E. Dean Kolbas - Critical Theory and The Literary Canon (2001)

Critical Theory and
the Literary Canon

This page intentionally left blank
Critical Theory and
the Literary Canon
E. Dean Kolbas
^JXfestview
• JMItl
- T -^ y\ Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Copyright © 2001 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Published in 2001 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kolbas, E. Dean.
Critical theory and the literary canon / E. Dean Kolbas.
p. cm.
Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)—Cambridge University.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-9813-4
1. Criticism—History—20th century. 2. Canon (Literature). 3. Literature, Modern—
History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Title
PN81 .K595 2001

801'.95'0904—dc21
00-053181
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
PERSEUS
POD
ON DEMAND 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part One History, Politics, and Culture
1 Canons Ancient and Modern 11

Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 12
Modern Literary Canonizing, 17
Canonical and Cultural Crises, 21
2 The Contemporary Canon Debate 25

Justifying the Western Canon, 26
Opening the Canon, 36
Representation and Pragmatism, 44
Conclusion: Ideological Proximity, 56
3 Cultural Reproduction 59
The Familiarity of Canonical Works, 61
Canon Formation and Social Relations, 72
Whither Aesthetics?, 79
Part Two Critical Aesthetic Theory
4 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 83

Aesthetic Autonomy and Radical Critique, 84
The Dialectic of Aesthetics and Politics, 92
Historical Content and Canonical Change, 98
5 Subverting the Canon: Sociology, New Historicism,

and Cultural Studies 103
The Anti-Aesthetic Impulse of the Sociology of Art, 104
v
VI Contents
New Historicism and Aesthetic Heteronomy, 113

The Extorted Reconciliation of Cultural Studies, 119
6 The Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 125

Limited Literary Horizons?, 126
Canonical Reproduction and the Limits of Critical Theory, 133
Conclusion: A Canon of Art, a Politics of Ends 139
Notes 145
References 167
Index 179
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of research done at Cambridge University that was
originally submitted as a doctoral thesis. Although it has been substan-
tially modified and rewritten to be more suitable for publication, its es-
sential content remains the product of work that was done there. Even
the most hermetic research is never a purely solitary endeavor, and 1 owe
a great deal of thanks to friends, faculty, and administrators for their ad-
vice, encouragement, and patience. Above all, I am indebted to my su-
pervisor, Simon Jarvis, for his invaluable guidance and critical attention.
I am also grateful to Graham McCann, Silvana Dean, and the Fellows,
porters, and staff of Queens' College for all of their help, as well as
Christopher Norris and Ato Quayson for examining my work so closely. I
would also like to thank my editors at Westview Press, David McBride
and Kay Mariea, and my reviewers, Noah Isenberg, Geoffrey Gait
Harpham, and Douglas Kellner for their suggestions and support. I am
also grateful to Sharon Dejohn for her meticulous copyediting. A number
of friends deserve special thanks for their help and advice over the years:
Mark Fenwick, Richard Jones, Alex Rehding, Paul Stephenson, Despina
Christodoulou, Julian Murphet, David Mikosz, Tiffany Stern, Heather
Wolfe, and Sam Gibson. In ways that are perhaps less direct, but no less
valuable for being so, many wonderful teachers and professors have also
influenced me throughout my education: David McLellan, Chris Taylor,
Sean Sayers, Thomas Cox, Ed McCann, Richard Prizant, Carole Rosen-
Kaplan, and the late Chet Lieb. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Paula,
and my parents, Eugene and Deanna Kolbas, for their love and support.
This book is dedicated to them.
£. Dean Kolbas
vn
Philosophy that satisfies its own intention . . . has its lifebiood in the resistance
against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of
what happens to be the case.
-Tlieodor Adonio, "Why Still Philosophy" 0962)
Introduction
A "literary classic" is a work considered first-rate or excellent of its kind, and there-
fore standard, fit to be used as a model or imitated.
—The Oxford Companion to English Literature <1985)
In the past twenty years, the controversy over the literary canon has gen-
erated a wide range of critical commentary, from editorials and polemics
in journals and newspapers to theories and case studies in seminars and
symposia. By some accounts, the Western canon—the corpus of works
comprising the "classics" of art and literature, the very summit of cul-
tural achievement in the West—once thought of as timeless and univer-
sal, is now being undermined by the combined forces of feminism, multi-
culturalism, popular culture, and relativistic literary theories that have
occupied schools and universities since the 1960s. By other accounts, the
canon has been dominated by "dead, white European males," excluding
authors and artists from social groups that have historically been margin-
alized or that do not conform to the interests of the dominant culture. It is
therefore condemned as an elitist, patriarchical, racist, or ethnocentric
construction. In both cases there is agreement that the current impasse
over the literary canon signifies a change in society at large because the
monuments of the old order are thought to be giving wray to new canons,
greater cultural diversity, and changing political values.
One of the main objectives of this book is to explain how and why
these two lines of argument have been both historically and politically
suspect, largely for neglecting the material processes of canon formation.
A critique of the current debate will demonstrate that their apparently
antagonistic positions actually have a number of ideological assumptions
in common. In particular, there is a widespread belief that literary canons
are maintained by the authority of educational institutions and can there-
fore be changed, or preserved, by engineering the classroom syllabus ac-
cordingly. It is also believed that canons and works of art in general rep-
resent specific cultures or social groups, such as women, African
1
2 Introduction
Americans, and even Western culture as a whole. In contrast to these and

other related suppositions, I will make a case for a sociological and his-
torical understanding of canons that is confined neither to schools and
universities nor to social representation but that stresses the material re-
production of culture in the process of canon formation. An alternative
account of the historical constraints and material conditions of literary
canonization will clarify the means by which only a limited number of
works of literature become canonical.
In addition to cultural reproduction, the very concept of a canon neces-
sarily involves qualitative judgment, because to be canonical also means
to be exemplary. Sociological views of the literary canon that overempha-
size the institutional processes of canon formation tend to discount or ne-
glect the distinctive, aesthetic aspects of canonical works of art. In contrast
to such viewrs, this book will suggest that critical theoiy—and particu-
larly the work of Theodor Adomo—offers a unique understanding of art
that salvages the aesthetic content of canonical works yet avoids lapsing
into reactionary glorifications of them. I will also showr how the critique
of politically "committed" art in Adorno's work may be extended to the
instrumental justifications for revising the canon that have been evident
throughout the contemporary debate about the canon.
Although the Frankfurt School has excited much academic interest in
recent years, virtually no attention has been paid to its potential rele-
vance to this debate. 1 The purpose of bringing critical theory into the so-
called culture wars is neither to establish new grounds for adding more
works of literature to the canon nor to exploit its insights for the sake of
legitimizing the received canon as an indivisible whole. Rather, it is to in-
troduce a distinctive perspective that exposes many of the major claims
made about the canon that fail to live up to what they promise. Where
some critics extol the humane and democratic virtues of the Western
canon, critical theory suggests how in the name of culture they end up
betraying it. Where others believe that a gender-balanced, populist, or
multicultural canon would help to foster equality by being more socially
representative, the critique of politically committed art and instrumental
justifications of literature implies that these arguments are no less culpa-
ble than the cultural hegemony they seek to vanquish. Ultimately, this
book hopes to demonstrate that the critical theory of art and society can
illuminate the very concept of a canon as well as the controversy sur-
rounding it.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the contemporary debate on
canonical literature is that the terms in which it has been framed have
been consistently oppositional: The polarized rhetoric of critics across the
political spectrum has practically determined from the start that the dis-
pute would remain unresolved. Whereas some of these critics denounce
Introduction 3
any attribution of value to canonical works as inherently biased or ideo-

logical, others reserve skepticism for the reputedly progressive effects of
debunking them. When one critic speaks of the loss of standards of judg-
ment, another reacts by emphasizing the exclusions that those standards
have reinforced. Some have appealed to the democratic legacy and hu-
manistic virtues of the Western tradition; others have invoked cultural
difference and otherness against its hegemony. And whereas certain aca-
demics continue to analyze and evaluate works of literature in isolation
according to their intrinsic aesthetic quality, others insist on disrupting
formalistic interpretation, preferring instead to situate texts within a so-
cial and historical context, to highlight their aporias and silences, or to re-
verse the relation of what is central and what is peripheral about them-—
all in opposition to hitherto orthodox literary criticism which, it is
believed, has implicitly favored canonical over non-canonical works.
Nevertheless, both liberal pluralists and conservative humanists, to use a
familiar shorthand, seem to share a surprisingly uniform conception of
the canon itself, as either a singular legacy of artistic excellence or an elite
body of works whose privileged station must now be exposed in the
name of social justice. Because the debate has been couched in explicitly
political and highly polemical terms, it is necessary to inquire into the po-
litical assumptions that inform it. Where political arguments are being
made, the actual merits of their claims need to be politically assessed. If
one of the central tasks of a politically informed cultural criticism is to
unveil the ideological homogeneity behind an illusory diversity or the
appearance of difference,2 then the common assumptions and political
limitations of these arguments must be exposed.
Chapter 1 begins by showing how the idea of a canon originated in an-
tiquity as a concept with various, and sometimes contradictory, mean-
ings: from simple tools of measurement to sophisticated artistic models,
from standards of moral behavior to the legitimization of political au-
thority. By the Middle Ages, the literary canon in particular was being
used in European schools as a pedagogical device for those with access to
formal education. Later, with the formation of the modern nation-state
and the rise of professional criticism, it also acquired the nationalistic and
exclusive connotations that are still in evidence today. Ending with a
brief review of some of the major precedents for challenging established
literary canons, the chapter provides historical background to the current
situation, as well as a point of reference for several arguments made later
in the book.
Chapter 2 is a critical survey of the contemporary debate itself. To elu-
cidate the ways in which conservative and liberal, humanistic and plural-
istic conceptions of the canon actually disclose their own ideological
affinities, I analyze in detail the specific claims for endorsing the Western
4 Introduction
canon as it stands or for "opening it up" to be more culturally diverse

and socially representative. In particular, the methodological assump-
tions and political implications of each position reveal that—in spite of
their apparent opposition—they tend either to conceive of the process of
canonization in idealistic terms or to appropriate canonical works for
their political or pedagogical utility, hi either case, ideological assump-
tions are taken for granted and the material constraints of canon forma-
tion are left unexamined.
Because most of the arguments regarding the canon have occurred in
the United States, especially within its universities, the controversy is
usually taken to be an issue of educational reform; it is sometimes even
dismissed as a "local debate" with little or no consequence outside of the
academy. 3 Not only can doubts be cast on the accuracy of this assump-
tion, but its narrow historical and sociological vantage point circum-
scribes an understanding of the socioeconomic foundations of canons as
much as the material basis of canonization as a process. In Chapter 31 at-
tempt to correct for this myopia by widening the scope of the debate and
considering the diverse forms of cultural reproduction and institutional
legitimization that are necessary for the canonization of any work of art
or literature. Insofar as the very idea of a canon implies that certain
works are more worthy of imitation and continual exegesis than others,
canon formation involves the reproduction of, adaptation of, and famil-
iarity with canonical antecedents, whether literal or figurative, direct or
indirect, or within the same genre and medium or not. Social and institu-
tional theories of art, such as the sociology of literary reputations or
Pierre Bourdieu's model of the field of cultural production, can help to
explain the mechanisms by which canonical works become culturally fa-
miliar. Among the questions raised by such approaches is whether there
has ever been an academic "monopoly" on literary consecration. If not,
or if this monopoly has since dissolved, then more consideration must be
given to other cultural forces and non-academic institutions that also af-
fect canon formation, including the publishing and entertainment indus-
tries, the mass media, and the commodification of culture in general.
For all their advantages, however, sociological accounts of literary re-
production have tended to put aside the question of the aesthetic con-
tent or quality of canonical works, highlighting instead the social and
ideological functions of art. Indeed, they sometimes go so far as to sug-
gest that there is nothing distinctive about canonical works of literature
because there is nothing uniquely aesthetic about "works of art" at all.4
To address this tendency, in Part 2 I begin by considering the aesthetic
content and significance of works of art that conventional literary soci-
ology neglects. I therefore reconsider canonicity through the lens of crit-
Introduction 5
ical theory, particularly the literary criticism and aesthetic theory of

Theodor Adorno.
Although the vast majority of critics seem to believe that canons and
canon formation are primarily the domain of formal institutions of edu-
cation, the members of the so-called Frankfurt School perceive the judg-
ment and fate of works of art to be a complex sociological and historical
process that is confined neither to a single institution nor to any one field
of cultural production. In answer to the radical educational reform pro-
posed in 1969 by Helmut Becker, who proposed to "abolish education ac-
cording to a fixed canon and instead to provide a program of varied
course offerings, i.e., a school with a wide series of choices and extensive
internal differentiation within the individual subjects," Adorno replied,
"It seems to me that as much as all this may be desirable, it remains too
much embedded in the institutional framework of the school." 5 To go be-
yond that framework without abandoning the aesthetic content of art, in
Chapter 4 I introduce the most relevant aspects of critical theory to the
current debate. Specifically, Adorno's—and, to some extent, Walter Ben-
jamin's—conception of the social, historical, and philosophical signifi-
cance of the work of art stresses its cognitive and critical attributes,
avoiding both the naive celebration of Western culture and the simple
condemnation of canonical literature as essentially ideological and there-
fore bankrupt. The autonomy of art, as Adorno understands it, is also ap-
plicable to the political assumptions of the current debate in general, be-
cause overtly political or pragmatic justifications for opening the canon
may be subject to a similar critique as that of socially "committed" art,
largely for adopting a specious and unhistorical idea that artworks are
necessarily socially effective, practical tools, or that canons should be
faithfully representative of society as it is. Instead, I suggest that the po-
litical claims for art by both left- and right-wing critics (even though the
latter would deny that their claims are political) contradict the very con-
cept of art in modern society, especially when it is confined to strictly
pragmatic functions or justified in instrumental terms. No less problem-
atic is the argument that takes the modernist criteria by which art has
been judged to be simply prejudiced and disposable. To the critical the-
ory of art, what is called the "truth content" of works is taken as histori-
cally objective and, in part, materialistically determined. If different ele-
ments of that content are revealed over time in fragments and changing
configurations, or "constellations," rather than entirely and all at once,
then works of art and literature can be neither condemned as totally ide-
ological nor glorified as the immortal monuments of culture. Ultimately, I
will explain how the concept of an historical constellation of elements
may be a suitable metaphor for canon formation itself.
6 Introduction
Although Chapter 4 is in part a critical response to the ideological pro-

posals and justifications for either revising or leaving intact the literary
amon, Chapter 5 is a rejoinder to the sociological arguments that attempt
to go beyond those proposals. In particular, I show how the sociology of
art, new historicism, and cultural studies implicitly or explicitly try to
subvert the high regard traditionally accorded the canon. Sociology gen-
erally finds the evaluation of literature to be dependent on its social ef-
fects or reception, which suggests that the qualitative content of wrorks of
art is merely a function of their institutionalization. On the occasions
when it does examine the specific content of an individual work, more
often than not sociology uses it merely to endorse its own empirical pri-
orities and theoretical aims rather than to perceive what aspects of the
work may not readily conform to the immediate conditions of society.
Similarly, with its emphasis on social context and the mediations of texts,
new historicism tends to give up the distinction between works of litera-
ture and other historical documents, even though its practitioners might
pay lip service to the idea of artistic quality. This is largely due to the dis-
regard of aesthetic autonomy in new historicism and its substitution of
heteronomy as a more realistic or accurate category with which to under-
stand literature. Even more directly, the discipline of cultural studies ap-
pears to abolish any canonical distinction at all, bridging the gap be-
tween "high" and "low" culture by giving cultural phenomena or
popular works of art—literary and otherwise—the same critical treat-
ment that canonical works have routinely received. Critical theory, how-
ever, anticipates many of these arguments, and it also reveals how each
of them betrays itself as ideological to the extent that works of art are
made to conform to the very social order they tacitly hope to transcend.
By the end of Chapter 5, the advantages of a critical theory of canonic-
ity should be clear. Without succumbing to the conservative fetish of
canonical art, critical theory nevertheless salvages whatever truth con-
tent can be found in art. Nor does critical theory resort to an instrumen-
tal justification, or idealistic program, of canon revision in the interests
of social justice, since it recognizes the critical value of art's autonomy as
well as the objective determinations of canon formation. Equally, critical
theory avoids the ideological aspects of the sociology of art that empha-
size its institutionalization over its transformative impulse, and that
therefore ultimately legitimize the status quo. In spite of these advan-
tages, however, the critical theory of art is itself open to criticism on sev-
eral grounds, the most relevant of which I assess in Chapter 6. Among
them are what has been described as the limited literary horizons of
Adorno's aesthetic theory, or its narrow focus on works of art and litera-
ture that are already part of the Western canon; the supposedly out-
dated, modernist emphasis upon the category of "the work of art,"
Introduction /
which is believed to make Adorno's aesthetic theory less applicable to

