Critical Theory And The Literary Canon

E. Dean Kolbas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429980824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Kolbas stakes out new territory in assessing the war over literary canon formation, a subject that contemporary polemicists have devoted much ink to. Throughout this succinct manuscript, Kolbas ranges through the sociology and politics of culture, aesthetic theory, and literary theory to develop his point that texts not only must should be situated in the historical and material conditions of their production, but also evaluated for their very real aesthetic content. One reason the is an important issue, Kolbas contends, is that the canon is not simply enclosed in the ivory tower of academia; its effects are apparent in a much wider field of cultural production and use. He begins by critiquing the conservative humanist and liberal pluralist positions on the canon, which either assiduously avoid any sociological explanation of the canon or treat texts as stand-ins for particular ideologies. Kolbas is sympathetic to the arguments of Bourdieu et. al. regarding positioning the canon in a wider "field of cultural production" than the university, but argues that theirs are purely sociological explanations of aesthetics (i.e., there is no objective aesthetic content) that ignore art's autonomous realm, which he argues -- a la Adorno -- exists (if only problematically). Ultimately, he argues that critical theory, particularly the arguments of Adorno on aesthetics, offers the most fruitful path for evaluating the canon, despite the approach's clear flaws. His vision is a sociological one, but one that treats the components of the canon as possessing objective aesthetic content, albeit content that shifts in meaning over history.

Part One
History, Politics, and Culture

1
Canons Ancient and Modern

For Polycletus taught us all the symmetries of the body in his treatise, and confirmed his testimony when he sculpted a statue according to his own rules, and named the statue, as lie had his treatise, the canon.

—Galen, De placitis Hippocrates et Platonis (second century A.D.)

Poetry in general was a gift to the world and to nations, and not the private inheritance of a few refined, cultivated men.

—The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832), vol. II, book x

Before assessing the contemporary debate over the Western literary canon, it is necessary to understand the precise meanings of the word canon. Although new studies of specific incidents of literary canonization have been appearing with increasing frequency most of them concentrate on the fortunes and fate of individual authors, texts, movements, or genres; to date, few have attempted to trace the origins of the term itself and its subsequent transformations.¹ My purpose in this chapter, therefore, is to provide a brief historical overview of the changing definitions and connotations of the term canon, with particular emphasis on the variety of uses to which it has been put.

This chapter begins by surveying the origins and evolution of the idea of a canon from antiquity to the Middle Ages. I will show that the creation of vernacular literary canons came only after the institutionalization of the vernacular languages, the consolidation of modern nation-states, and the spread of nationalist ideologies. The eventual establishment of modern canons of literature depended on other economic and sociological factors, such as the rise of professional criticism, the growth of the publishing industry, and the commodification of culture in capitalistic societies, none of which, of course, has been exclusive to any single nation-state. Bringing this historical account up to the contemporary canon debate, the notion that the crisis of canonical legitimization today signals a deeper cultural crisis is assessed in the third part of this chapter. In light of challenges to the Western canon that have periodically occurred throughout its history I consider suggestions as to what makes the present controversy different from those that have preceded it before analyzing, in the following chapter, the specific arguments for and against diversifying the literary canon today.

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The definition of canon ultimately derives from the ancient Greek word kanna, which referred to useful types of reed, the straight stalk of marsh plants with firm stems. The related Greek term kanon metaphorically and metonymically extends that use to include straight rod, bar, or ruler, as well as rule, standard, and model. In architecture it acquired the meaning of the right measure and, in the arts, correct proportion. The latter sense was developed most explicitly in antiquity by the celebrated sculptor Polykleitos.

It has been remarked that the fifth century B.C. was the prime period of classical sculpture, in which an artistic realism and universalism were established that would profoundly influence the future course of Western art.² Polykleitos of Argos, whose statues were among the most copied of antiquity, exemplified this ambition. His sculpture of the Doryphoros, or spear-carrier, has been famous since its completion for exhibiting "a harmony of design ... never before attained in Greek sculpture," so much so that successive generations of artists took the figure as their model.³ Indeed, representations of the Doryphoros appeared in reliefs, altar friezes, and other statues, as well as on coins and engraved gems, well into the first century B.C, and after. Although only copies of Polykleitos's work now survive, literary and archaeological evidence has led one critic to surmise that the Romans admired it "almost fetishistically" and considered it "an ideal model for all sculptors to follow (words like lex, magister and exemplum are used of the Doryphoros)."⁴ In Book XXXIV of his Natural History (first century A.D.), Pliny the Elder refers to the Doryphoros as "the statue that artists call the Canon, since they draw their outlines from it as if from a sort of standard." Thanks to this one work, he continues, Polykleitos "perfected the art of sculpture."

