Canons II

II
The contemporary debate about the Canon highlights three major problems that Western culture has yet to resolve - the problem of Western history and politics, the problem of Western thinking, and the problem of Western aesthetics.

1 The problem of Western history and politics
Discussion of the Canon of Western Literature uncovers the problem for Western culture of its dubious history. Leading contemporary (well, he is dead now) cultural critics such as Palestinian-American Edward Said rightly point to rather equivocal past of Western culture. In his magisterial book Culture and Imperialism, Said aims
...to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative or interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire...Since narrative plays such a remarkable part in the imperial quest, it is therefore not surprising that France and (especially) England have an unbroken tradition of novel-writing, unparalleled elsewhere.

Literature, then has played a role in the dubious process of Empire. Much undoubted good has come from the hegemony of the West in the modern world. Yet the construction of a monolithic cultural identity, to which poetry and narrative literature are fundamental, has been to the specific exclusion of other cultural identities - classes, races, even genders. We may cite for example even the English language itself - today, truly a world language, opening exciting possibilities for communication between peoples; but at the same time privileging some and disadvantaging others, working against diversity, by its power sucking the life out of other languages. Said admires the great literary works of the Western tradition as an unparralleled corpus of imaginative literature; but he deplores the use of this corpus in the exercise of power and privilege.

If the Canon is an instrument of oppression, exclusion and elitism, how can it maintain any credibility? Wouldn’t it be better to dismantle the very idea of a Canon as outmoded and imperial? Terry Eagleton, the marxist-learning formerly professor of English at Oxford, argues for the dismantling of the idea of “Literature” on ideological grounds. He proposes rather the study of “discourse”, by which he means everything from Shakespeare and Tolstoy to advertising copy and government memoranda. A document surveying “The Humanities in the Princeton Undergraduate Experience 1989” summarises the debate:
Is there a Canon of great books? What is a masterpiece? Who decides what the ‘great books’ are?...Are the currently revered books chosen ‘by Western white men for Western white men’ as some critics claim? Do colleges and universities have an obligation to expose undergraduate students to some of the great works of Western civilisation by requiring some course or set of sourses designed specifically for that purpose? Do we also have an obligation to expose students to the work of other cultures and of the historically dispossed within our own society?