The term Western canon denotes a body of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the development of "high culture". The idea of a Canon has been used to address the question What is Art?; according to this approach, a work is art by comparison to the works in the canon, or conversely, any aesthetic law to be valid should not rule out any of the works included in the canon.
In practice, debates and attempts to define the canon in lists are essentially restricted to literature, including poetry, fiction and drama; biographical and autobiographical writings; philosophy; and history. A few accessible books on the sciences and mathematics are also included.
Read more about Western Canon: Origins, Debate, Works, Examples
Famous quotes containing the words western canon, western and/or canon:
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“O! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on’t! O fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed;”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)