"postmodern" society today; and the questionable notion of totality, or a
uniform socioeconomic order that is thought to permeate society on
every level. In addition to these familiar objections, certain remaining
ambiguities and inconsistencies are also examined, including Adorno's
equivocal assessment of artistic reproduction and its role in canon for-
mation. Finally, I consider whether the apparent limitations of a critical
theory of canonical art are in part due to the inherent tensions—or objec-
tive contradictions—of canonicity itself, which are not to be erased in
the name of logical consistency but rather highlighted by any account
that would be truly critical,
As long as the discourse about literary canons continues to be domi-
nated on the one hand by the rhetoric of liberal representation and the so-
cial utility of art and on the other by the irreproachability of Western cul-
tural monuments, there will continue to be space for a perspective that is
neither pragmatic nor idealistic, neither conventionally political nor po-
litically aloof. Despite its own shortcomings, and the historical and mate-
rial conditions working against it, critical theory provides such a per-
spective. If critical theory helps to move beyond the limited terms of the
canon debate and the false opposition of its cultural politics, then ex-
plaining how is a worthwhile task.
It should be reiterated that this book is primarily concerned with the
literary canon and the contemporary arguments about it. Although it is
increasingly evident that this debate has ramifications for disciplines be-
yond those specifically concerned with the study of literature—as wit-
nessed by recent studies in political theory, sociology, U.S. history, and
Western music 6 —these subjects, with the exception of the latter, have
generally not been concerned with the aesthetic quality or content of the
works comprised in their respective canons. Nor have they generated
anything like the volume of commentary and critique that has been de-
voted to the literary canon. For these reasons, in this book I focus on ar-
guments concerning canons of art and literature alone. The question as to
whether the arguments made here can be extended to canons in other ar-
eas is therefore left open.
PART ONE
History, Politics, and Culture

1
Canons Ancient and Modern
For Polyclelus taught us all the symmetries of the body in his treatise, and confirmed
his testimony when IK sculpted a statue according to his own rules, and named the
statue, as he had his treatise, the canon.
—Galen, De placitis Hippocrates et Platonis (second century A.o.)
Poetry in general was a gift to the world and to nations, and not the private inheri-
tance 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 concen-
trate 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, there-
fore, is to provide a brief historical overview of the changing definitions
and connotations of the term canon, with particular emphasis on the vari-
ety 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 institutional-
ization of the vernacular languages, the consolidation of modern nation-
states, and the spread of nationalist ideologies. The eventual establish-
ment 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 capital-
istic societies, none of which, of course, has been exclusive to any single
It
12 Canons Ancient and Modern
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 oc-
curred 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 es-
tablished 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 har-
mony of design . . . never before attained in Greek sculpture," so much so
that successive generations of artists took the figure as their model. 3 In-
deed, 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 consid-
ered 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 Nat-
ural 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 contin-
ues, Polykleitos "perfected the art of sculpture."
The statue is sometimes claimed to have been the sculptural illustra-
tion of Polykleitos's only known book, now lost, entitled Kanon, in
which he expounded the theoretical basis of his technique. A manual de-
tailing the precise mathematical measurements and "ideal proportions"
of the human figure, it is thought to have provided a "practical working
Canons Ancient and Modern 13
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 per-
fected naturalism, or formal realism, are supposed to have been con-
tamed in the Kanon, whereas the Doryphoros itself was meant physically
to exemplify the artist's conceptual ideal. Art historian Brunilde Ridg-
way alleges that the sculpture did not represent any particular individ-
ual 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 interre-

lated 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 arche-

type 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
all sculptors, just as Homer is of poets (U.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 (Re-
public, 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 sculp-
ture 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 ideo-
logically sound artist in Plato's ideal republic, because the exclusion of
artists was neither automatic nor absolute: Plato does allow the "encomi-
asts of Homer," for example, to make "the best possible case" for the
"goodness and truth" of his poetry (Republic, book x, 11.606e-608b), al-
though the precise manner in which their appeal to truth would be justi-
fied 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 "delight-
ful" or appealing to "the childish loves of the multitude" (Republic, books
iii, U.398a-b, and x, U.608a-b).8
u Canons Ancient and Modern
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 moral-
ity. Indeed, in the contemporary plays of Euripides, the term kanon is em-
ployed specifically as a measure of moral behavior. In the lament follow-
ing the sacrifice of her daughter, Hecuba reflects that "good nurturing
teaches noble behavior, and if a mail 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 genera-
tion after Plato, Epicurus wrote a treatise on natural philosophy called Of
tlie 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 preconcep-
tion they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion, or uni-
versal 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 ex-
emplary 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 fac-
tors 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, reproduc-
tion, and potential canonization of works of literature, philosophy, and
history. Scholars of the Library of Alexandria, for example, had been cat-
aloguing, 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 philoso-
phy to oratory and history, making qualitative distinctions and thereby

either reconfirming or helping to shape, at least implicitly, the earliest lit-
erary 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 stylis-
tic elements of both The Iliad and The Odyssey; the Georgics 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 consid-
ered valuable enough to be worthy of imitation, so their reproduction
came to be a mark of canonical distinction. The reproduction of well-
known works, however, also had ideological functions, because the ap-
peal to historical precedent often legitimized contemporary political
power as much as literary practice. In The Aeneid, for example, the found-
ing of Rome and its imperial dominion was glorified by association with
the hallowed Homeric epics and justified by poetically inscribing the lin-
eage 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 be-
tween "ancient" and "modern," classic and contemporary, major and mi-
nor, authors was beginning to be formulated, and the first explicit dis-
tinction 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 an-
tiqui, 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 subse-
quent canon debates lie partly in such ancient versus modern distinc-
tions, 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 compre-
hensive list of books for study, such as those of Christian literature. The
long history of the formation of the authoritative biblical canon, not offi-
cially finalized until the sixteenth century, has been recounted else-
where.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 wrhich involved literature as
much as linguistic practice per se. 12 The authors studied in medieval
schools included pagan cind 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 be-
yond. 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 In-
ferno (canto iv, 11.88-90) and Ptirgatorio (canto xxii, 11.97-108), as well as
Chaucer's The House of Fame (book iii, 11.1460-1519). Even into the six-
teenth 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 m o d e m pe-
riod, then, the secular canonical auctores were used for a variety of ped-
agogical purposes. To scholars, they were authorities of general and sci-
entific 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 writh them was virtually prescriptive
for poetic composition. This remained the case during the initial flower-
ing 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, accord-
ing 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 Div-
ina Commedia on the whole is infused with Virgilian motifs. In English,
just as Shakespeare had absorbed Plutarch, Seneca, and Ovid, so Dry-
den and Pope self-consciously developed the pastoral style of Theocri-
tus and Virgil; in French, Racine recreated the tragedies of Euripides, as
Moiiere 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 litera-
ture: 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 dependent in some degree on
canonical precedent.
Modern Literary Canonizing

The imitation and adaptation of ancient literature, however, was only
one of the means by which vernacular works acquired esteem. So com-
mon was the practice throughout the Renaissance and the neoclassical re-
vivals of later centuries that imitation was insufficient by itself to make a
work canonical; otherwise any number of those modeled on the classics
might have been considered so. Clearly, more than imitation alone was
required. At least three major features distinguish modern literary canon-
ization from the ancient and medieval periods. First, certain material and
social conditions developed that changed the nature of literary produc-
tion, distribution, and reception. Second, the incorporation of the modern
nation-state and its increasing influence as a primary form of cultural
identity helped to fix distinct national canons. And third, the compara-
tively recent creation of specific courses dedicated to the study of secular
literature in schools and universities—in a manner quite different from
the medieval concern with grammar—further helped to canonize se-
lected works in nationally standardized curricula. (As shown in Chapter
2, the latter in particular has been at the heart of the current controversy
and often commands the rhetoric that surrounds it.) To clarify the rela-
tionship of these developments and how they have influenced the his-
tory of canon formation, each is considered in turn.
As it had been throughout the Middle Ages, an educational function
remained associated with the classical canon that was reserved for a priv-
ileged social elite. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, "from the
Italian humanists to the English humanists and beyond," according to
Joseph Levine, "there was complete agreement that the classics were
meant to instruct the young in all that was required to govern." 15 But
with the gradual expansion of literacy, the publishing industry, and the
reading public throughout this period—as well as yet another conflict be-
tween the followers of the ancients and proponents of the moderns—de-
votion to the classical canon began to be seriously questioned. Unlike the
twelfth-century querelle, the "battle of the books" in France and England,
as memorably portrayed in Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704), re-
vealed not only a crisis of literary and pedagogical values but also that
conceptions and uses of history, the success of new forms of scientific
knowledge, and the ever-increasing publication of literature were all un-
dermining the authority of the old order and its long-established canon
of antiquity. 16
The material changes and revolutionary consequences brought about
by publishing, beginning with the invention of the printing press in the
1440s, is known well enough not to require repetition here. 17 Although its
most profound effects were not immediate, in time it would transform
both the mode and content of literary production, as well as the social
significance of printed material as such, Alvin Kernan claims that only af-
ter the print revolution did the definition of literature, which had for-
merly embraced any and all written material, narrow to mean works of a
particular quality, as generally distinct from historical, scientific, and
other texts concerned more with facts than eloquence of expression. 18 By
the eighteenth century, he argues, the "most radical tendency of print
and its logic of multiplicity was to destroy the canon of courtly letters
centered on the classics and in a revolutionary, democratic manner to
level all books in a continuous surge of new, ever-accumulating print
products." 1 9 How "revolutionary" (or even effective) the leveling of
books really was, however, is open to debate. The assumption is that the
mere fact of numerical proliferation is necessarily "democratic," without
regard to who is controlling the press and in what interests. Nonetheless,
the boom of literary production in this era is beyond dispute. Among its
social consequences was an apparent anxiety of the learned class, ex-
pressed in England, for example, by Alexander Pope's Dunciad Variorum
(1728) and much of the work of Samuel Johnson, whose essays, and espe-
cially prefaces, eventually collected as The Lives of the English Poets
(1779-1781)—written originally at the behest of publishers—self-con-
sciously confirmed a canon of English literature by investing it with criti-
cal authority at a time when it was believed to be threatened by the grow-
ing deluge of printed material. If the literary canon were entirely at the
mercy of print alone, however, this tendency might have succeeded in
engulfing it long ago, but its preservation also depended on other factors.
Stimulated by the burgeoning publishing industry, the occupations of
professional writer and critic first developed in Europe in the eighteenth
century.20 The enormous growth of literary criticism and the activity of
formally editing literary texts, often with the scholarly apparatus of de-
tailed annotation, further helped to bring modern, secular, vernacular lit-
erature into the canon. The market for new books and newly edited edi-
tions of classics bound writing directly to commercial interests as never
before. In England, the expiration of the 1695 Licensing Act made way for
the creation, under pressure from publishers, of the Copyright Act in
1709. Comparable laws were passed in France and Germany in 1777 and
1794, respectively. Written works were officially deemed to be the prop-
erty of their authors, legally protected as commodities for exchange little
different, in principle, from manufactured goods or other commercial

products. 21 In addition to such laws, the printing press itself had helped
to commodify the art of writing into books with "a real marketplace
value, and therefore property to be bought and sold in a way that an oral
poem or the few copies of a manuscript never could be." 22 Emergent in-
dustrialism, together with the corresponding rise of a new class of pro-
fessionals, fostered the commercialization of literature and criticism.
Socioeconomic factors also gradually switched the interest of the reading
public to a national vernacular literature more in tune with modem com-
mercial interests: Writers and publishers realized that no books sold bet-
ter than those that could be widely read and enjoyed, compared to the
relatively limited audience for Greek and Latin classics.
Apart from the expanding market for vernacular literature in the eigh-
teenth century, the national significance of literature has perhaps been the
single most effective means of reinforcing a specific literary canon in the
modern era. Although some vernacular poets had been highly regarded
and widely imitated in the later Middle Ages (e.g., Chretien de Troyes,
Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer), the consolidation of independent states and
their respective nationalist ideologies, combined with the growth of pub-
lishing and professional criticism, ultimately began to fix multiple and
distinct national canons. The French and English literary canons, for ex-
ample, began to coalesce during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, when the economic power and national identities of France and
England were becoming established. 23 In Germany, a national literature
developed in earnest in the nineteenth century, when increasing national-
ism helped to found a distinct canon of German literature. Indeed, cele-
brations of major literary figures such as the "Schillerfest" of 1859 were
used explicitly to fuel nationalist sentiments of unification and constitu-
tionalism. 24 The role of nationalism in modem canon formation is more
clearly illustrated in the following examples.
Two recent studies demonstrate that the commemoration of poets in
England became conspicuously frequent after the eighteenth century,
when a national pantheon of writers began to form. Andrew Sanders has
found a metaphor for the formation of the canon of English literature in
Poets' Comer of Westminster Abbey, the same site in the capital where
the monarchy is invested with its authority. From Dryden (1700) to Mil-
ton (1737), Shakespeare (1741), Thomas Gray (1771), and Samuel Johnson
(1784), selected authors increasingly earned the posthumous homage of
tombs, monuments, or plaques placed in honor of their literary achieve-
ment. 25 In Michael Dobson's account, the formation of Shakespeare's rep-
utation demonstrates how he had become "the centre of English literary
culture" and his works "national treasures" in the century after the
Restoration. From Augustan adaptations of his plays and revisions of his
W Canons Ancient and Modern
image to appropriations of his work for a variety of purposes, culminat-

ing symbolically in David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee of 1769, Shake-
speare was ultimately enshrined in Britain as "the transcendent personi-
fication of the national ideal." 26
Also around this time, English literature first began to be formally
studied alongside the ancient classics. Revealingly, teaching rhetoric and
belles lettres using modern English writers first occurred not in England
but in Scotland, at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the mid-
eighteenth century, largely to help assuage resurgent Scottish national-
ism and mitigate the Jacobite threat to restore the Stuarts. From the start,
the academic study of English literature had clearly ideological inten-
tions. In England itself, literature in English was sporadically studied
throughout the nineteenth century at the University of London, women's
extension schools, and mechanics' institutes, either to illustrate the his-
tory of the language or as a means of "social improvement." But not until
the attempts to establish an Honours School in English Literature at Ox-
ford—first in 1887 and then, successfully, in 1894—did the national canon
find a place in English academia. 27 Cambridge University followed suit
at the close of the First World War, when "English Literature rode to
power on the back of wartime nationalism." 28 Although it has been re-
marked that the introduction of English as a full university subject was
"the most important attempt to fix a canon of English literature," no less
important was that its study "was from the outset all about the legiti-
macy of national origins." 29
In this regard, the United States furnishes perhaps the paradigmatic
case of modern canon formation. Whereas in England the nationalist ap-
propriation of literature largely preceded its eventual accommodation in
the university, in the United States both nationalism and the formal aca-
demic teaching of literature more closely coincided. In spite of Emerson's
declaration in "The American Scholar" in 1837 (see Selected Writings,
1992) that Americans had listened too long to the courtly muses of Eu-
rope, for most of the nineteenth century American education remained
focused on the classics of antiquity and works of English literature, even
though a great variety of native writing was already flourishing. In the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, the study of English literature in
the United States gradually supplanted the study of Greek and Latin
classics, less for its "literary" value than for its linguistic, grammatical,
and oratorical example. And even though a handful of courses concerned
with Amerkcin literature as an independent subject had appeared spo-
radically in the late nineteenth century, a specifically American, as distinct
from British, literary canon began to be institutionalized within academia
only in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with the outbreak of the
First World War and the consequent demand for overt patriotism and
"civic uplift." 30 However, just as in Europe, canon formation in the

United States was not determined solely by the syllabus. Other accounts
also cite the impact of the publication of influential works such as The
Cambridge History of American Literature, first published in 1917, which
codified the American canon and helped to establish an independent
American literary tradition. 31
In the interwar years, the combination of isolationism and nationalism
was sometimes potent enough to confound clear distinctions between a
purely literary canon and that of historical documents or political tracts.
In an article entitled "An American Canon" in the Saturday Reviezv of Lit-
erature of October 15,1927, Henry Canby ranked the Declaration of Inde-
pendence alongside works by Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
and Sinclair Lewis, while Daniel Marsh's The American Canon (1939),
published on the eve of the United States' entry into the Second World
War, is entirely composed of patriotic political texts. Examining what
were thought to be the essential qualities of American literature, whole
schools of academic criticism and literary theory arose during and after
the war which, combined with the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold
War, only strengthened the resolve to establish an independent American
canon. Influential critical works included Yvor Winters's Maule's Curse
(1938), F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), and Henry Nash
Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), to
name only a few. In this context, T. S. Eliot's 1944 lecture, "What Is a Clas-
sic?," in which Virgil is regarded as the truly universal poet and Latin as
Europe's universal language, can be read as a reaction to the heightened
nationalism of its time, when Europe was torn apart by war.
By the mid-twentieth century, nationality had come to be among the
most dominant forms of social identity in Europe, North America, and
much of the rest of the world. 32 It has permeated the content and function
of education at every level, especially in the humanities, where the study
of literature is usually placed. To that extent, the transformation of liter-
ary canons in modernity has been profoundly influenced by the pre-
scribed values and priorities of the state, where the inculcation of ab-
stract aesthetic ideals has given way to fostering a sense of shared
identity by appeal to national history and distinct cultural heritage. Com-
bined with the other social and material changes rehearsed above, the
fragmentation of a single, universal canon of antiquity and the Middle
Ages seemed complete.
Canonical and Cultural Crises

