Western canon
Western canon is a term used to describe a canon of books and art, and specifically a set--one with very fuzzy boundaries--of books and other art that, in general, have been most influential in shaping Western culture. The selection of a canon is important in educational perennialism.
The process of listmaking - defining the boundaries of the canon - is endless. One of the notable attempts in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program that grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago developed in the middle third of the 20th century. University president Robert Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public.
Starting in the 1960s, but growing considerably in the 1980s, classic books were attacked by various groups as being from "dead, white, Western men" and not representing the viewpoints of other people (i.e., most people in the world). These groups advocated inclusion/study of all literature, sometimes to the exclusion of literature ordinarily placed in the traditional Western canon; this practice has been called "rewriting the canon." This trend continues strong in most universities, but has waned somewhat in its influence in recent years.
Authors such as Yale Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom have spoken strongly in favor of the canon, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in most institutions, though its implications continue to be debated heavily.
Authors and works which are commonly included in the canon:
- Thomas Aquinas
- Aristotle
- Augustine
- Jane Austen
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Lord Byron
- Miguel Cervantes
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Anton Chekhov
- Cicero
- Joseph Conrad
- Dante
- Charles Dickens
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- T. S. Eliot
- William Faulkner
- Gustave Flaubert
- E. M. Forster
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Heinrich Heine
- Joseph Heller
- Ernest Hemingway
- Homer -- the Iliad and the Odyssey
- David Hume
- Henrik Ibsen
- Henry James
- James Joyce
- Franz Kafka
- King James Version of the Bible
- John Locke
- Niccolo Machiavelli
- Thomas Mann
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Herman Melville
- Henry Miller
- John Milton
- Thomas More
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Ovid
- Plato
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Marcel Proust
- Aleksandr Pushkin
- Salman Rushdie
- J. D. Salinger
- William Shakespeare
- Adam Smith
- Sophocles
- Leo Tolstoy
- Virgil
- Alice Walker
- Oscar Wilde
- William Butler Yeats
Works which directly address the canon (pro or con):
- Shakespeare by Harold Bloom
- The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
- The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme
See also: literature, university, history
External links:
- the "Great Ideas" website: http://www.thegreatideas.org/
- a "Great Books" website: http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html
- Harold Bloom's canon: http://www.literarycritic.com/bloom.htm