The statue is sometimes claimed to have been the sculptural illustration of Polykleitos's only known book, now lost, entitled Kanon, in which he expounded the theoretical basis of his technique. A manual detailing the precise mathematical measurements and "ideal proportions" of the human figure, it is thought to have provided a "practical working blueprint" and aesthetic standard for other sculptors to follow.⁵ The sculptural technique that was to follow his own example was thus given didactic exposition: The technical procedures needed to achieve a perfected naturalism, or formal realism, are supposed to have been contained in the Kanon, whereas the Doryphoros itself was meant physically to exemplify the artist's conceptual ideal. Art historian Brunilde Ridgway alleges that the sculpture did not represent any particular individual but rather "the athlete or the Olympic victor par excellence," and has described it as

the epitome of idealization, since the body is seen as a sequence of interrelated measures that create the total harmony of the figure.... As such, no human being could ever look like the Doryphoros, and the statue assumes the value of a Platonic idea, of which this world can only afford vague copies.⁶

Indeed, the concept of a canon may be interpreted as the very archetype of Plato's conception of the Ideas or Forms, the perfect ideals that constitute true understanding and are to be followed as standards, even though they may only be imperfectly approximated. In the Protagoras, Plato explicitly invokes Polykleitos and implies that he is the exemplar of till sculptors, just as Homer is of poets (11.311c-e).⁷ Of course, Plato also notoriously banishes from his ideal city-state the artists and poets who trade In "mere appearances," who fashion "phantoms far removed from reality" and whose "creations are inferior in respect of reality," thereby leading its citizens away from truth, excellence, reason, and the good (Republic, book x, 11.605a-c and 607a-608b). Nonetheless, because it is founded on the mathematically ideal proportions of the human form, Polykleitos's Kanon can be seen as embodying the Platonic truth of sculpture in classical Greece. Even though Plato bans all those ignorant of geometry from entering his Academy, Polykleitos and his followers would not likely have been excluded. The same could be said of the ideologically sound artist in Plato's ideal republic, because the exclusion of artists was neither automatic nor absolute: Plato does allow the "encomiasts of Homer," for example, to make "the best possible case" for the "goodness and truth" of his poetry (Republic, book x, 11.606e-608b), although the precise manner in which their appeal to truth would be justified was left unspecified. Many passages in the dialogues do imply that canonical artists and poets such as Homer are legitimate to the extent that they convey the ideals of austerity, goodness, and truth—in short, the Platonic conception of knowledge—rather than being merely "delightful" or appealing to "the childish loves of the multitude" (Republic, books iii, 11.398a-b, and x, 11.608a-b).⁸

As codified by Plato, excellence, beauty, justice, and goodness were each forms of the idea of truth, which ideally had to be comprehended by anyone who would be genuinely knowing and just. The notion of artistic excellence therefore mingled closely with that of knowledge and morality Indeed, in the contemporary plays of Euripides, the term kanon is employed specifically as a measure of moral behavior. In the lament following the sacrifice of her daughter, Hecuba reflects that "good nurturing teaches noble behavior, and if a man learns this lesson well, he knows what is base, measuring it by the standards [kanoni] of the honorable" (Hecuba, 11.601-602). Likewise, the Epicureans, who believed the highest good to be personal happiness, also thought of a canon as a moral and conceptual ideal. In the century after Polykleitos's Kanon and a generation after Plato, Epicurus wrote a treatise on natural philosophy called Of the Standard, a work entitled Canon. Although the work no longer survives, Diogenes Laertius described it as follows:

Now in The Canon Epicurus affirms that our sensations and preconceptions and our feelings are the standards of truth; the Epicureans generally make perceptions of mental presentations to be also standards.... By preconception they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion, or universal idea stored in the mind (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in Ten Books, book x, 11.30-34).

Although otherwise opposed to Plato's philosophy, the Epicureans clearly shared with him the notion of canon as a standard of truth and exemplary form of knowledge. However intangible or idealistic it may have been, the standard was thought to be universal, in spite of the fact that ancient Greek society was based on slavery, depriving an entire class of people from access to such knowledge. Already in classical antiquity, then, the concept of a canon combined artistic excellence with morality and truth with ideology.

Apart from its philosophical foundations, more mundane material factors also affected which specific works came to be considered canonical in antiquity. In addition to abstract artistic and moral standards, classical scholarship began to play a practical role in the preservation, reproduction, and potential canonization of works of literature, philosophy, and history. Scholars of the Library of Alexandria, for example, had been cataloguing, copying, and editing texts as early as the third century B.C. Zenodotus of Ephesus, librarian during the reign of Ptolemy II, was among the first editors of Homer, and the poet Callimachus produced a 120-volume critical catalogue—the Pinakes—of some of the library's vast contents. These and other Alexandrian scholars devised lists of the most distinguished writers in various genres ranging from poetry and philosophy to oratory and history, making qualitative distinctions and thereby either reconfirming or helping to shape, at least implicitly, the earliest literary canons of antiquity.⁹