If this historical account of the changing functions of the canon has so far
presented a smooth chronological narrative in which the meaning of the
concept appears to have continuously evolved and expanded to include

a greater and greater diversity of literature, then it might be fairly ac-
cused of being far too linear or progressive. Indeed, canon formation has
been fraught with episodes of ambiguity, unrest, and even radical con-
tention throughout its history.
In the literary history of the West, at least, counter-canonical move-
ments are nearly as old as the idea of the canon itself. As mentioned
above, the distinction between the inherited literary excellence of the an-
tiqui and the comparative merits of contemporary literature had occurred
as early as the first and second centuries A.D., when poets deemed classi-
cus scriptor were implicitly taken to be superior to more recent ones. A cer-
tain tension is found in the very contrast between "modern," with its sug-
gestion of immediacy and originality, and "ancient," with its implication
of historical influence and artistic imitation. The twelfth century wit-
nessed the first great querelle in the universities between ancient and mod-
ern, classical and contemporary, canonical and novel writers and works. If
the Renaissance was the "rebirth" of antiquity in the arts and literature of
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, then the critique of scholasticism
and humanism in the early seventeenth century, exemplified by Francis
Bacon's Novum Organum (1620), sowed the seeds of modern scientific re-
action against ancient traditions. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the
rational skepticism of the Enlightenment undermined the old order of
courtly letters, as illustrated by the "battle of the books" in France and En-
gland. The foundation of courses for the study of modern vernacular liter-
ature at universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was yet an-
other controversial challenge to the long supremacy of classical studies
and, by implication, to the classical canon. And with the rise of artistic
modernism, the Romantic verse and sentimental novels of the Victorian
era were themselves opposed, and eventually superseded, by avant-garde
artists and what came to be the modernist canon. Figures like Matthew
Arnold and T S. Eliot long ago perceived a "crisis" in contemporary soci-
ety, as did F. R. Leavis, whose "Great Tradition" attempted to preserve
critical judgment and reaffirm a specific literary heritage in an age of pre-
sumed cultural and spiritual decline. 33 In the United States, courses in
"General Education" using the "Great Books" of Western literature were
offered as early as 1915, not least to help counteract the cultural crisis in
the West marked by the First World War. In short, mere have been many
moments in history at which prevailing values, literary conventions, and
accepted classics of literature were, in varying degrees, disputed or un-
dermined and to which the rhetoric of "crisis" has been applied, whether
contemporaneously or retrospectively. And these are only the better-
known examples of when the boundaries of the canon were redrawn or its
specific content scrutinized and revised, if not contested and condemned.
Given the number and variety of precedents, then, it should be clear

that the idea of a cultural crisis is by no means a novel one, and that criti-
cisms of a traditional canon, on whatever grouiids, have a history as
much as the concept of the canon itself does. Indeed, it has even been
suggested that the literary canon is actually defined by attacks upon it.34
Nonetheless, to deny that there is anything distinctive about the current
debate, to dismiss the sense of urgency it has aroused in conservative and
liberal polemics, would be to assume a conception of history in which
radical challenges to the canon are mystified as natural recurrences and
the social, cultural, and institutional changes of which they are a part are
oversimplified as historically continuous or commonplace. What needs
to be asked instead is whether the latest challenges to the canon may sig-
nify something new.
Today, critics who view the debate as signaling a serious crisis have
given many diverse reasons for its cause and why it is unprecedented.
George Steiner, in Real Presences (1989), Alvin Kernan, in The Death of Lit-
erature (1990), and Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Read-
ing in an Electronic Age (1994), attribute the latest crisis, at least in part, to
the threat posed by modern electronic media that is undermining the tra-
ditional appreciation of literature. Many critics, from Allan Bloom in The
Closing of the American Mind (1987) to Gregory Jay in American Literature
and the Culture Wars (1997), have traced the latest assault on the tradi-
tional humanities directly to the social upheavals of the 1960s, including
the impact of feminism and the Civil Rights movement in the United
States. John Ellis, in Literature Lost (1997), and Hilton Kramer and Roger
Kimball (1995), editors of the journal The New Criterion, charge the degen-
erate influence of "theory" in the universities for attacking democratic
values, paralyzing standards of judgment, and deflating the high esteem
in which canonical works of art and literature have historically been
held. John Searle, in "The Storm Over the University" (1992) and W. B.
Carnochan, in The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and
American Experience (1993), believe that the rhetoric of crisis is due to the
decline in national consensus on the policies and purposes of higher edu-
cation in general. In "Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon For-
mation" (Fall 1987), Cornel West attributes the controversy to the decolo-
nization of the Third World; the shattering of white, male cultural
hegemony; and the rise of academic interest in popular culture. In Cul-
tural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), John Guillory
refers to the waning cultural capital of the "old bourgeoisie" and the rise
of a new, professional-managerial class that has little need for the literary
canon. In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991),
Fredric Jameson argues that capitalism thrives on pluralism and pop-
ulism just as diverse commodities flourish in new and open markets,
markets in which the hierarchy of values that the canon represents has,
supposedly, no place at all. To Harold Bloom, in Tlie Western Canon: The
Books and School of the Ages (1994), the whole notion of a crisis in literary-
study is as much a "journalistic event" as a real institutional problem.
To cite a single reason for the current controversy, however, would be
to oversimplify a complex cultural and historical process. It is rather
more convincing to recognize that several probable causes—including
broad institutional changes and material developments, general ideolog-
ical shifts, and specific socioeconomic tendencies—have all converged to
undermine whatever confidence there once was in a singular and vener-
ated literary heritage. Although the increasing political recognition of so-
cial diversity and the consequent revisions of the classroom syllabus are
certainly involved, I argue in the following chapters that they are insuffi-
cient by themselves to have altered the literary canon or broken it up into
a plurality of separate ones. Rather, such academic strategies may be bet-
ter understood as symptoms of other, broader changes affecting modern
capitalist societies. A materialist critique of the specific terms of the con-
temporary debate, including the implicit assumptions and explicit justifi-
cations of recent arguments both for and against "opening" the canon,
will help to disclose what those changes are as well as their ideological
manifestations. Such a critique is developed in Chapter 2.
2
The Contemporary Canon Debate
Cecil Graham.- What is a cynic?

Lord Darlington; A man who hum's the price of everything and the value of
nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an
absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.
—Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Act III
Although speculation about the origins and causes of the current canon
debate has been wide ranging, the arguments within the debate itself
have been more limited. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century,
one aspect of these arguments has been remarkably consistent: The
rhetoric within them has tended to be quite clearly divided between mu-
tually antagonistic positions. On the one hand are conservative critics
who attempt to justify the continuing importance of the Western canon
on the grounds of its permanent greatness and the edification that its
study will yield, either to individuals or to society at large. They perceive
the argument that alternative texts have been undeservedly neglected as
symptomatic of the loss of academic standards and the collapse of aes-
thetic judgment in the face of extrinsic political pressures. On the other
hand, liberal critics argue that the canon should be more representative
of the true diversity of society and the wide span of its cultural heritage,
that the canon should include writers previously excluded from literary
history and the educational institutions of the dominant culture. They
find the reverence accorded the Western canon indicative of elitism, pa-
triarchy, and ethnocentrism, each of which is antithetical to the egalitar-
ian ideals of democratic societies. They have also discredited the asser-
tion that aesthetic judgments or works of literature can ever be totally
aloof from political interests. Although the stalemate between these two
25
26 The Contemporary Canon Debate
positions is familiar, and their opposing arguments might appear to be ir-

reconcilable, what has not been recognized is how much they actually
have in common.
Rather than adopting a middle course between the extremes or at-
tempting to harmonize the opposing views, this chapter demonstrates
the ideological proximity between defenders of the Western canon and
those who would "open" it in the name of diversity or pluralism. A cri-
tique of the range of arguments in the debate will show that, despite their
apparent opposition, several ideological assumptions are shared by lib-
eral and conservative critics alike: Both groups either conceive of the
function of the canon in idealistically aesthetic terms, that is, without suf-
ficient recourse to the historical and material constraints of canon-forma-
tion, or appropriate canonical literature for the purposes of political or
pedagogical pragmatism. In this chapter I highlight the ideological prox-
imity through aii analysis of several foundational assumptions in each of
their respective arguments, including the notion that canons are formed
by means of historical struggle and inter-artistic competition, making
some authors and works more worthy of longevity than others; the idea
that works of literature represent narrowly defined social groups in the
same way that democratic institutions are thought to represent specific
constituencies; and the belief that either preserving or changing the liter-
ary canon will necessarily preserve or change the society in which it
functions. This critique will pave the way for the introduction in Part 2 of
the critical aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin,
which provide a radically historical and materialistic account of canoni-
cal literature that neither liberal-pluralist nor conservative-humanist ar-
guments are able to do on their own terms.
Justifying the Western Canon

Although canonical change has a long and varied history, as shown in
Chapter 1, the latest reaction to canon revision did not begin until the
1980s. One of the earliest arguments came in 1984 from William Bennett,
then-chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, in To
Reclaim a Legacy; A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. As a con-
demnation of the state of liberal arts education in the United States, it
provoked a variety of reactions and counter-reactions attacking and de-
fending its pronouncements.
Bennett's essay mourns "the decline in learning in the humanities,"
caused largely by "a failure of nerve and faith on the part of many college
faculties and administrators." Traditional academic standards and atten-
tion to classic literature have been diluted by the contending pressures of
multicultural and feminist rewritings of literary history, the rise of cul-
The Contemporary Canon Debate 27
tural studies courses, and the retreat of senior faculty members from
teaching general education to professional specialization. In Bennett's
view, what is wanting is adequate "educational leadership," one that in-
stills the virtues and "common culture" of Western civilization, its "last-
ing vision, its highest shared ideals and aspirations, and its heritage." As
a corrective, he advocates a reverential regard for canonical authors—
from Homer and Plato to Twain and Faulkner—because "the highest
purpose of reading is to be in the company of great souls." Bennett also
deplores "the tendency of some humanities professors to present their
subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner," apparently unaware that
the idolatry of canonical works is itself an ideological position. 1
Bennett's understanding of the "great tradition" of "the Western
mind" is such that the value of the canon resides in little more than cul-
tural appreciation. Consequently, it works at the expense of any critical
engagement with canonical works, whose specific content might not sim-
ply affirm the idea of a singular tradition and may even have critical
functions itself, rather than being mystified as spiritually edifying. To the
extent that Bennett's argument takes the works' cultural transmission as
unproblematic and their worth as simply given, it is also unhistorical. As
one of his critics remarks, "in Bennett's view, liberal arts study lost its in-
stitutional legitimacy, intellectual credibility, and pedagogical integrity.
. . . [But] Bennett never examines either the historical development of the
'liberal arts' or the social functions of such forms of study in the past or in
the present; he simply asserts their value." 2 Moreover, Bennett targets
teachers and professional academics as solely responsible for the decline,
without regard to the changing socioeconomic conditions that may have
compelled the very increase in specialization he laments. As will be seen
again and again, the exaggeration of the role of formal education in the
formation of canons is a chronic symptom of the current debate.
Nonetheless, Bennett's observations clearly demonstrate that the ideologi-
cal status of the literary canon—that is, the degree to which it legitimizes
the status quo—has been a central preoccupation in the contemporary
debate, whether denied by its apologists or emphasized by its detractors.
Equally enamored of the purity and virtues of Western civilization is
Lynne Cheney, Bennett's successor as chair of the National Endowment
for the Humanities. In 1988, she published a report entitled Humanities in
America, followed in 1989 by 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Stu-
dents, both of which reiterate Bennett's arguments about the purpose of
the literary canon. Cheney likewise criticizes esoteric scholars who, she
believes, "reduce the study of the humanities to the study of politics, ar-
guing that truth—and beauty and excellence—are not timeless matters,
but transitory notions, devices used by some groups to perpetuate 'he-
gemony' over others." As an alternative, she advocates a sort of populist
humanism, arguing that "what gives [the humanities] their abiding

worth are truths that pass beyond time and circumstance; truths that,
transcending accidents of class, race, and gender, speak to us all." 3 Ch-
eney justifies the study of the canon by appealing to the idea of a singu-
lar, unified tradition. Of all the world's civilizations, she writes, "the one
that has shaped our [American] culture most profoundly arose in the
West." With neither recourse to the actual heterogeneity of "the West"
(or, for that matter, the United States), nor hermeneutic skepticism as to
how, precisely, "enduring human questions" can be gleaned by con-
fronting the "basic landmarks of history," Cheney's proposals for educa-
tional reform would replace historical analysis and critical reflection with
an unthinking consensus. 4
If the pedagogical recommendations and historical assumptions of of-
ficially empowered administrators are at all troubling, then the writings
of various contributors to journals like The New Criterion have pushed the
rhetoric of terminal decline to an extreme. Founded in 1982, The New Cri-
terion continues to publish book reviews and cultural commentaries
mourning the degeneration of traditional art and values in the United
States. Its primary editors, Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, denounce
the "radical assault on cultural life" espoused by left-wing artists, aca-
demics, and intellectuals, whose "liberal fascism" is reflected in the de-
funct policy of affirmative action and the jargon of political correctness,
both of which, they maintain, have become sclerotic and undemocratic.
They believe that academic "radicals," in spite of their professed icono-
clasm, have become "the establishment," against which The New Criterion
provides the voice of reason and sobriety.5
Like Bennett and Cheney, Kramer and Kimball stand in "principled
opposition to the politicization of culture," which they see as promoted
by the "cynical obscurities of deconstruction," the anti-elitist agenda un-
derpinning cultural studies, and the "baleful influence that the social sci-
ences themselves continue to wield [on the humanities] with such devas-
tating results." The arts, they maintain, "have become hostage to
ideology." 6 Blinded by their own polemic, however, they fail to admit the
ideological assumptions behind their own posturing: According to them,
all other accounts and criticisms of the arts are ideological; theirs alone
remains pure. Of course, a monolithic and unpolitical idea of tradition is
itself subject to criticism, especially when it is recalled that canon forma-
tion has been a dynamic and political process throughout history, which
makes the claim of rescuing the arts and humanities/rom politics and ide-
ology misconceived, if not futile. It is by now a truism of literary theory
that all texts arise within a political context and therefore inevitably har-
bor some political content—whether explicit or implicit-—even despite
the specific intentions of their authors. Nevertheless, James Tuttleton, an-
other contributor to The New Criterion, denies this as "a point of view that
only an activist political ideologue of some stripe could hold," while in
the same breath commending the supposedly apolitical innocence of
canonical figures such as Shakespeare, Milton, T. S. Eliot, and Ralph Elli-
son—as if Henry V, Paradise Lost, The Waste Land, or Invisible Man were
without political content! 7
To keep politics out of the study of the arts and humanities, to preserve
the canon untarnished by the corrupting influence of latter-day theoreti-
cal fashions, Kramer and Kimball advocate treating the arts "on their
own terms, according to aesthetic rather than political criteria." Kramer
in particular argues that "art must be defended and pursued and relished
for what it is rather than as a political instrument in the service of some
other cause." However, in defining what art is, he offers only vague plat-
itudes: "a source of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment... a special
form of pleasure and moral elevation . . . a spur to the highest reaches of
human aspiration." 8 The inadequacy of these criteria is thrown into relief
when they are applied to some of the most canonical literature of the
modern age. For example, it would be difficult to reconcile Crime and
Punishment, A Season in Hell, or In the Penal Colony with Kramer's "inspi-
rational" values. Indeed, to do so would be antithetical to their specific
content, in which humanistic beliefs are themselves seriously questioned,
if not undermined. Even so, it must be appreciated that arguments for
preserving the autonomy of art from explicit politics are not exclusive to
humanists alone. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School also main-
tains the importance of aesthetic autonomy, albeit on totally different
grounds and for completely different purposes (see Part 2). Yet the appar-
ent likeness in this regard of both left- and right-wing critics, particularly
regarding the Literary canon, reveals the specific historical and material
conditions that have coincided with the current debate, such that both
may be reacting to the same socioeconomic tendencies. What distin-
guishes their arguments, however, is whether those tendencies are de-
scribed simply in terms of declining academic standards or as sympto-
matic of wider historical, institutional, and materialistic conditions of
modern capitalist society.
Apart from denying the political aspects of works of literature and lit-
erary evaluation, the arguments exemplified by Bennett, Cheney, and the
contributors to The Neiv Criterion view the Western canon to be histori-
cally transcendent. But other arguments in defense of that canon have
developed into fully formed theories that allow for a degree of historical
contingency. Superficially, Harold Bloom's elegiac account of the fate of
the canon may appear to share the dubious assumptions of conservative
humanism. His best-selling book, The Western Canon (1994), is an explicit
reaction to left-wing literary critics, whom he collectively brands "the
School of Resentment." It offers an extended reflection upon Bloom's

