Canons


Continuing from yesterday's discussion/post. I found Kirby's book. Here's the relevant quote from Edmund White:

I am in favor of desacralizing literature, of dismantling the idea of a few essential books, of retiring the whole concept of the canon. A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.

The notion of a canon implies that we belong to something called Western Civilization that is built on a small sacred library and that that library is eternal and universal and important in the way no individual reader can ever be. I would say that every part of such an assumption is misguided. ... Even the hierarchy inherent in the concept of a canon must be jetissoned. ... the canon, even among the most conservative readers, shifts from one generation to the next. Look at the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Classics, once considered definitive. Few people today read Charles Dana's Two Years Before the Mast or Whittier's poetry, but for my grandparents such books were unquestionably canonical, as was The Pilgrim's Progress or William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham (quoted in Kirby, 1998, xx-xxi).

Kirby goes on to say that every person interested in the study of comparative literature -- or, I would submit, canon formation -- should read Nussbaum's book Cultivating Humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. (1997, Harvard University Press). Nussbaum, in my experience is a facile mind worth spending time with.