In later centuries, the Romans appropriated the concept of canon by adapting Greek models for their own purposes. The word itself was transliterated—kanon became Latinized as canon. Just as they followed Polykleitos's example of sculpture, so the Romans imitated, recreated, and transformed Greek poetry: The Aeneid combines thematic and stylistic elements of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Georgian reproduce the poetic modes of Theocritus, as the Eclogues do those of Hesiod; Seneca recreates the Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedies; Plautus and Terence adapt Menander's comedies; and so forth. Selected works were considered valuable enough to be worthy of imitation, so their reproduction came to be a mark of canonical distinction. The reproduction of wellknown works, however, also had ideological functions, because the appeal to historical precedent often legitimized contemporary political power as much as literary practice. In The Aeneid, for example, the founding of Rome and its imperial dominion was glorified by association with the hallowed Homeric epics and justified by poetically inscribing the lineage of its emperors back to Aeneas's divine parentage. In the current canon debate, it is precisely such ideological associations of canonical works that has attracted the most criticism, as will be seen in Chapter 2.

Around the beginning of the first millennium, the discrimination between "ancient" and "modern," classic and contemporary, major and minor, authors was beginning to be formulated, and the first explicit distinction of a whole literary canon, as a collected body of texts, was made. In the first century A.D., Quintilian already counted Cicero among the antiqui, and in the second century, Aulus Gellius coined the term classicus to differentiate the ancient model authors. In his celebrated study, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), E. R. Curtius explains that the classic writers were always the "ancients." They could be acknowledged as models, but they could also be rejected and superseded, in which case there is a "querelle des anciens et des modernes." This, he finds, has been a constant phenomenon of literary history.¹⁰ Indeed, the roots of subsequent canon debates lie partly in such ancient versus modern distinctions, which have been subject to change according to the various uses to which literature has been put in different historical contexts.

By the fourth century A.D., the canon was understood to be a comprehensive list of books for study such as those of Christian literature. The long history of the formation of the authoritative biblical canon, not officially finalized until the sixteenth century, has been recounted elsewhere.¹¹ Of more relevance here is the subtle shift in definition: Without abandoning the sense of artistic or moral exemplars, the early medieval canon became a list of works for pedagogical instruction in the liberal arts, and especially in grammar, the study of which involved literature as much as linguistic practice per se.¹² The authors studied in medieval schools included pagan and Christian writers, both of which were taken as authorities. Indeed, it was characteristic of the early Middle Ages that all auctores, or curriculum authors, were perceived as equally valuable, that each one was believed to be timeless. Lists of selected auctores were devised as examples to learn from and to follow, and although the lists differ in points of detail and were periodically challenged, a remarkable degree of consistency is also evident, as certain authors reappear on list after list across Europe from the fifth to the thirteenth century and beyond. In various combinations, those lists included Aesop, Homer, Plato, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Statius, Cato, Juvenal, and Boethius. As late as the fourteenth century, the esteem in which many of the same writers were held was confirmed in Dante's Inferno (canto iv, 11.88-90) and Purgatorio (canto xxii, 11.97-108), as well as Chaucer's The House of Fame (book iii, 11.1460-1519). Even into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Curtius shows, European cultures still followed a canon of authors that largely resembled the thirteenth-century list of Hugh of Trimberg.¹³

For the duration of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, then, the secular canonical auctores were used for a variety of pedagogical purposes. To scholars, they were authorities of general and scientific knowledge as well as sources of wisdom and general philosophy; to students, they provided moral edification as much as grammatical models; and to artists, familiarity with them was virtually prescriptive for poetic composition. This remained the case during the initial flowering of vernacular literature, of which the Italian language developed the first European vernacular canon, which included the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and later Ariosto and Tasso. However, according to Curtius, to survive in a climate dominated by the study of ancient poetry, even vernacular poetry had to "legitimize itself through model authors who could serve as a standard for Italian literary practice as Virgil did for Latin."¹⁴ Just as Virgil and others had appropriated Greek models, so Dante followed his Latin precursors. Indeed, Inferno is in many ways a poetic elaboration of Book VI of The Aeneid, while the Divina Commedia on the whole is infused with Virgilian motifs. In English, just as Shakespeare had absorbed Plutarch, Seneca, and Ovid, so Dryden and Pope self-consciously developed the pastoral style of Theocritus and Virgil; in French, Racine recreated the tragedies of Euripides, as Moliere did the comedies of Plautus and Terence; and so on. By the end of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, then, vernacular literature had become canonical largely by association with, and imitation of, the ancient classics, as Latin literature had done before with Greek literature: The poets of antiquity were emulated as authorities to legitimize contemporary literature and the values it was thought to embody Thus, even canonical change, it seems, was d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One History, Politics, and Culture
• Part Two Critical Aesthetic Theory
• Notes
• References
• Index