personal canon, comprising twenty-six novelists and poets, with Shake-
speare at its center (approximately 800 more writers also deemed canoni-
cal, or at least having the potential to become so, are listed in the appen-
dices). Like Bennett or Kimball, Bloom promotes the cultural monuments
of the Western tradition and condemns the reduction of aesthetics to ide-
ology, against which he urges a "stubborn resistance" to preserve litera-
ture "as fully and purely as possible." He believes that "we are destroy-
ing all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social
sciences, in the name of social justice," even though the Western canon
exists "precisely in order to impose limits, to set a standard of measure-
ment that is anything but political or moral." 9
Here, however, Bloom differs markedly from the humanists insofar as
he denies that the canon stands pragmatically as a moral exemplar or ed-
ucational guide to the heights of human achievement: "Whatever the
Canon is, it is not a program for social salvation," because reading
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, or Tolstoy "is not going to make us better
citizens." 10 From the start, therefore, Bloom wants to distance himself
from both cultural moralists and the politics of the debate as a whole:
I am not concerned . .. with the current debate between the right-wing de-
fenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexis-
tent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network . . . who wish to
overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent)
programs for social change."
Such hermetic aloofness, however, is itself indicative of Bloom's own pe-

culiar conception of aesthetics, as well as of its unspoken ideological
premises.
Bloom concedes that the canon is never really a stable structure. How-
ever, although it is in constant historical flux, it cannot be simply forced
open. Because no canon of secular literature is ever closed, what is now
described as "opening up the canon," he argues, is simply redundant.
Nor can the canon be prescribed too specifically, since it exists more as an
ideal than as a fixed entity. The historical instability and indefiniteness of
the canon leads Bloom to develop his own theory of canon formation.
Faithful to the classical idea of kanon and its function, Bloom situates the
literary canon firmly in the realm of the arts: "The deepest truth about
secular canon-formation is that it is performed by neither critics nor
academies, let alone politicians. Writers, artists, composers themselves
determine canons, by bridging between strong precursors and strong
successors." 12 In his account, competition is intrinsic to the arts, and the
"intercanonical" influence between, or "ongoing contest" among, writers
is the fundamental basis of all canonization. Indeed, there can be no

"strong, canonical writing" without the process of literary influence. 13
The idea of literary "strength" enters Bloom's formula of canonicity be-
cause he believes that interartistic influence and competition throughout
history are the key to canonical greatness. The agon—ancient Greek for
struggle or contest-—between strong writers inspires the highest aesthetic
achievement because, as Bloom puts it, "the aesthetic and the agonistic
are one." Thus, literary history is neither a narration of self-begotten au-
thors nor an illustration of innocent artistic borrowings: "Tradition is not
only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a con-
flict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is lit-
erary survival or canonical inclusion." 14 In short, canon formation is the
result of artistic strife, not of gradual accretion or humanistic inspiration.
Bloom's theory, however, underestimates the historical development
of literature as a specialized form of artistic production with its own so-
cial determinants, including levels of literacy, access to materials, and the
necessity of publication. The very argument for isolating the arts from
their socioeconomic context is itself an historical development, dating
back through fin de siecle aesthetieism (I'art pour I'art) at least as far as
nineteenth-century Romanticism and the "cult of genius" in the late eigh-
teenth century. By adhering to an absolute "autonomy of the aesthetic"
and deriding the "flight from or repression of the aesthetic" in current lit-
erary criticism, Bloom betrays his own aesthetic idealism, treating liter-
ary production in an historical and material vacuum. Consequently, he
oversimplifies the theoretical contributions of new historicism and Marx-
ism, as well as categories such as "cultural capital," each of which has il-
luminated various factors involved in canon formation, including its
socioeconomic conditions. 15
Moreover, Bloom's theory about the historical agon between writers
and artists, or between readers and canonical texts, is so individualistic
that his conception of the aesthetic amounts to little more than solipsistic
pathos. For example: "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"; "the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ulti-
mately reads writh one aim only: to confront greatness." 16 Ironically,
Bloom confesses that all his "passionate proclamations of the isolated
selfhood's aesthetic value are necessarily qualified by the reminder that
the leisure for meditation must be purchased from the community." 17
Given his impatience with the idea that social, political, and economic
factors impinge upon literature, canon formation, and aesthetic value per
se, this remark is more than a little self-contradictory. Bloom's definition
of the individual as wholly "against society" is therefore entirely in keep-
ing with his "agonistic" aesthetic theory and its unspoken political sup-
positions. The belief that the aesthetic is "an individual rather than a soci-
etal concern" simultaneously negates its social import and obscures the
institutional and material means by which the literary canon is repro-
duced. (Both ideas are taken up in the following chapters of this book.)
The relentless use of expressions such as the "competition" and "con-
flict" between writers, the "struggle" and "survival" of texts, or the "in-
dividual enterprise" and "self-reliance" of authors perhaps best discloses
Bloom's ideological assumptions.
Whereas Bloom resigns himself to an isolated individualism, another
prominent literary critic considers the functions of literature much more
broadly. Indeed, fewr critics have reflected so thoroughly upon canons
and canon formation as Frank Kermode. In several books and articles,
he has examined a variety of means by which certain works of art and
literature become socially sanctioned as canonical, including the histori-
cal and institutional ones that the critics discussed so far invariably
omit. More nuanced than Bloom and more open-minded than Bennett or
Kramer, Kermode admits of an element of contingency and even fortu-
itousness in the formation of canons (his use of the plural alone dis-
tances him from their narrow singularity). In his most detailed account
of canon formation, Forms of Attention (1985), Kermode maintains that
the reputation of artists and books is initially made according to a con-
fluence of judgments of "mere opinion," but only when their esteem be-
comes institutionally validated as knowledge by academic professionals
do they become canonical. Although he ackiiow ledges the difficulty of
sharply distinguishing knowledge from opinion, the important insight
here is the recognition that works of art are subject to social and institu-
tional confirmation:
In thinking about canonicity in the history of the arts and literature, we have
at once to reflect that our canons have never been impermeable; that our de-
fenses of them are always . .. provisional. .. . Canons . . . are of course de-
constructible; if people think there should not be such things, they may very
well find the means to destroy them. . . . [T]he idea of tradition has never
been so weak as it now is, the sense of a literary past less strong.'8
Kermode, however, avoids resignation, adding that "canonicity still

seems an important preservative and, though under repeated attack, still
potent." 19 Its import hinges on its practical necessity.
Like the concepts of artistic movements and literary genres, Kermode
finds that the concepts of canons arid historical periods are distinct but
interrelated tools with which the past is organized. They are needed for
describing, understanding, and reconstructing history, literary or other-
wise. Because "we haven't enough memory to process everything," he
writes, "canons are useful in that they enable us to handle otherwise un-
manageable historical deposits. They do this by affirming that some
works are more valuable than others, more worthy of minute atten-
tion." 20 Unlike the humanist critics, Kermode does not naively presup-
pose the ideological innocence of canons or what they represent; he is
merely making the case for their inevitability, whatever their particular
political content.
And whether one thinks of canons as objectionable because formed at ran-

dom or to serve some interests at the expense of others, or whether one sup-
poses that the contents of canons are providentially chosen, there can be no
doubt that we have not found ways of ordering our thoughts about the his-
tory of literature and art without recourse to them. That is why the minori-
ties who want to be rid of what they regard as a reactionary canon can think
of no way of doing so without putting a radical one in its place.21
However, the extent to which the pragmatic utility of canons may itself
be an ideological assumption is not considered by Kermode.
Books held to belong to the canon are granted not only high value, but
"an almost rabbinical minuteness of comment and speculation"—"every
word, every letter, is subject to minute commentary." 22 Kermode argues
that constant textual attention, particularly scholastic attention, is the
most fundamental mode of canonical preservation, and that only inter-
pretation maintains the life of a work of art from one generation to an-
other. Whether or not this adequately explains the means of canonical
longevity, it says little by itself about why certain works more than others
attract such attention or how they are singled out for scrutiny in the first
place. Kermode does propose one reason. He suggests that there will al-
ways be more and new things to say about canonical works. Indeed,
"this is what it means to call a book canonical." From artists to lay read-
ers, professional critics to academic expositors, "all grant to the text
something like omnisignificance, all have canons of interpretation that
are permissive rather than restrictive." 23 This is not simply a matter of an
individual reader's open-mindedness or creativity. Rather, it is assumed
to be a quality inherent to the canonical text itself: "the book is a world,
capable of being exfoliated into a universe." 24 Interpretive possibility is
believed to be endless, if not without constraint, since Kermode does not
believe that anything at all may be said of a work, even a canonical one.
The limitations of interpretation, he argues, are imposed by earlier inter-
pretations: "all our interpretations depend in some measure on historical
interpretations; of these some survive and some do not . .. and commu-
nities maintain, with indefinite but quite powerful criteria, some [inter-
pretations] and not others." 25 Nevertheless, Kermode finds that canonical
works have "an inexhaustible potential of meaning," that they are "full
of senses only partly available to any previous reading"; interpretations
"constantly change though their source remains unchangeable." 26
Taking the example of Hamlet, which he regards as "unshakably
canonical," Kermode demonstrates how Shakespeare's play offers inter-
preters the possibility of saying an incredibly wide range of things about
it. He explains that the general shift in exegetical priorities, from the em-
phasis on dramatic character in nineteenth-century readings of Hamlet,
to an emphasis on "the actual language of the play, its very texture" in
those of the twentieth, is indicative of Hamlet's flexibility, its openness to
interpretive appropriation. To fit the changing needs and interests of dif-
ferent generations, "there must be new appraisals, and they will be pos-
sible only so long as new relations, new adjustments of centre and mar-
gin, are perceived in the play and given licit expression in commentary."
In short, "the canonical work, so endlessly discussed, must be assumed
to have permanent value and, which is really the same thing, perpetual
modernity." 27
Unlike Bloom and others, therefore, Kermode recognizes that interpre-
tation does not occur in a social vacuum as a solitary, individualistic en-
terprise. As he writes in "The Institutional Control of Interpretation,"
valid interpretations depend on the sanction of certain social institutions,
a professional community with the authority, though not undisputed, to
define a subject, impose valuations, and validate interpretations. Indeed,
the very definition of what it is to be canonical itself involves interpreta-
tion. Kermode locates such authority and relative consensus specifically
within the academic community, in universities, colleges, and other asso-
ciations of higher learning. So the question of which works are accredited
as canonical is determined largely by the "tacit knowledge" of academic
professionals and, less directly, by the control of appointments and the
awarding of degrees. 28
Just as he admits of historical changes in what constitutes the canon,
Kermode links them to corresponding changes in the institution of criti-
cism: "The intrusion of new work into the canon usually involves some
change in the common wisdom of the institution as to permissible
hermeneutic procedures." But in terms of radical innovations within the
academy-—even those that aim to unsettle or discredit institutional au-
thority (Kermode cites as examples the influence of Barthes, Lacan, Der-
rida, and Foucault)—the institution is expected "to contain or control"
them. To Kermode, this is easily done because such radical forms of criti-
cism are "not, in the end, subversive at all" and because there is an "un-
derlying continuity," he believes, between such criticism and the "tradi-
tional modes" of interpretation from which they try to distinguish
themselves. Thus, even anti-canonical criticism ends up merely lending
canonical texts "another span of life," adding another chapter to the his-
tory of their interpretation. 29 If this were all that radical literary criticism
amounts to, it would be a troubling thought indeed to more than a few of
its practitioners.
In the process of attempting to explain the relation between canonical
and institutional "change," therefore, Kermode actually minimizes the
possibility of any substantial change at all. He does this by discounting
the radical critiques of social institutions that post-structuralist or Marx-
ist theories have offered. He is not troubled by the "necessary conser-
vatism" of learned institutions because, he believes, "it is by recognizing
the tacit authority of the institution that we achieve the measure of lib-
erty we have in interpreting. It is a price to pay, but it purchases an incal-
culable boon." 30 Elsewhere, he declares that "there must be institutional
control of interpretation," and that all institutions "are bound to be reac-
tionary in some sense." While remaining open to the possibility of new
canons to suit, for example, feminists, African Americans, or Derrideans,
Kermode believes that truly "revolutionary revisions would require
transfers of powers" and "a reign of literary terror." He concludes that
"absolute justice arid perfection of conscience are unlikely to be more
available under that new dispensation than they are now." 31 Ultimately,
therefore, Kermode betrays himself as an apologist for the status quo,
keeping the institutions that he believes are responsible for sustaining the
canon intact, so as to avoid what he believes would only be worse—and
apparently destructive—alternatives.
Before leaving Kermode's account of canon formation, a few of the
methodological assumptions and political implications underlying it
need to be examined. First, in direct contrast to Bloom, he takes for
granted that the responsibility for shaping and perpetuating canons falls
squarely on the academic establishment. However, such academicism
disregards the wider social, institutional, and historical factors that also
affect canonization, factors that are explored in Chapter 3. Although
Kermode recognizes and describes changing interpretative values—as
read out of, or projected upon, canonical works—his partiality for the
academic severely limits an explanation of the social, historical, or eco-
nomic rationale that helps to determine such changes, that is, one that
might explain why critical emphasis fell upon the characters of Hamlet in
the nineteenth century but moved to the actual language of the play in
the twentieth.
Second, the idea of inexhaustible interpretive potential, "omnisignifi-
cance," or timeless modernity is also vulnerable to criticism. If a close read-
ing of canonical works is thought to yield greater depth or ambiguity,
metaphorical complexity, or varied allusions than a reading of other texts,
Kermode does not make it clear on what grounds, methodologically, the
distinction is to be determined. How exactly is the richness of canonical

versus non-canonical texts to be compared or quantified? Moreover, the
perpetual modernity of canonical literature means little more than con-
stant contemporaneity in Kermode's account. As long as the interpretation
of canonical works has been ratified by academic institutions (i.e., con-
verted from mere opinion into "knowledge"), canonical works will remain
relevant and are therefore condoned. However, this argument ignores the
extent to which academic institutions may have an interest in sustaining
certain hermeneutical categories that are less threatening to the status quo
(and, conversely, proscribing interpretations that are deemed too radical,
as Kermode himself suggests). It also neglects the degree to which the spe-
cific content of the works themselves might challenge such institutional
complacency, as in the case (at least in principle) of avant-gardism.
Finally, both for viewing canons as practical necessities with which to
organize history and for suggesting that they survive only if constantly
made relevant to contemporary interests, Kermode's explanation of the
value of canonical works is ultimately utilitarian, an instrumental justifi-
cation that obscures what other, non-instrumental roles canonical works
of art may have. Insofar as works of art, particularly in modernity, are not
strictly functional and may even be antithetical to useful application—
whether pedagogical, practical, or political—their utility is questionable.
In this regard, Kermode's pragmatism is not far from many of the argu-
ments for opening the canon to greater cultural diversity.
To summarize the arguments so far, humanists such as Bennett, Ch-
eney, Kimball, and Kramer take the Western canon to be irreproachable
and to exemplify the social and moral virtues of Western civilization. By
contrast, to Harold Bloom the canon confirms an individualistic, socially
insulated sphere of private aesthetic experience by remaining aloof from
all social concerns. To Kermode, the canon changes incrementally over
time, but only by the authority vested in the institutional powers that be,
even though such change may work at the cost of engaging critically
with canonical works that might provide a radical challenge to authority.
In spite of these differences, however, their common concern is to justify
the canon as it stands by keeping it beyond all political concerns—liberal
or radical, explicit or otherwise. But in a practical sense, their anxieties
about the fate of the Western canon may well prove to be exaggerated, es-
pecially if the perceived threat from political ideologues and liberal plu-
ralists turns out to be less serious than feared and even closer to their
own positions than they would suspect.
Opening the Canon

