The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, philosophy, art, music and architecture from the Western world, with works classified within it considered to be—and celebrated—as classics in the context of Western civilization. The concept has been discussed and debated in cultural criticism with regard to Western exceptionalism and which works constitute the canon, given the lack of official standardization of the category.
Literary canon Classic book
A classic is an artistic work that has been accoladed and culturally circulated as being exemplary in its medium because of its distinctions, and noteworthy in history as a result of its cultural associations. In the second-century Roman miscellany Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification were initiated with the Greeks' ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (ancient Greek , : "measuring rod, standard"). Similarly, early Christian Church Fathers declared as canon the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in a canon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term ("the admitted", "the included") to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc., from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics. What makes a book "classic" has been a concern appearing in works by Mark Twain in the 19th century and Italo Calvino in the 20th century, and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound.
The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, Everyman's Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's), or be the official reading list of a university. In The Western Canon, Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.
Great Books Program
A university or college Great Books Program is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s by John Erskine of Columbia University, which proposed to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.
The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's Republic, or Dante's Divine Comedy. Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.
Over 100 institutions of higher learning, mostly in the United States, offer some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students.
For much of the 20th century, the Modern Library provided a larger convenient list of the Western canon through its publication of editions of classics. The list numbered more than 300 items by the 1950s, by authors from Aristotle to Albert Camus, and has continued to grow. When in the 1990s the concept of the Western canon was vehemently condemned, just as earlier Modern Library lists had been criticized as "too American", Modern Library responded by preparing new lists of "100 Best Novels" and "100 Best Nonfiction" compiled by famous writers, and later compiled lists nominated by book purchasers and readers.
Debate
A "high conservative modernism", characterized by the insistence that universal truths exist and that artists must aspire for greatness, has been observed by cultural critics.Gerald J. Russello, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (2007) p. 14 Yale University Professor of Humanities and literary critic Harold Bloom, in his 1994 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, is regarded as having contributed to this phenomenon. Similarly, previously, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987) argued that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture. Bloom further comments: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied".Allan Bloom (2008), p. 344. His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored by cultural relativists.Jeffrey Williams, ed. PC wars: Politics and theory in the academy (Routledge, 2013)
Classicist Bernard Knox discussed the concept of the Western canon in his 1992 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved May 25, 2009). Knox titled his lecture "The Oldest Dead White European Males" as a provocative statement.Nadine Drozan, "Chronicle", The New York Times, May 6, 1992. In this and its subsequent adaptation into a book, Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical culture to modern society.Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics (1993) (reprint, W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), .Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books of The Times; Putting In a Word for Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Etc.", The New York Times, April 29, 1993.
Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of the motivations of extremist politics, and that such criticisms are misguided or disingenuous. As John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has written:
Charles Altieri, of the University of California, Berkeley, states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes". It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society. American historian Todd M. Compton argues that canons are always communal in nature; that there are limited canons for, say a literature survey class, or an English department reading list, but there is no such thing as one absolute canon of literature. Instead, there are many conflicting canons. He regards Bloom's "Western Canon" as a personal canon only.
The philosopher John Searle said that in his "experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised". One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Maynard Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public.Adler, Mortimer Jerome (1988). Reforming Education, Geraldine Van Doren, ed. (New York: MacMillan), p. xx. An earlier attempt had been made in 1909 by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, with the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books" ("The Hero as Man of Letters", 1840).
In the English-speaking world British renaissance poetry
The canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th centuries has always been in some form of flux; towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers. However, the central figures of the British renaissance canon remain: Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. Spenser, Donne, and Jonson were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poet John Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute,"Life of Cowley", in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury.Gary F. Waller, (2013). English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge. p. 262
In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature. Eliot, for example, championed poet Sir John Davies in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926. During the course of the 1920s, Eliot did much to establish the importance of the Metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. However, by 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry".Alvarez, p. 11 Two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a "high Anglican and royalist literary history" on 17th-century English poetry.Brown & Taylor (2004), ODNB