Canon

The term canon (‘Kanon’ in Greek signifies a measuring rod or a scale) was originally applied to the Christian religious texts in the middle ages which were designated by the church authorities as comprising the genuine Holy Scriptures. Later the term was used in literature to signify the list of secular literary works accepted as really written by a particular author. Thus we have “the Shakespeare Canon”’ “the Milton Canon” and so on. Now the phrase “literary canon” denotes the works of those authors/writers who are commonly accepted by authorities like the critics, scholars and teachers as major writers and which is often hailed as literary classics. Canon thus refers to authorized texts. The canonical writers are the ones who, at a particular time are the most published, most discussed by critics and likely to be included in the curriculum.

The canon of literature, unlike that of religion, emerges by way of a gradual and unofficial consensus. It is tacit rather than open and has no clear cut boundaries. It is also subject to changes.

New books could be included or excluded from it. The social process by which an author comes to be tacitly and durably accepted as canonical is called “canon formation”. The factors involved in canon formation are complex and disputed. Anyhow, it involves the acceptance of certain works by critics, scholars, teachers and authors with different viewpoints, the use of an author in curriculum and frequent references to the author in discussions within her/his community. All of this points to the fact that, the so-called ‘literary canon’, unquestioningly considered as the ‘great tradition’, has to be recognized as a construct, formed by particular ideologies at particular times. Many English writers of the twentieth century like T.S.Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as present day writers like V.S.Naipaul and Salman Rushdie amongst others have achieved this status.

At anytime the boundaries of the canon remain unclear, within which some authors are central and others marginal. Some marginal authors later achieve central status. A notable example in twentieth century English literature is that of John Donne who achieved prominence because of the reevaluation made by T.S.Eliot and other New Critics. Once firmly established in the canon, it is very difficult for an author to be excluded from it.

Presently the canon has become an area of dispute. Opposition to the established canon has become an important area of concern for different types of critics like deconstructive, feminist and Marxist critics. The centre of the discussion is what book to be selected for the curriculum. An important accusation is that the standard canon represents the dominant white, male, European Middle to upper class ideology. Gauri Viswanathan in her Masks of Conquests: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) has conclusively shown that the canon in English is indirectly related to British imperialism (a system in which one country rules over other one by force).

The canon provokes a lot of debate because since the 19th century it has been viewed as something in which the language achieves its finest expressions. Critics like Mathew Arnold and F.R.Leavis viewed literature as providing a model for social harmony and cultural integration. The theory revolution of the 1970s however seriously challenged the ideology and concept that formed the basis for canon. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1995), Dinesh D’souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex in Campuses (1991) have all strongly defended pluralism and multiculturalism against elitism and hierarchism in canon formation.