Although the justifications for a traditional, Western literary canon re-
viewed so far span from unhistorical humanism to aesthetic idealism to
pedagogical pragmatism, the range of liberal arguments for opening the

canon is broader still. Given the often alarmist tone of the traditionalists, it
is unsurprising that the rhetoric of the liberals has been prone to overreac-
tion, especially in the early years of the contemporary debate, when theo-
retical discussions of the nature of canon formation were relatively scarce.
Although political arguments for fundamental curricular reform in the
United States go back at least as far as the 1960s, stemming in part from the
Civil Rights movement, they were not initially or explicitly concerned with
the literary canon as such. The phrase "opening the canon" seems to have
been coined in 1979, and the first large Modern Languages Association fo-
rum that explicitly made the canon an issue was not organized until 1982.32
Since that time, the comparative absence of literature by women, racial
or ethnic minorities, non-Western writers, homosexuals, and the working
classes from literary anthologies, histories, and course syllabi has tended
to arouse a certain indignation over the very idea of a canon. For exam-
ple, George McFadden claims that "the establishment of a privileged
canon is repugnant in itself; it promotes elitism, ethnocentrism, and sur-
render to the institutional machine." Paul Lauter asserts that the literary
canon is simply "a means by which culture validates social power" and
that it has invariably worked to the "progressive exclusion" of literature
by women and ethnic minorities. To Lillian Robinson, the "nature of the
existing canon" is "fundamentally elite" and must therefore be chal-
lenged. 33 It is believed that opening the canon will redress its imbalances
and render it more democratic by making it more accurately representa-
tive of true social diversity. However, the proposed means by which this
could or should be done are often insufficiently articulated and theoreti-
cally underdeveloped.
The premise that the canon is essentially elitist and actively exclusive is
sometimes taken for granted or simply asserted, rather than scrutinized.
There is a tendency to caricature the literary canon throughout history as
largely comprising "dead, white, European males." Ironically, such
rhetorical shorthand itself homogenizes the canon as much as the hu-
manist arguments for a singular Western culture have done. The new
critical orthodoxy is that factors such as the race, class, gender, or sexual
orientation of authors are not only essential to the content of literature
but also determine whatever esteem a work acquires by appealing to cer-
tain socially arid institutionally empowered groups that share those iden-
tifying characteristics. A sort of conspiracy theory arises as to how "the
Great Tradition" is created and maintained, which must now be de-
mythologized to expose the latent social interests that it is thought to
serve. Because it has been politically constructed, the canon must now be
politically deconstructed.
As much as the Western canon has been depicted as internally homo-
geneous, it has also been argued that the canon actively homogenizes so-
cial diversity by overlooking—if not erasing—the existence of disenfran-

chised communities, their distinctive histories, and the cultural diversity
of the society in which they live. So Robert Weimann asks,
What else is the projection of a canon, if not—in the language of poststrue-

turalism—the attempt to homogenize discursive space, to suppress disconti-
nuity in favor of some stabilizing hierarchy, to assert some transcendental
signified, some unexamined authority such as "order" or, as obvious alter-
natives, "experience," or "human nature"? And is not, then, this type of au-
thority easily used as some universalizing tool of obliteration, expropria-
tion, and exclusion?-1*
Or, as Jan Gorak has summarized in The Making of the Modern Canon:
It is asserted that the modern canon exists only in order to conserve existing
institutional practices and definitions; that it requires teachers of the human-
ities to transmit time-honoured platitudes; that it favours a privileged set of
writings that alone constitute "literature," while conspiring to conceal the
way those writings become the basis for the curriculum; and that it com-
pounds these sins of omission and commission by employing methods of
reading that remove favoured authors and texts from processes of struggle
and conflict.33
Although doubtless true of some reactionary arguments used to justify a

traditional, Western canon, as shown above, it is unclear whether such
social consequences are indeed inevitable, or that canonical works cannot
also have critical, as much as ideological, potential.
Ultimately, an underlying yet problematic assumption persists of a cor-
respondence between the interests of the author and the values of the so-
cial group he or she is thought to represent. A great number of studies
presume such a relation and therefore attempt either to expose the com-
plicity of specific canonical works with the status quo, to prescribe alter-
native texts to "counterbalance" the canon by appealing to distinct aes-
thetic criteria and cultural traditions, or both. 36 For example, Bruce
Franklin suggests that the study of literature has been "primarily a
means for students to become acculrurated into the class to which they
aspire." He therefore urges teachers and professors to resist using it for
"subtly propagandizing" their own class interests. 37 Similarly, in a brief
analysis of modern literary canon formation, Richard Ohmann finds the
ideology of bourgeois individualism operating in many of the most es-
teemed works of late twentieth-century American literature, such as the
novels of Sylvia Plath, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow. The publishing in-
dustry, too, insofar as it is saturated with the values of the professional-
managerial class, influences the reputation and esteem of chosen works.
Periodicals like the Neu> York Times Book Review, for instance, inadver-
tently reinforce the values that certain books are thought to represent by
encouraging their success with favorable reviews. 38 More than simply ex-
plaining the process that leads to mass readership for relatively few
books each year, Ohmann argues that publishers and periodicals affect
the canon of "serious" literature as well. By reaching the majority of
America's elite intellectuals, he writes,
a major Times review could help put a novel on the cultural agenda and in-
sure that other journals would have to take it seriously. . . . If a novel was
certified in the court of the prestigious journals, it was likely to draw the at-
tention of critics in more specialized and academic journals . . . and by this
route make its way into college curricula, where the very context.. . gave it
de facto recognition as literature.3'*
Like Kermode, then, Ohmann ultimately turns to academia as the final

arbiter of canonical status.
Other studies have similarly sought to expose the concealed, and
specifically conservative, interests behind canonical authors and works.
Among the more celebrated is Jane Tompkins's thesis of the manufacture
and maintenance of Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation, which discloses
his connections with prominent New England publishers, politicians,
and reviewers, both contemporary and over successive generations. Ar-
guing that "the reputation of a classic author arises not from the intrinsic
merit of his or her work, but rather from the complex of circumstances
that make texts visible initially and then maintain them in their preemi-
nent position," she takes Hawthorne and his books to represent the class
interests of an American "dynastic cultural elite" that came to identify it-
self with him and his works. Thus, "Hawthorne's canonization was the
result of a network of common interests—familial, social, professional,
commercial, and national—that, combined, made Hawthorne a literary
and cultural artifact, a national possession." 40 Although, like Franklin
and Ohmann, she can be criticized for too neatly equating the ideological
values of a canonical author and his or her works with the presumed val-
ues of a particular social group or class, Tompkins denies that hers is a
crude conspiracy theory, claiming that "a literary reputation could never
be anything but a political matter." 41 Nevertheless, her conception of
what exactly is political about the reputation of a canonical author is it-
self subject to criticism to the extent that it promotes a theory of canon
formation based on interest group politics and the modern liberal ideol-
ogy of which that politics is a part (see below).
Arguments such as these perceive few functions of canonical literature
beyond propaganda in the service of narrowly defined social interests.
As a consequence, their proponents do not sufficiently consider whether
w The Contemporary Canon Debate
some aspects of particular works might not immediately or evidently

serve the status quo, or indeed whether other aspects may even serve the
critical purposes in which they are interested. The implication is that
those books left unpromoted by the publishing industry or academic in-
stitutions are likely to be freer of ideological liabilities because their polit-
ical unorthodoxy is taken as the reason for their exclusion. In some de-
gree, however, "the ideological burden of canon-formation," as John
Guillory has described it, may be inescapable, even if it is not obvious. 42
Contrary to reactionary fears, academic critics generally seem to be
more interested in reading the canon differently than in adding to or sub-
tracting from it. A common method for doing so has been to situate
canonical works in their historical contexts, often by studying them in
tandem with other, comparatively neglected contemporary works. For
example, Charlotte Pierce-Baker urges what she calls "a new narrative
quilting of voices" in the teaching of literature, so as to "validate and val-
orize understudied authors and literatures simultaneously with tradi-
tional ones that we all know." She encourages historical, "ensemble"
analyses and believes that pairing books from within and without the
canon is more fruitful than studying canonical works in isolation. Her ex-
amples couple lane Eyre with the contemporaneous Incidents in the Life of
a Slave Girl, and The Great Gatsby with Their Eyes Were Watching God.43
Paul Lauter likewise argues that "the best lens" for reading the tradi-
tional canon is provided by "noncanonical works," which "teach us how
to view experience through the prisms of gender, race, nationality, and
other forms of marginalization." Indeed, the sheer variety of texts stud-
ied, he believes, will provide a "more comprehensive view" of the cul-
tural issues and circumstances of a given period. 44 Toni Morrison also be-
lieves that extending the study of American literature into "a wider
landscape"—one that includes racial questions as an essential compo-
nent of canon-formation—will render that literature "a much more com-
plex and rewarding body of knowledge." 45 And, with particular atten-
tion to English Romantic poets, Marilyn Butler suggests that those who
have been "installed as canonical look more interesting individually, and
far more understandable as groups, when we restore some of their lost
peers." Instead of narrowly studying in succession "the old thin line of
national heroes" that have made up the canon of English literature, she
believes that historicizing them would be "richer and more credible." 46
Rather than simply debunking the traditional canon, then, these pro-
posals aim to nurture a critical sensibility responsive to cultural plural-
ism and more conscious of a literary work's social and historical context.
Although commendable as far as they go, these proposals do not address
several practical and theoretical difficulties. If alternative texts are se-
lected on the basis of the identity of their authors, then certain additional
criteria—such as aesthetic criteria—have to be employed at some point to

decide which particular works from the vast range of alternatives should
finally supplement canonical ones. The fact of previous neglect is insuffi-
cient justification by itself, because, for example, any number of female
authors have been forgotten, but surely not every one of them can now
be taken as canonical. Nor is it evident that the study of a variety of
roughly contemporaneous texts necessarily translates into "more com-
prehensive" knowledge. Indeed, whether exposure to sheer literary vari-
ety alone—especially if confined to contemporaneous works—amounts
to either greater comprehensiveness or critical understanding is debat-
able. It may turn out that the American "landscape" of race in literature is
not, in fact, a very wide terrain of critical inquiry but rather a limited ide-
ological horizon in itself. Because the arguments often appeal to the idea
of historical accuracy, the question is raised as to what sort of historicism
would best serve critical knowledge, an issue that is analyzed in Chapter
5 with specific reference to new historicism. Moreover, the alternative se-
lections are often already regarded as estimable literature, that is, institu-
tionally endorsed anyway; but even if they are not, the textual or critical
alternatives are understood largely in relation to the existing canon and
therefore risk remaining subordinate to it, rather than being equally valu-
able or of comparable interest. Finally, in the pedagogical terms in which
these prescriptions are made, it is doubtful whether much more is actu-
ally changed than literary anthologies, histories, or syllabi. Without a
conception of the canon that goes beyond the schools and takes into ac-
count the broad historical development of social relations, institutional
structures, and the material conditions of artistic production, such rec-
ommendations will be politically limited, and even deceptive.
In addition to the strategy of enlarging the canon with exemplary but
hitherto neglected works of literature, there are also arguments for open-
ing the canon to once-popular texts by apportioning them a degree of
critical exegesis normally reserved for works of "high" culture or those
that have historically been viewed as "Literature" proper. For instance,
Morris Dickstein suggests that, in comparison with the canon, little atten-
tion has been paid to popular ctilture and works on the margin "between
high and popular art," works that intrinsically "bring into question the
hierarchical basis of the canon itself." In an effort to define a more plural-
istic version of literary history, he studies the influence of Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe—"perhaps the most famous book of the eighteenth cen-
tury"—alongside Matthew Lewis's Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), which
was also "immensely popular" in its time, although it has only lately be-
gun to attract serious critical attention. 47 To demonstrate and help redress
the exclusion of female writers from the canon, Nina Baym likewise ap-
peals to the criterion of popularity in the cases of Susannah Rowson and
E. D. E, N. Southworth, two of the most "widely read" American novel-

ists of the nineteenth century.48 One of the most conspicuous cases of the
academic neglect of a popular novel is that of Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose
canonical status many critics have asserted, not only for its tremendous
popularity, but also for its political impact in the nineteenth century,
Of course, popularity alone does not provide sufficient grounds for
canonization, otherwise every work that had once been popular could be
regarded as "canonical." Therefore, critics have either applied the cus-
tomary tools of academic criticism to popular literature (e.g., Dickstein),
or devised different criteria to justify the inclusion of popular works that
had failed to follow earlier conventions. Tompkins provides a clear ex-
ample of the latter strategy. To justify why Uncle Tom's Cabin ought to be
as canonical as any of the novels by Hawthorne or Melville, she appeals
to a set of aesthetic criteria distinct from what she takes to be the gen-
dered and elitist values of aesthetic modernism. For Tompkins, "the
work of sentimental writers is complex and significant in ways other than
those which characterize the established masterpieces," and she urges
that "we can and should set aside the modernist prejudices that consign
this work to oblivion." 49 To evaluate Stowe's work effectively, modernist
aesthetic standards of judgment such as abstractness, intricacy, and polit-
ical aloofness need to be replaced by sentimentality, domesticity, popu-
larity, and political effectiveness. Analogously, Lauter makes a case that
certain common categories of historical periodization in American liter-
ary history, such as "Puritanism" or the nineteenth-century "Frontier
Spirit," have helped to produce "a distorted canon" that is exclusive, un-
representative, and historically inaccurate. In contrast, he believes that
different thematic classifications like colonization/decolonization, ur-
banization, and what he calls "the color line" would make the canon and
an understanding of American literature "inclusive and explanatory in-
stead of narrowing and arbitrary." 50 Such alternative criteria would force
a complete revision of the canon and the terms in which individual
works are evaluated.
Doubts, however, can be cast on whether different evaluative criteria
or organizational categories would really be any less narrow, arbitrary, or
exclusive than those they are intended to displace. Arguments that at-
tempt simultaneously to delegitimize specific aesthetic qualities or
canonical authors (e.g., modernist) and canonize others (e.g., female, mi-
nority, a n d / o r popular) on different grounds (e.g., historical accuracy, so-
cial representation, political effectiveness) are logically flawed. As Guil-
lory has shown, to supplant one set of texts, or one set of evaluative
criteria, for another cannot be sustained as a means for creating a more
democratically inclusive canon because, having already deconstructed or
historicized the claims to aesthetic merit of the hitherto canonical, any al-
tentative canon becomes equally subject to criticism.51 Such strategies are

ultimately self-contradictory, devising new terms of exclusion in the
guise of historical accuracy or social justice. Furthermore, the assumption
that certain criteria, like those taken to be uniquely modernist, derive
from simple prejudice or automatically bar some works while valorizing
others, is also problematic. To assert that allegedly non-modernist quali-
ties are comparatively innocent of "prejudice" is a disingenuous way of
suggesting that those qualities are themselves beyond social construction
or political bias. Conversely, the assumption that modernist qualities like
abstractness or formal intricacy are either inherent to particular texts or
solely beneficial to specific social groups is tautological, unhistorical, and
itself exclusive. It is an assumption that prejudges canonical works on the
basis of predetermined social categorizations and discounts the possibil-
ity that such qualities may also be found in works traditionally regarded
as non-canonical, including sentimental novels and other popular litera-
ture. The claim that certain aesthetic properties have necessarily ex-
cluded popular wrorks from the canon ignores the degree to which those
properties have themselves been historically determined by material cir-
cumstances, rather than being arbitrary—a crucial point that is more
fully discussed in Part 2. Like the weakness of Kermode's theory in ex-
plaining the historical shift in interpreting Hamlet, the claim that popular
works have been excluded from the canon on aesthetic grounds fails to
grapple with the reasons why those properties may have become stan-
dards of judgment. When critics like Tompkins advocate "setting aside"
modernist prejudices, as if overcoming modernity were simply a matter
of willpower, they betray their own unhistorical idealism.
Although the mere popularity of a work is a suspect criterion for can-
onization, equally common and no less problematic are explicitly utilitar-
ian, political justifications for inclusion in the canon. In Against Literature,
John Beverley makes a case as to why the Latin American testimonio is a
valid, but relatively neglected, literary genre. Because of its direct politi-
cal commitment, he believes, the testimonio fails to conform to the bour-
geois, colonial tradition of European literature since the fifteenth century,
within which direct political intervention in contemporary affairs has
rarely been a measure of literary merit. By contrast, Beverley argues, a
work like /, Rigoberta Menchu (1983) has been politically effective, not
only for contributing to the struggle for liberation in contemporary
Guatemala, but also because it challenges the cultural authority of litera-
ture itself:
Rigoberta Menchu uses the testimonio as a form of literature without sub-

scribing to a humanist ideology of the literary, or . .. without abandoning
her identity and role as an Indian activist to become a professional writer.
. . . The aversion or ambivalence of the testimonio toward literature sug-

gests that cultural democratization must involve not only changes in what
counts as literature, but also that literature itself . . . may in the process lose
its centrality and authority as a cultural practice. Where literature in Latin
America has been (mainly) a vehicle for engendering an adult, white, male,
patriarchal, "lettered" subject, testimonio allows for the emergence—albeit
mediated—of subaltern female, gay, indigenous, proletarian, and other
identities.52
The implications for the literary canon are obvious: If active intervention
in contemporary politics were the primary grounds of literary evalua-
tion, perhaps very little of the Western canon would remain intact.
Underlying this type of argument is an assumption that the content of
bourgeois European literature is not, or cannot be, as political or radically
significant as the explicitly political content of post-colonial works like
testimonies. It is not even considered whether testimonies might have cer-
tain ideological tendencies themselves, including the disguise of their
own mediations by affecting immediacy. (Beverley's passing admission
of Latin American literature being mediated is more subterfuge than crit-
ical analysis.) Ultimately, arguments like his construct a false dichotomy
between politically effective, committed literature and that which is de-
tached, "humanistic," and therefore supposedly inert, even though the
boundaries of the two can be much more porous, as discussed in Chapter
4. Moreover, transforming the canon on the grounds of political recogni-
tion, representation, or effect also has other ideological consequences.
Representation and Pragmatism

