Western Canon - Debate

Debate

There has been an ongoing debate, motivated by politics and social agendas, over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s, much of which is rooted in critical theory, feminism, critical race theory, and Marxist attacks against capitalism and classical liberal principles. In the United States, in particular, the canon has been attacked as a compendium of books written mainly by "dead European men", that does not represent the viewpoints of many in contemporary societies around the world. Allan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, has disagreed strongly. Yale University Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom (no relation to Allan) has also argued strongly in favor of the canon, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions, though its implications continue to be debated.

Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle has written:

There is a certain irony in this in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.

One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority—who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading and teaching? Searle's rebuttal suggests that "one obvious difficulty with it is that if it were valid, it would argue against any set of required readings whatever; indeed, any list you care to make about anything automatically creates two categories, those that are on the list and those that are not."