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SoSe 21: Canons and Revisions

Florian Sedlmeier

Kommentar

As the OED suggests, “canon” initially means “a rule, law, or decree of the Church” (the etymological root is the Greek kanon, which roughly translates to “measuring stick”); with respect to a corpus of texts, it refers to “the collection or list of books accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired.” From these religious origins, the concept retains many elements in its secular versions: the formal presentation as a collection or a list, affective qualities such as genuineness, ingenuity and inspiration, as well as normative judgments of literary valence. Likewise, the metaphors of the sacred feature prominently in the transfer to the presumably secular domain of literature. The canon has caring and protective “custodians”; authors and works are “enshrined” in the canon. At the same time, a canon is inextricable from its revision, prompting us to think multiple canons and their ongoing corrections. In the past four decades in particular, the reach of the canonical has been significantly extended. This extension rests on at least three developments that have shifted the grounds of literary valence: first, the notion of literature has been expanded beyond what previously qualified as high literature; second, writers’ ascribed identities at the intersection of race and gender have become a key criterion of canon revision, exposing what Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls “the contingencies of value”; third, the proliferation of literary prizes and notable books lists pose the question of instant canonization in relation to notions such as trend and Zeitgeist. In contradistinction, one may argue that precisely because of these developments, the question of whether we can do without some notion of a canon or canons remains a vital one to ask, also considering the rather paradoxical relation between an unprecedented production of contemporary literature and a frequently diagnosed decline of reading. Taking our critical cues from Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., D. H. Lawrence, Jane Tompkins, and others, we revisit general debates such as the “canon wars” in English literature departments of the 1980s and 1990s as well as specific instances of canonization and controversies from the twenty and twenty-first centuries. We explore related concepts such as author, classics, curriculum, greatness, tradition, and work; and we look at anthologies and book series as publication formats in the service of the canonical, conceived as a mechanism of the “institutional control of interpretation” (Frank Kermode). Students are expected to participate actively with regular contributions to class discussion. As a short assignment, they are asked to draft both a syllabus and a canonical list of their own. For a graded “Schein,” they will have to write a term paper. Schließen