The preceding criticisms reveal a variety of methodological problems
with the specific grounds for opening the canon, but there is a common
rationale underlying nearly all of them: the modern discourse of plural-
ism that is rooted in the tradition of political liberalism, including its
foundational suppositions regarding social representation and political
praxis. But the assumptions of liberal pluralism itself are vulnerable to
critique, especially when applied to literature and the presumed func-
tions of art in general. Since the claims of the contemporary debate have
been made in explicitly political terms, the actual or would-be results of
opening the canon must be politically assessed as well.
That canons are formed because they allow communities to define
themselves remains a pervasive belief in the current debate. However,
this axiom neither clarifies exactly what constitutes a "community" in the
instance of literature nor admits of its irreducible heterogeneity. In addi-
tion, the presumption of self-definition is politically oblivious and mysti-
fying, neglecting the variety of socioeconomic, historical, and institu-

tional constraints on such autonomy. Attempts to revise the canon (or, at
least, the syllabus) by appeal to the self-representation of social commu-
nities caii be deceptive. For instance, in Loose Canons, Henry Louis Gates
writes that, in the traditional Western canon,
no women or people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or rep-
resentation of their images, or hear the resonances of their cultural voices.
The return of "the" canon, the high canon of Western masterpieces, repre-
sents the return of an order in which my people [i.e., African-Americans]
were the subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible, the unrepresented, and the
unrepresentable.53
Rather than limit his argument to the idea of communal autonomy alone,
Gates makes the further suggestion that the reflection of racial and gen-
der identity is a condition for political agency and social change.
Just how effective or comprehensive such change has been or can be
when superimposed on literary history, however, remains to be seen. It is
claimed that marginalized groups especially benefit from symbolic repre-
sentation by giving them voice where they had none before, but it may
also have inadvertent consequences as far as it leaves untouched the re-
production of social relations, the economy in which it operates, and the
pragmatic rationale by which it functions. The gesture toward a more
representative and accurate literary canon, in which the greatest variety
of social groups can find their own traditions reflected, also presupposes
that a primary function of the canon is to mirror society's diverse, multi-
cultural character. Although they are made in the name of political jus-
tice, equality, or emancipation, it is far from certain that claims for literary
representation necessarily amount to substantial political praxis.
Granted, in certain circumstances recognition may indeed be politically
significant, but only an impoverished conception of politics would
equate literary representation per se with political praxis. The reflection
of social diversity, however "accurate," may well even impede political
potential by reducing it to an empirical confirmation of the status quo in-
stead of enabling its transformation.
Even if the canon had historically formed according to prejudice, it
would be simplistic to suppose that a more representative literary canon in
the schools will now begin to redress social injustice in society at large.
Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the canon has already become notice-
ably multicultural, but how much social equality has been achieved as a
result? Without a critique of the whole socioeconomic order—including
its structural dependence on the division of labor, the dominance of prag-
matic, means-over-ends rationality, and the global commodification of
culture—revising the canon in isolation amounts to little more than sym-

bolic change, treating a symptom in lieu of the system.
The vast majority of critics and commentators imagine that a canon's
formation, alteration, reproduction, and preservation depend primarily
on institutions of formal education, a narrow academical conceit shared
by liberals and conservatives alike. However, alterations in syllabi or an-
thologies do not guarantee canonical prominence for historically ne-
glected or marginalized works, any more than they necessarily effect sig-
nificant social change. In fact, despite reactionary fears, modifications to
the canon, or rather the syllabus, are usually minimal and easily assimi-
lated within the educational establishment. For example, the controver-
sial curriculum revisions at Stanford University in 1988, which intended
to supplement the syllabus of standard classics with multicultural litera-
ture, resulted in only one of eight academic "tracks" differing markedly
from the earlier curricular requirements for courses in "Western cul-
ture." 54 Because it leaves intact the economic structures that help repro-
duce social inequality, symbolic representation in the literary canon often
ends up merely as a token concession—accommodating a few different
books on some reading lists, or a few new classes in various schools and
universities, as if social or political change were only to be achieved in a
localized, piecemeal manner. On the contrary, it may well be that, in the
words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "no great victories are won in a war for
the transformation of a whole people without total participation. Less
than this will not create a new society; it will only evoke more sophisti-
cated token amelioration." 55 It is a sad irony that liberal-pluralist critics
today seem to have forgotten his counsel.
Partly for these reasons, more radical critics have been suspicious of
simply augmenting "Shakespeare and company" with a few textual al-
ternatives. Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, for instance, argue
that the supposedly sweeping changes within university curricula are ac-
tually allied with the very norms and traditions they had intended to su-
persede—a gradual "reformism" that only "relegitimates the dominant
ideology." They believe that the liberal faculty majority at several promi-
nent U.S. universities has contrived "merely to trade one set of studies
(authors, texts, canons) for another, purposely leaving intact the overall
institutional system for constructing student-citizens as bourgeois sub-
jects and willing servants of the status quo." 56 However, like the position
of more moderate left-wring critics (e.g., Franklin, Ohmann), this argu-
ment insinuates that successful curricular or canonical change could
somehow be innocent of ideological tendencies, and that canonical texts
could only work in the service of the establishment, whether liberal or
conservative. If they would dispense with the canon entirely, though,
even nominally radical critics might inadvertently comply with the sta-
tus quo in spite of themselves. By sacrificing the aesthetic import of litera-

ture in the name of critique, they lose in the process a form of criticism
that is potentially even more subversive.
Ultimately, modifications to the canon for solely pedagogical purposes,
like the project of literary representation, can actually perpetuate the so-
cial injustices they intend to overcome if they neglect wider socio-
economic factors. Pedagogical arguments for inclusion ultimately rely on
the faith that social justice or emancipation will come with fair and equal
representation, or that an adequately pluralistic canon can actually repre-
sent, if not foster, genuine equality. Yet, conversely, it may be argued that
in a truly free, substantively democratic society, as opposed to one that is
but formally equal, fair representation would come with social and mate-
rial justice, rather than vice versa—if representation itself would then
even remain an issue.
Indeed, the very concept of social representation, not least when ap-
plied to works of art, is more problematic than is usually admitted. The
notion that a particular literary work actually "represents" a specific so-
cial constituency remains theoretically unsupported, perhaps especially
when historically distant works are thought to represent particular social
groups today. For instance, it is far from clear that the Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass (1845) speaks exclusively for African Americans to-
day, or Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1660) for women in gen-
eral, any more than Tom Jones (1749) or David Copperfield (1850) necessar-
ily represent the interests of white, Western males. The assumption, of
course, is that distinct social groups today have a cultural affinity with
the content of such works or the identity of their authors, that people to-
day share the same cultures, experiences, and traditions as their literary
forebears. However, such beliefs may owe more to recently constructed
traditions than to any direct historical continuity or unmediated social
experience. 57 If the notion of commonality or cultural relationship is
taken as the primary social significance of literature, then it seems at least
as probable that members of various social groups in the West today
would have as much an affinity with the novels of James Joyce or
Thomas Pynchon—not because of common characteristics of personal
identity, but because they are similarly embroiled in modernity (or post-
modernity), with all the sociological, technological, and psychological
repercussions (and even problems regarding identity) that that implies.
In the contemporary canon debate, reference is often made to distinct
canons that represent specific genres or literary traditions. African Amer-
ican, feminist, and homosexual critics all speak of independent and
unique literary traditions that are in need of recovery or that are in the
process of being recovered. Indeed, the assumption is so common that
the existence of such independent traditions is generally taken for
granted. 58 That historically marginalized social groups are now discover-

ing and celebrating their own, distinct literary canons and traditions,
however, signifies something more than the self-motivated political ac-
tivism of professional literary critics. By their own admission, women
have been excluded from the literary canon, yet they are beginning for-
mally to institutionalize canons of their own. As Hilde Hein writes,
"women who aspire to artistic prominence have in the past been forced,
as much as they are able, to conform to the male-identified canons," but,
she continues, "it is now possible to challenge that requirement and to
propose that alternative, non-canonic modes of expression . . . be equally
valorized." 59 Regrettably, in her account the material conditions underly-
ing this possibility are not even considered.
If cultural and material reproduction is a necessary condition for the
canonization of any work of literature, then it must be asked what social,
historical, and economic conditions have lately enabled the relative suc-
cess of women to establish "their own" canon. One cinswer lies in the ex-
pansion of capitalism into wider and diverse markets, which demands
an ever-increasing production of commodities, including cultural com-
modities. As Henry Louis Gates notes in the preface to The Norton Anthol-
ogy of African American Literature (1997), the success of African American
literature in the 1990s is partly owing to its growing prominence in the
marketplace. Rather than develop this essential point, however, Gates
immediately moves on to consider the impact of black literature on col-
lege curricula and in literary anthologies, returning the problems posed
by literary canons to the mundane issue of reforming the syllabus. As
much as opening the canon on the grounds of representation is thought
to be politically empowering for certain communities, therefore, it may
also be a perfect stratagem for actually accommodating disenfranchised
groups, heterogeneous cultures, and diverse artistic forms under the
rubric of a single ideology (liberalism) and dominant socioeconomic sys-
tem (capitalism). But the terms of "representation" that have circum-
scribed the canon debate seem to imply that sheer force of numbers—in
sales, literary prizes, or entries in anthologies and course syllabi—is tan-
tamount to canon revision,
In essence, the conflation of social representation with the literary
canon entails either a denial of the division of labor as an integral element
of artistic production and reproduction or a failure to acknowledge class
as an aspect of social identity that is categorically distinct from others, such
as race or gender. On the one hand, the uncritical assumption of radically
separate cultural traditions does not necessarily account for the division
of labor that constitutes even those social groups that have historically
been marginalized. Although it is done in the name of social, symbolic, or
cultural emancipation, the construction of multiple canons according to
categories of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality remains ideological by

obfuscating or legitimizing class hierarchies, even within the social
groups they are thought to represent. As long as alternative canons main-
tain class privilege, they remain just as hierarchical and elitist as the sin-
gular canon they sought to overcome. The actual degree of equality or
emancipation resulting from the establishment of different canons is
therefore, almost literally, immaterial. Rather than stop with piecemeal,
pragmatic, pedagogical engineering on the grounds of representation in
school syllabi or literary anthologies, any truly critical account of the
canon must be pushed farther to focus on the material basis and historical
development of social stratification—including that of artistic production
per se—to which the very existence of canonical art itself attests.
On the other hand, the methodological failure to acknowledge class as
a categorically distinct type of identity also ends up severely curtailing
the critique of injustice and inequality that is claimed by opponents of
the traditional canon. According to Diana Coole, the categories of differ-
ence and identity such as race, gender, and sexuality cannot be treated in
the same way as class because the latter, particularly the working class or
underclass, is not a "life-form" whose "otherness" needs to be recog-
nized; on the contrary, it demands to be transformed. The liberal virtues
of tolerance and respect for social diversity, she argues,
are patently inappropriate when it comes to class, and a celebration or fos-

tering of difference becomes simply nonsensical. For economic inequality is
patterned not as a plurality of horizontal diversities, but according to a ver-
tical scale of more and less Respect for those on lower echelons is pa-
tronizing; tolerance for those above, irrelevant... Rich and poor do not sim-
ply belong to different groups, but are divided according to the
requirements of a system where the gains of the better-off are often made at
the expense of the worse-off.60
Similarly, in Democracy Against Capitalism (1995), Ellen Meiksins Wood

points out that the liberal politics of identity reveals its theoretical and
political limitations when class differences are accommodated within its
idealistically democratic vision: "The class relation that constitutes capi-
talism is not, after all, just a personal identity," it is also "the constitutive
relation of a distinctive social process, the dynamic of accumulation and
the self-expansion of capital." 61
These arguments should be extended to the literary canon debate be-
cause the dissimilar nature of class identity highlights a fundamental
contradiction of liberal-pluralist arguments for opening the canon. If
"representation for the marginalized" is the primary justification for
making the canon more inclusive, and the working class and underclass
are, quite rightly, considered to be historically marginalized, then it logi-

cally follows that these classes would also have to be fairly and equally
represented in the canon. But since class differences are not marginalized
in the same way as those of race and gender, because they emphatically
demand—in the name of justice and emancipation—to be overcome (and
to deny this would be a form of political complacency), then social repre-
sentation alone is an insufficient basis for revising the literary canon.
Representation in this context seeks only to legitimize empirically given
social divisions rather than to transform those that call for change. More-
over, as examined in Part 2, the division of labor that facilitates artistic
production and reproduction within any social group must be under-
stood as an irrevocable aspect of each and every work of art, canonical or
non-canonical, literary and otherwise.
Even if the idea of social representation in the canon were not so prob-
lematic, other premises of liberalism are also suspect, methodologically
as much as politically. With the claim that recent canon revisions have not
attacked Western culture but have enriched the meaning of Western cul-
ture and its study, both the effects of opening the canon and the automat-
ically progressive idea of pluralism are taken for granted. For example, in
a review of Bernard Knox's book, The Oldest Dead White European Males,
and Other Reflections on the Classics (1993), James Davidson writes that
"the controversy over the canon should perhaps be seen as a sign of
vigour rather than a portent of cultural crisis." Far from being threaten-
ing, "it stimulates change." 62 According to Jonathan Culler, the humani-
ties ought to teach diversity because "a particular virtue of literature, of
history, of anthropology is instruction in otherness: vivid, compelling ev-
idence of differences in cultures, mores, assumptions, values." To him,
the emphasis on plurality is "a major but difficult duty." 63 Or, as Paul
Lauter argues, "difference, manifest in race, gender, class and certain other
categories of experience and analysis, can and should provide a central
way of thinking about collegiate educational programs." 64 By this logic,
diversity and difference are assumed to be automatically or necessarily
beneficial, in and of themselves.
Ironically, the imperative of diversity has become virtually dogmatic,
prompting the remark by Marjorie Perloff that the "opening" of the
canon "should be understood less as a sign of 'the new openness' or of a
healthy pluralism man of a 'piety' just as intense" as that of the conserva-
tive humanism it would replace. 63 That is because it condemns from the
outset other accounts of the canon and its function that do not readily
conform to the liberal precepts that representation, difference, and diver-
sity are valuable for their own sake. The underlying assumption of such
pluralism is that cultural diversity or radical "otherness" has endured in
spite of changing social and material conditions and modern globalizing
trends, including the ubiquity of financial markets, mass communica-

tions and a host of other economic, institutional, and technological devel-
opments, trends whose tendency is to accommodate any variety of cul-
tures within a strikingly uniform socioeconomic order. Indeed, as
historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, the politics of identity and plural-
ism have coincided with, and may be a function of, just such social and
material transformations, as well as other profound sociological changes
of the late twentieth century. 66 To the extent that cultural difference is
lauded at the expense of recognizing its own historical determinations, it
becomes an exercise in idealism, fetishizing diversity itself as an unhis-
torical constant without perceiving its material mediations in modernity.
By closing off alternatives even while championing the toleration of
difference, the rhetoric of pluralism also has other political implications.
At its furthest extreme, it lapses into a culturally specific form of liberal
pragmatism, sometimes referred to as market liberalism, that is especially
characteristic of modern U.S. politics and economics. Given that the cur-
rent debate has raged primarily in the American context, this is hardly
surprising: Works of art, whose respective value is taken as culturally rel-
ative, represent distinct social factions that are in a permanent state of
competition. Charles Altieri, for instance, claims that,
[s]ince the valuing dimension of criticism is inescapably ideological, we

