Katana VentraIP

Western canon

The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the globe. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".[1]

Recent discussions on it emphasize cultural diversity within the canon. The canons of music and visual arts have broadened to encompass overlooked periods, while newer media like cinema grapple with a precarious position. Criticism arises, with some viewing changes as prioritizing activism over aesthetic values, often associated with Marxist critical theory.[2] Another critique highlights a narrow interpretation of the West, dominated by British and American culture, prompting calls for a more diverse canon.[2]

– English-language novels of the 20th century

Modern Library 100 Best Novels

classic American literature

Library of America

Evolution and criticism[edit]

More recent discussions have been centered on expanding the canon of books to include more women and racial minorities, while the canons of music and the visual arts have greatly expanded to cover the Middle Ages, and subsequent centuries once largely overlooked. But some examples of newer media such as cinema have attained a precarious position in the canon. Also during the twentieth century there has been a growing interest in the West, as well as globally, in major artistic works of the cultures of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, including the former colonies of European nations.


Expansion and changes to the canon have been criticized as promoting political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values. Broadly, such criticism associates such changes with Marxist critical theory, including African-American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism and post-structuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.[2] Yale humanities professor and literary critic Harold Bloom labeled such approaches to modifying the canon as the School of Resentment.


A different criticism comes for narrow interpretation of the concept of the West. This criticism argues that the Western canon is dominated by British and American culture, with a small dose of ancient western classics and a few non-English works, primarily from other Western European countries (like Germany or France), and almost no works from other regions such as Eastern Europe.

; Trefil, James; Kett, Joseph F. (1988). The dictionary of cultural literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780395437483.

Hirsch, E. D.

(1993). Cultural capital the problem of literary canon formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226310442.

Guillory, John

(1994). The oldest dead white European males and other reflections on the classics. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393312331.

Knox, Bernard

(1995). The Western canon: the books and school of the ages. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 9781573225144.

Bloom, Harold

Owens, W. R. (1996). Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, and the Canon. New York: in association with the Open University. ISBN 9780415135757.

Routledge

(1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 9781573227513.

Bloom, Harold

Ross, Trevor (1998). The making of the English literary canon from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Montreal Que: McGill-Queen's University Press.  9780773520806.

ISBN

Kolbas, E. Dean (2001). Critical Theory and the Literary Canon, Boulder: Westview Press.  0813398134

ISBN

Morrissey, Lee (2005). . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781403968203.

Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisii

Brzyski, Anna, ed. (2007). . Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822341062.

Partisan Canons

Owens, W. R. (2009), "The Canon and the curriculum", in Gupta, Suman; Katsarska, Milena (eds.), English studies on this side: post-2007 reckonings, Plovdiv, Bulgaria: , pp. 47–59, ISBN 9789544235680

Plovdiv University Press

Gorak, Jan (2013). The making of the modern canon: genesis and crisis of a literary idea. London: Bloomsbury Academic.  9781472513274.

ISBN

(2014). Historia da literatura ocidental [The History of Western Literature] (in Portuguese). Rio de Janeiro: LeYa. ISBN 9788544101179. OCLC 889331083.

Carpeaux, Otto Maria

Aston, Robert J. (2020). The role of the literary canon in the teaching of literature. New York: Routledge.  9780367432621.

ISBN

"Great Books Lists: Lists of Classics, Eastern and Western": this has numerous lists, including Harold Bloom's

Compton, "Infinite Canons: A Few Axioms and Questions, and in Addition, a Proposed Definition. A response to Harold Bloom"

John Searle, "The Storm Over the University," The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990