the bases for canonization remain unclear.
English and Writer’s Sense of Personal and Cultural Identity
English as canon is often questioned by the following points: why should the literary works in the English canon composed by non-standard varieties of English language? Does the perspectives of the writers personal and cultural identity has a great influence in these works?
Nowadays, the term “culture” has already become one of the most common words in all kinds of public discourse. It has been constantly heard from journalists and politicians, not to mention of academics especially those in all disciplines of Humanities. “Popular culture”, “research culture”, “mass culture” – there is almost no limit as to the applicability of the term in any context. If one looks at the subject of culture in a historical way, three things came out ( 1994).
The first is that culture as a subject and as a social issue is definitely not the invention of this time. as a matter of fact, the farther we go to the eighteenth century, the more we find that culture, its nature and composition is the central issue in the field of Humanities. In addition, it was not really in the 1920s and the 1930s (period of modernism in the English speaking world) that culture became another word for “high art”.
The second is that from the beginning of the argument of culture in the eighteenth century, there has been a debate regarding the relative status and merits of its parts. Even though as a general theory, the farther one goes back to the eighteenth century, the more broadly culture is defined, this does not really represent that anything goes.
Lastly, the third is that culture has always been a burning issue in times of perceived change and conflict as it is in the moments of change that is has already become relevant to ponder on what is good and worth preserving in a society, what is essentially meaningful to its experience and its civilization.
The definition of culture even up to this date continues to be debated by anthropologists and other scholars. In one concept, (1994) defines culture as “the system of understanding characteristics of that individual’s society or of some subgroup within that society” which includes “values, beliefs, notions about acceptable and unacceptable behavior and other socially constructed ideas that members of the society are taught as ‘true’” (p. 51). The members of cultures go about their daily lives within shared webs of meaning ( 1973). Upon associating the two definitions provided by , one can assess culture as invisible webs composed of values, beliefs, ideas about appropriate behavior and socially constructed truths.
According to (1996) and (1983), an individual’s own culture is most of the time invisible to the individual himself or herself. However, it should be noted that they are the circumstances within which people operate and make sense of the world. As individuals come across a culture which is different from their own culture, one of the issues that they face is a set of beliefs that marked themselves in behaviors that differ from their own. It is in this way that people often discuss regarding other people’s cultures and not so much on their own. It has been perceived that an individual’s own culture is usually hidden from them. People even describe it as “the way things are”. Nevertheless, one’s beliefs, ideas and actions are not any more natural or biologically predetermined than any other group’s beliefs, ideas and actions. They have simply emerged from the ways one’s own group has dealt with and deduced the particular circumstances that it has faced. As conditions change, so do cultures; hence, cultures are said to be dynamic.
However, individual cultural identity poses yet another layer of complexity. Even members of the same culture vary significantly in their beliefs and actions. All peoples have unique identities that have been developed within their specified cultures. However, these identities are not fixed or static. For this reason, stereotypes do not hold up since no two individuals from any culture are exactly alike. It should be noted that despite the fact that living inside a culture will allow its members to become acquainted with their total cultural heritage of that specified society, no individual actually internalizes the entire cultural heritage. As a matter of fact, it would actually be impossible for any individual to acquire a society’s entire cultural heritage since there are as you might expect complicated and conflicting values, beliefs and ideas within the specific heritage which is a result of the conditions and events that individuals and groups experience.
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