could either hope to impose a single canon that we see as favoring our own
concerns, or we could take a more complex stance emphasizing the liberal
play of interests in society. If there are no longer any central stories that
unify society but only stories that define the desires of distinctive segments
in society, then our view of the canon should supposedly correspond to so-
cial reality, should perhaps parlay this fragmentation into articulate differ-
ences. Canons are simply ideological banners for social groups: social
groups propose them as forms of self-definition, and they engage other pro-
ponents to test limitations while exposing the contradictions and incapaci-
ties of competing groups.67
However, such a sharp distinction between a singular canon and a multi-

plicity of separate ones amounts to a false dichotomy. Advocating the
former is taken as but one more interested position among many, so it
confirms the "liberal play of interests" of the latter from the start. And al-
though both positions are admittedly ideological, the "imposition" of a
single canon is, to Altieri at least, apparently more ideological than the
"more complex" situation in which contending groups each have their
own distinct canon. Ironically, Altieri's own conception of the function of
canonical works ends up being decidedly monolithic. Not unlike Ker-
mode's literary utilitarianism, Altieri believes that the canon works at
"directing our actions" and enables us "to satisfy our interests." 68 In

other words, its primary function is to serve contemporary needs, partic-
ularly those of pragmatism and individualism.
Altieri explicitly acknowledges the influence of Richard Rorty, whose
philosophical anti-foundationalism maintains that all truth-claims, in-
cluding aesthetic judgments, are thoroughly contingent and freely open
to a variety of applications. Rorty's ideal of "ironic liberalism" puts faitli
in the ethical and educative potential of literature. Thus, he and his fel-
low "ironists" would use literary critics as "moral advisors" who are able
to
admire books which are prima facie antithetical [to each other] by perform-
ing some sort of synthesis. We would like to admire both Blake and Arnold,
both Nietzsche and Mill, both Marx and Baudelaire, both Trotsky and Eliot,
both Nabokov and Orwell. So we hope some critic will show how these
men's books can be put together to form a beautiful mosaic. We hope that
critics can redescribe these people in ways which will enlarge the canon, and
will give us a set of classical texts as rich and diverse as possible.69
Such a synthesis, however, may do less to establish a rich and diverse

canon than to classify the variety of works of which it is composed
within a single comprehensive ideology. Rorty's own version of liberal-
ism perceives
the aim of a just and free society as letting its citizens be as privatistic [sic],
"irrationalist," and aestheticist [i.e., subjectivistj as they please so long as
they do it on their own time—causing no harm to others and using no re-
sources needed by those less advantaged. There are practical measures to be
taken to accomplish this practical goal.70
Whether it is even possible to isolate individuals so radically that their

consumption of "resources" (including literary or aesthetic ones) has no
social impact at all, subsuming the canon under such private and "irra-
tional" purposes epitomizes the appropriation of literature—no matter
how diverse or contradictory—by and for a single ideology. It is also
characteristic of this assumption that whatever aesthetic value canonical
works do have is entirely a matter of personal opinion. They are thereby
divested of any rational, objective, or cognitive content beyond individ-
ual and subjective taste.
hi this regard, Altieri seems to personify Rorty's ideal critic. In Canons
and Consequences, he attempts to show how canonical authors from Plato
to Wordsworth to Joyce can be worked into a "mosaic" of harmonious
difference, such that their respective values converge to inform "our"
own. 71 These values, however, are plainly ethnocentric. Altieri ends up

homogenizing the non-identity of distinct authors and their works by
finding in them only the liberal-pragmatic values that match his own. Ac-
cordingly, Plato is taken as dramatizing what philosophy provides
"within the marketplace," Wordsworth's "empiricist commitments"
force him to articulate his poetry through "private personal expression,"
and Joyce is "bound to a radical individualism" based on "personal sin-
gularity and contingency perfectly suited to contemporary tastes." 72
Without any regard to the historical conditions or material constraints of
canon formation, Altieri even suggests that canons are the result of "com-
peting choices," as if they were formed by the "invisible hand" of liberal
economic theory 7 3 It is therefore unsurprising that Altieri explicitly in-
vokes Harold Bloom, whose model of canonical "struggle" he adopts:
"The very idea of a canon and the example it offers create the standards
writers try to meet." Moreover, "canons make us want to struggle, and
they give us the common questions and interests we need to ennoble that
project."74 Like Bloom's, Altieri's rhetoric of "us" and "we" primarily sig-
nifies individual authors and their bourgeois critics, without any recogni-
tion of the positions they occupy in society. Altieri admits nothing of the
social privileges, class distinctions, or division of labor that enable artists
and critics to produce their work in the first place. As a theory of the
function of canons and the nature of canon formation, it is totally bereft
of an historical or materialist account of literary production and repro-
duction. In short, it is thoroughly idealistic. Without regard to those de-
prived of the means of authorial "struggle," the glorification of competi-
tion and the liberal "play of interests" remain as ideological as Bloom's
own aesthetic idealism.
It is no accident that the very language used by Bloom is repeated
within the discourse of liberal pragmatism, because both are inclined to
preserve an idealized private sphere apart from the social and material
constraints they fail to recognize. The ideology of competition is made
even more explicit in the work of two other advocates of opening the
Western canon to greater cultural diversity. In Professing Literature, Ger-
ald Graff gives an historical account of how the U.S. university and its
curriculum developed out of a series of historical conflicts that have since
been forgotten; the contemporary canon debate is merely the latest in this
series of conflicts. He also finds that the "existence of a canon does not
guarantee that it will be taught in an ideologically consistent way" 7 5 Be-
cause his concern is the practice and politics of teaching literature, how-
ever, Graff does not merely describe the process of literary institutional-
ization and its controversies; he also promotes a particular method to
begin to resolve, or at least to accommodate, the latest impasse in literary
studies, of which canonical legitimacy is but one example. He invites
teachers of literature to "teach the conflicts/' the debates within literary

criticism itself, because "it is doubtful that the traditional canon profits
from being insulated against challenges." 76
More recently, in American Literature and the Culture Wars, Gregory Jay
adopts the same practical program for dealing with challenges to the
canon, but with even more explicit political goals in mind. His "multicul-
tural pedagogy" and emphasis on the "cultural work" of texts would
highlight the social effects and political impact of literature in U.S. his-
tory and entail the equal treatment of canonical and non-canonical texts
in the classroom. To Jay, teaching the conflicts arid "institutionalizing the
crises of representation" would serve as "a very useful device for ad-
dressing the public good"; it would encourage the discussion of "what
the purposes of education in a democracy should be." 77 (In Cultivating
Humanity, Martha Nussbaum similarly writes that the purpose of liberal
education and teaching diversity is above all "to produce adults who can
function as citizens," and "to prepare people of highly diverse back-
grounds for complex world citizenship." 78 ) Not only would the teaching
of literature be bound by pragmatic, liberal priorities, but the literary
works themselves would be treated as "active agents in the sociopolitical
process." By concentrating on the "use value" of writing, Jay suggests,
"we may stop thinking in terms of canons altogether." 79 What is the ulti-
mate goal of this pedagogical utilitarianism? Nothing more than "a com-
parative curriculum of connecting the differences, one in which the com-
peting visions and rival representations can enter into dialogue with one
another." 80 Doing nothing to challenge contemporary socioeconomic re-
lations fundamentally, such pragmatism yields to political complacency.
Whether or not the Western literary canon has ever been quite so "in-
sulated" from challenges, Graff's and Jay's pedagogical program takes
for granted and reinforces the liberal postulate of competitive group in-
terests and the practical utility of literature. By systematically confusing
the canon with the syllabus ("without a syllabus there is no canon" 81 ),
their approach also repeats the narrow academic conceit that the univer-
sity is the sole keeper of the canon. Like that of so many others, Graff's
and Jay's microscopic view of canon formation remains confined almost
entirely to formal institutions of education, with little or no attention to
wider socioeconomic considerations. The pedagogical proposal to em-
brace any and all contributions to the discourse of social conflict not only
threatens to collapse under the strain of its own weight but also pre-
sumes itself to be aloof from any complicity with the status quo.
Even with the best of intentions, there remains an inescapable ideolog-
ical component to such infinitely inclusive pluralism. As Terry Eagleton
remarks, "seeking to understand everybody's point of view quite often
suggests that you yourself are disinterestedly up on high or in the mid-
die, and trying to resolve conflicting viewpoints into a consensus implies

a refusal of the truth that some conflicts can be resolved on one side
alone." 82 Moreover, the social agreement as to what constitutes literature,
or what works specifically make up the Western canon, is believed to be
determined by pragmatic expediency: a working consensus that can vary
as often as its members change their minds. Allegedly benign, the neu-
trality of this proposal is actually false. It derives explicitly from the tra-
ditions of liberalism and utilitarianism, whose oppositional claims are a
far cry from radical challenges to current social relations and the eco-
nomic order that sustains them. Such pedagogical pragmatism may well
contest hitherto orthodox methods of teaching, but it neglects the fact
that the very concept of a canon, employed by and for artists since antiq-
uity, long predates the foundation of universities. It also fails to recognize
that canonical art and literature has since come to designate much more
than simply tools for teaching. Indeed, at least since the advent of aes-
thetic modernism, the concept of art in general has resisted so banal and
constraining a definition.
By emphasizing social diversity, pluralistic adjustments to the canon
are cloaked in progressive rhetoric. However, by eternalizing their own
conception of social conflict as immediate, interest-group politics and
cultural "competition," they end up reinforcing the ideology of liberal-
ism, which takes the private rights of individuals to be inviolate, the
recognition of their social identity to be a universal imperative, and the
realization of that identity as best done within the market of competing
cultural goods. When these concepts are applied specifically to art and
literature, they may be better understood as peculiarly modem cultural
expressions of the commodification of "difference" and the actual stan-
dardization of "diversity" to fit the market model of struggle and conflict.
If so, they can hardly be taken as universal, neutral, or unmediated.
Rather, the concepts of competition and conflict are themselves subject to
changing social and material conditions. Apart from historicizing educa-
tional institutions at large or canonical works individually, then, contem-
porary critical discourse—including the debate over the canon—should
also be historicized so as to disclose its axon objective conditions, as well
as its unspoken ideological tendencies.
In spite of certain episodic protests and spurious attempts at political
intervention, the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the
globalization of Western socioeconomic priorities and the triumph of U.S.-
style capitalism on an unprecedented scale. Professionalism and pragma-
tism now pervade the educational system at every level, including the
study of literature and the humanities. In this environment, it is no sur-
prise that so many critics-—whether ostensibly liberal or conservative—
have yielded to the dominant ideology. But laying blame on literary critics
alone would be as unconvincing as the charge that "a failure of nerve" on

the part of professional academics is responsible for putting the canon in
jeopardy. It would be idealistic to imply that critics or educators could
simply overcome social, economic, and material conditions by fiat. And
even though some liberal critics, such as Paul Lauter, have upbraided the
"bottom-line thinking" and "managerial governing strategy" of univer-
sity administrators, whose "marketplace ideology casts students into the
role of 'consumers' of the 'products' offered in the grand store of the colle-
giate curriculum," 83 they fall short of being truly critical—of radically
challenging the status quo—as long as the extent of their critique is lim-
ited to official educational policy or the promotion of difference, diversity,
and literary representation that is anything but subversive.
Conclusion: Ideological Proximity

The polemical and rhetorical disagreements among left-wing and right-
wing critics about opening or preserving the Western canon have ob-
scured the similarity of their fundamental assumptions. But the limita-
tions of the liberal-pluralist critique of the canon and its specific
recommendations for making it more socially representative or culturally
diverse are precisely what reveal its ideological proximity to the conserv-
ative humanism to which it is opposed. Equally, the implicit assumptions
of the latter tend to betray a likeness to many of the common assump-
tions of the former. To summarize, at least five related points of intersec-
tion can be identified from among their respective arguments.
First, it has been shown how several humanistic critics resort to unhis-
torical generalizations that the Western literary canon represents the
whole of Western culture; they therefore glorify canonical works for em-
bodying certain timeless and universal values that merit the deepest re-
spect and closest study. Liberal-pluralist critics typically take alternative
works to be ensigns of cultural identity, especially of social groups that
have been historically marginalized but may now celebrate their hetero-
geneity and learn of their own distinct heritages. In either case, an idea of
literary canons as essentially didactic and socially representative is
adopted to fulfill certain culturally puristic functions—preserving what
is thought to be an unadulterated cultural tradition—without necessarily
realizing how canons are historically mediated by the division of labor,
the professionalization of artists as wrell as of critics, and the commodifi-
cation of culture in general. Whether hegemonic or marginal, artworks
are consecrated and idealized, celebrated and fetishized, at the expense
of recognizing the social costs of their enshrinement.
Second, conservative humanists who take the Western canon to be
aloof from politics and ideology end up endorsing a conception of aes-
thetic value that is subjective and individualistic: The greatest literature

is meant to be beyond public opinion or social constraints. On the other
hand, liberal pluralists who would open the canon to the literature of
marginalized social groups have found the purely aesthetic justifications
of the given canon to be invariably tendentious. If the aesthetic "preju-
dices" of modernism, for example, are believed to have favored a narrow
and exclusive canon, then they must be overcome by the initiative of crit-
ics and teachers. Yet both arguments fall prey to idealism insofar as mate-
rial circumstances, modem and otherwise, are not perceived as essential
to canon formation. In the first case, art itself is elevated beyond social
scrutiny; in the second, critics, teachers, and the reading public are ideal-
ized as autonomous individuals who can make or break a canon by
decree.
Third, several literary critics have promoted a view of canon formation
as an Oedipal form of artistic struggle, a contest in which only the great-
est works succeed and therefore survive. Others have found that works
of literature represent specific social constituencies and contending inter-
est groups who vie with each other for political recognition. Common to
each is the assumption that canons form and have formed competitively,
as if in a literary marketplace. Characteristically modern and specifically
Western social perceptions, political values, and economic ideals are
therefore legitimized: The ideological tropes of struggle, competition,
and success are reified as unhistorical constants that are universally valid
and applicable, even to culturally and historically distinct works of art.
Fourth, one conservative theory finds that canons are necessary be-
cause they are conceptually useful for organizing the past and because
they maintain a contemporary relevance. Another, liberal perspective
takes literature to be worthwhile only as far as it is politically productive,
discounting works traditionally regarded as canonical for not being self-
evidently socially effective or politically applicable to certain topical
causes. In either case, the immediate utility of literature is taken for
granted or promoted as its ultimate justification: If it cannot be proved to
be methodologically useful or politically expedient, then it is irrelevant,
obsolete, or ideological. However, as I argue in Part 2, the immediate util-
ity of art and literature may well be contrary to the very concept of art in
modernity, in which even the most emphatically useless objects are in-
creasingly subject to instrumental rationalization.
Finally, both those who defend the Western canon and those who
would bring greater diversity into it share the conceit that formal institu-
tions of education are its keeper, as if the preservation or reproduction of
art and literature would end without the explicit sanction of schools and
universities. More often than not, the debate has been reduced to an issue
of educational reform. In the process, the wider issues regarding the sig-
5^ The Contemporary Canon Debate
nificance of canonical art in capitalist societies are neglected arid the po-
litical implications of art are diminished. This is perhaps the most salient
indication that pragmatism has become the dominant political paradigm
in the current debate over literature and the arts as well as in other areas
where it is inappropriate.
In conclusion, despite their apparent antinomy, the liberal-pluralistic
and conservative-humanistic arguments for preserving or revising the
literary canon betray several striking affinities. Essentially, they either
conceive of the canon in idealistically aesthetic terms, with little or no ref-
erence to objective historical and material conditions, or they appropriate
the canon for the purposes of political or pedagogical pragmatism, with-
out regard to the functionless or mediated aspects of art in modernity.
What tends to be neglected in eager claims to open the canon are the
material constraints of canon formation. Because canonical works have
historically been the source of imitation and reproduction over pro-
tracted periods of time, a necessary feature of any such work will be its
historical persistence and broad cultural familiarity. But arguments that
do admit as much are no better if they merely celebrate the monuments of
culture and take their historical reproduction as unambiguous evidence
of aesthetic superiority. What the latter arguments neglect is the potential
of canonical works to become culturally inert or aesthetically sterile ob-
jects, such that they end up serving the most trivial purposes. By con-
trast, a materialistic, sociological, and critical account of canon formation
will show on what specific social, economic, and institutional conditions
it depends. These matters are the subject of Chapter 3.
3
Cultural Reproduction
"But Slutkespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an
Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one
touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.—No man of any
brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his
meaning immediately."
"No doubt, one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree," said Edmund, "from
one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half
the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similies, and describe with his
descriptions."
—lane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), vol. Ill, ch. iii
Of poets who come down to us through distance

Of times and tongues, the foster-babes of Fame,
Life seems the smallest portion of existence;
Where twenty ages gather o'er a name,
T is as a snowball which derives assistance
From every flake, and yet rolls on the same,
Even till an iceberg it may chance to grow;
But, after all, 't is nothing but cold snow.
—Lord Byron, Dan Juan (7827), canto IV, stanza c
The terms in which the debate over the canon has been articulated, evi-
dent in nearly every example in Chapter 2, indicate a widespread as-
sumption that canons are created and preserved primarily by the author-
ity of formal educational institutions such as schools and universities.
The prevalence of this belief may well be due to the social situation of
those who hold it, the majority of whom are themselves professional aca-
demics; but that need not confine an examination of the debate to a cri-
tique of its participants or the conventions of their discourse, as if they
existed independently of other institutions or apart from wider economic
and historical contexts. No single judgment creates a canon, so the assort-
59
w Cultural Reproduction
ment of factors and range of institutions necessary to its formation must

be acknowledged. The question as to which factors in particular predom-
inate in different periods therefore requires sociological and historical
investigation.
This chapter examines two major sociological approaches to literary
canon formation: Pierre Bourdieu's and John Guillory's. An analysis of
Bourdieu's theory of cultural production will show that the reproduction
and prestige of canonical works depends on a process of cultural famil-
iarization that in turn depends on social confirmation and broad institu-
tionalization. However, familiarity is insufficient by itself to explain
canon formation because any number of works are continuously repro-
duced and institutionalized in one form or another, but precious few end
up being regarded as "classic." Thus, a further aspect of canonization
must also be taken into account: specifically, the qualitative distinctions
made by those institutions empowered with the cultural authority to en-
dorse a select body of works as canonical. Bourdieu's theory of cultural
reproduction posits that an educational "monopoly" of literary consecra-
tion had once existed, but has dissipated since the nineteenth century.
One of the weaknesses of his theory, however, is that it does not consider
whether other institutions or forms of cultural reproduction may have
supplanted academia's influence on canon formation.
Although the material reproduction of literature has been under-ac-
knowledged in the contemporary debate, the authority of educational in-
stitutions certainly has not. In fact, that authority is precisely what has at-
tracted the political scrutiny of literary critics and social theorists, who
argue that canons contribute to the reproduction of social relations and
thereby help to maintain the status quo. Among them, John Guillory's
work on canon formation is perhaps the most extensive and systemati-
cally developed. His alternative theory of the social significance of liter-
ary canons and its shortcomings is therefore examined in detail.
By highlighting the social, symbolic, and especially material means by
which certain works flourish over others, I will ultimately demonstrate
how canon formation is an historically cumulative process, and that con-
tinual social confirmation over time is necessary for any work to be can-
onized. In conclusion, I also suggest that sociology, in its effort to explain
the social rationale of canonical esteem, ends up with a highly restrictive
concept of art. Although it does provide a necessary corrective to the aes-
thetic idealism of the current debate, literary sociology fails to give ade-
quate consideration to the aesthetic content of canonical works. The social,
historical, and political significance of that content—a feature of canonic -
ity no less important than institutionalization—will be examined in
Chapter 4.
Cultural Reproduction 61
The Familiarity of Canonical Works

Although the changing function of the term canon in different historical
contexts has already been reviewed in Chapter 1, the specific social, insti-
tutional, and material mechanisms that preserve and transmit only a
handful of books from generation to generation needs to be looked at in
detail. By examining the material production, distribution, and con-
sumption of literature, the social history of literacy, the political aspects
of reading and writing, and the ideological role of schools and universi-
ties, literary sociology has done much to explain the determination of lit-
erary value, the hierarchy of genres, the definition of literature itself,
and—by implication at least-—the social processes of canon formation.
Few sociologists have done so with greater insight than Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu's model of culture attempts to capture both the social nu-
ances and broad institutional structures that make up what he calls, gen-
erally, the "field of cultural production" within which aesthetic discourse
and valuation is continually constructed. The literary field is but one
among many fields of cultural production and is simultaneously distinct
from and homologous with others, such as the artistic fields of painting
and sculpture. The specific boundary or definition of a particular field is
a condition of the field of cultural production at large, which is always al-
ready situated within the general economy of social relations. The theo-
retical model of the field can explain, for example, the historical genesis
and socioeconomic rationale of the concept of "pure" art by dismantling
the conventional belief in the lone artist or author as an independent
"creator." It showrs how that belief actually coincided with the historical
rise of the bourgeoisie to cultural dominance in Europe.
According to this model, "the producer of the value of the work of art is
not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief wrhich pro-
duces the value of the work of art as a fetish by producing the belief in the
creative power of the artist." To follow "the process of literary consecra-
tion in the diversity of its forms and its manifestations" and to observe
"the fluctuations in the stock of different authors," Bourdieu devises a
model of the process of canonization. A "genuine science" of the work of
art such as this would thereby undermine conventional notions of artistic
creation and expose aesthetic value as socially constructed and primarily
ideological, that is, in the service of legitimizing and reproducing the sta-
tus quo. 1
In Bourdieu's model, the field of cultural production is composed of
the objective relations among a wide network of social agents and institu-
tional components, each of which plays a role in the symbolic consecra-
tion of particular works of art and the formal recognition of individual
62 Cultural Reproduction
authors and artists. It includes sites and actors as varied as places of exhi-
bition such as galleries and museums; institutions of consecration like
academies and salons; institutions for "the reproduction of producers"
themselves such as schools and universities; and other, specialized
agents, including dealers, critics and art historians. The vast array of offi-
cial forms of recognition includes government arts councils, literary
prizes, academic exegeses, and authorized biographies, not to mention
translations and publication in multiple editions. Less directly, there are
more subtle, but no less important, modes of evaluation such as staff ap-
pointments in relevant agencies and word of mouth among the literati.
Of course, even forms of repudiation, such as negative reviews and cen-
sorship, also play a role in the success or failure of works of art and liter-
ature. Political revolutions and changes of regime; the symbolic minutiae
of popular culture, including commemorative stamps, memorial statues,
and the attribution of street names; mention in film and popular song; ci-
tations or allusions in the works of other artists, whether or not in the
medium of literature: All combine in the logic of the cultural field to val-
orize or stigmatize certain writers and works, hi short, a whole "market
of symbolic goods" operates to canonize. 2 Taking into account so many
variables alone should deflate the academic conceit that the canon is pri-
marily determined by formal institutions of education.
Given the wide range of institutions and agents, types of discourse,
and symbolic signification that informs the process of canonization,
Bourdieu affirms that cultural familiarization is constitutive of any work
that becomes canonical:
The consecrated authors dominating the field of production tend also to

make gradual inroads into the market, becoming more and more readable
and acceptable the more everyday they seem as a result of a more or less
lengthy process of familiarization, whether or not associated with a specific
apprenticeship.3
In other words, consecrated authors become acceptable because they have

become part of "general culture" through "a process of familiarization
which may or may not have been accomplished by specific teaching." The
effect of broad social familiarity is such that "one comes to see the works
of art of the p a s t . . . through categories derived from an art of the past that
has become natural." It is a process of "conscious or unconscious inculca-
tion" that leads people generally to accept the established hierarchy of au-
thors as "self-evident," both before and after periods of intensive canoni-
cal revision. 4 Socially sanctioned works of art become so deeply
embedded within a collective cultural memory that they influence not
only successive artists and authors (popular or otherwise) but also those
who do not appear to participate directly within the field of production,

such as amateur art enthusiasts, "casual" readers, or the public at large.
Indeed, canonical art and literature can come to infuse the very language
of a culture, as indicated by intertextual citations and linguistic devices,
visual imageiy and symbolic codes, and popular myths and traditional al-
legories, not only within individual cultures but also between different
ones. For example, Shakespeare remains the most frequently quoted sin-
gle author in The Oxford English Dictionary, Dante's Inferno has crossed cul-
tures as much as centuries to become among the most familiar portraits of
hell, and accounts of totalitarian states today almost invariably evoke im-
ages from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or the novels of Solzhenitsyn. So
culturally pervasive have canonical works become that art historian E. H.
Gombrich dubs them "sources of metaphor." 5 (Lest this account of cul-
tural pervasiveness be thought of as uncritically conservative or simply
reconfirming a particular, hegemonic Western tradition, the point here is
simply to account for how certain works become institutionalized as
canonical, not to judge the legitimacy of the process.)
Bourdieu argues that the discourse about a work "is not mere accom-
paniment, intended to assist its perception and appreciation, but a stage
in the production of the work, of its meaning and value." A canonical
work of art is not made or remade once, but "hundreds of times, thou-
sands of times, by all those who have an interest in it, who find a material
or symbolic profit in reading it, classifying it, decoding it, commenting
on it, reproducing it, criticizing it, combating it, knowing it, possessing
it." 6 Because it is entirely a product of social interaction, production, and
reproduction, the question of a work's inherent value or the qualitative
distinction between different kinds of artistic reproduction does not arise
in Bourdieu's account; the argument here is simply that artistic longevity
depends on continual re-creation, adaptation, and institutional confirma-
tion. According to Andre Lefevere, "the 'intrinsic' value of a work of lit-
erature is by no means sufficient to ensure its survival. That survival is
ensured at least to the same extent by rewritings. If a writer is no longer
rewritten, his or her work will be forgotten." 7 In purely sociological
terms, then, broad cultural familiarity is a crucial but overlooked index of
canonicity. In fact, even Bourdieu fails to illustrate it in very much detail.
However, canonical familiarization, as opposed to cultural familiarity in
general, does not merely reflect the popularity of a specific work at a sin-
gle moment of time or for a limited period. Rather, it is an historical
process resulting from the continual reproduction of works in multiple
contexts, as well as from the social confirmation across a range of vari-
ably influential institutions.
The variety of ways in which certain authors are acclaimed and their
works become familiar—both contemporaneously and over subsequent
generations—is illustrated by the numerous studies of authorial reputa-

tion that have lately become fashionable. 8 With little regard to other
forms of reproduction and cultural transmission, conventional literary
histories have often been written as narratives of canonical authors influ-
encing their artistic peers and successors ("the old thin line of national
heroes"), as if they worked in a social vacuum; but the sociology of repu-
tation has a much wider focus. For example, in The Politics of Literary Rep-
utation, John Rodden surveys George Orwell's posthumous reputation
by documenting an assortment of factors involved in his canonization,
including the shifting justifications over time for the acclaim of different
works within his oeuvre. He also shows how those justifications vary de-
pending on who is making them (whether socialists, liberals, or neo-con-
servatives), which suggests that the potential for canonization may also
rely in part on an author's or work's flexibility to ideological appropria-
tion. Rodden pays close attention to the cultural minutiae and represen-
tations in various media, including newspapers and television, text-
books, and anthologies, from which Orwell's image has been
constructed. 9 Similarly, in Creating Faulkner's Reputation, Lawrence
Schwartz illustrates "the confluence of literary, cultural, and commercial
forces" that shaped William Faulkner's rise to fame and critical reap-
praisal. Out of print and generally ignored in the early 1940s, Faulkner
was proclaimed a literary genius in the United States by the close of that
decade, when a combination of nationalist sentiment, supportive re-
views, and publisher promotions-—each mutually informing—gathered
momentum, culminating in the publication of Viking's best-selling
Portable Faulkner in 1946. Intruder in the Dust (1948), which Hollywood
quickly adapted for film, was "made into a publishing event" with the
power of Random House applied "to insure its commercial success, to
stimulate the Faulkner revival." 10 All of these factors, admittedly, explain
only his popularity. However, Schwartz also details how professional
critics and journalists, in addition to academics, consolidated Faulkner's
status by making the case for his serious literary value. In the wake of
winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, Faulkner was accommo-
dated in the university curriculum, where he remains to this day.
In addition to academic attention and critical acclaim, therefore, inter-
genre and intermedia rewritings play a significant role in the familiarity
with and esteem for canonized artists and works. As reviewed in Chap-
ter 1, historical examples of canonical reproduction abound from antiq-
uity to the present. Homeric imagery was ubiquitous in ancient Greece
and Rome, typically found on painted vases and temple pediments, in
lyric poetry, tragic drama, and philosophical treatises, as well as in the
painting, sculpture, and literature of the Renaissance and beyond. Like-
wise, the countless quotations, citations, interpretations, and adaptations
of Shakespeare's works demonstrate not only his centrality to English

and European literature since the eighteenth century but also his interna-
tional dominance in theater, poetry, and professional criticism today. His
plays are continually adapted for film, translated into dozens of lan-
guages, and published in hundreds of editions, prompting one critic to
pronounce "Shakesperotics" an industry unto itself.11 Another illustra-
tive example, if on a lesser scale, is Dryden's adaptation of Paradise Lost
for opera. Beyond being merely a literary tribute from one poet to an-
other, The State of Innocence (1674) served to reinforce Milton's reputation
by adaptation into a new medium:
Operas were a distinctively modern genre in late seventeenth-century En-

gland, and their librettos were often derived from classic texts, including
works that were coming to be claimed as English classics . . . In choosing to
base The State of Innocence on Paradise Lost, Dryden was declaring that Mil-
ton's poem had the status of a classic.12
In more than 300 years Paradise Lost has never been out of print, and Mil-
ton's poems, it has been remarked, were once so familiar that "they
formed part of what one might call the national consciousness. Genera-
tions of literate Englishmen found resonant phrases from Milton on their
lips." 13 Similarly, the reproduction of the Faust legend in Goethe's play,
Gounod's opera, Berlioz's oratorio, Liszt's symphony, Thomas Mann's
novel, and Murnau's and Svankmajer's films—to name only the most ex-
plicit adaptations—has only strengthened its reputation as a literary clas-
sic. Indeed, one scholar describes Faust, along with Don Quixote, Don
Juan, and Robinson Crusoe, as one of the dominant myths of modern soci-
ety.14 Today, the making and remaking of the novels of Scott, Austen,
Dickens, and the Brontes for film and television continually ensure their
familiarity, while the multiple editions of Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, and
other "modern classics" contribute to their distinction over other pub-
lished literature. The collected works of canonical authors in elegant edi-
tions also confer on them a certain prestige: "the uniform bindings con-
firm us in our belief that we are reading a classic, and they make the
authors appear in some timeless space in which they all coexist to-
gether." 15 Of course, no single adaptation or edition of a work is enough
to canonize it, because the means by which it is disseminated and be-
comes familiar—in whatever form—are many and diffuse. Moreover, the
consecration of a work in one medium will often excite or rekindle inter-
est in its antecedents, thereby furthering the potential for canonization by
association with the already canonical.
None of this, however, appeals to the sheer scale of numerical prolifer-
ation or the extent of cultural dispersion alone. Contrary to those who be-
lieve that "it is in mass and not high or official culture that the value of
literary canon formation is preserved," 16 the process of canonization de-
pends no less on the relative authority of those groups with institutional
influence on the evaluation and reproduction of selected works of litera-
ture. Populist optimism can be faulted for ignoring the hierarchical struc-
ture of institutions, including those in the service of "mass" culture.
Bourdieu documents at length the conflicts of social and economic power
involved in acquiring and maintaining such authority, and he shows how
the institutional process of familiarization also relies on access to the es-
tablished codes—including technical vocabulary and symbolic c a p i t a l -
necessary to participate in the appreciation (in both senses) of any work.
Indeed, the struggle to establish a "monopoly of literary legitimacy" is it-
self a function of the logic of the field: "cultural heritage, which exists in a
materialized and in an incorporated state . . . , only exists and effectively
persists (meaning actively) in and through the struggles located in fields
of cultural production; that is, cultural heritage exists by and for the
agents disposed and able to assure its continued reactivation." 17 Cultural
familiarity may not be transparently universal-—in the sense of being
equally recognized across the spectrum of class, gender, and racial differ-
ences—but neither does it result from individual assertiveness, popular
acclaim, or discursive contestation alone. Rather, the processes of famil-
iarization are objectively bound to the structure of the field of cultural
production, including the internal hierarchies and materiality (i.e., the
modes and relations of production) of institutions within it, which are
themselves situated within the wider economy. Liberal-pluralists who
pronounce obscure works to be suddenly canonical or who suggest that
aesthetic criteria hitherto used for literary evaluation can now be simply
cast aside fail to perceive the intransigence of social relations and institu-
tional structures or the dependence of canonization on broad cultural
and historical reproduction. New or historically underappreciated works
are unlikely to be canonized without corresponding social, institutional,
and material changes sufficient to promote their reproduction, dissemi-
nation, and familiarization. The gesture of liberally claiming recent or
"recovered" texts to be deservedly or spontaneously canonical—whether
for exciting sudden critical interest or for representing culturally disen-
franchised groups—is therefore misleading to the extent that it underesti-
mates the control of institutions upon which canonization depends.
Canonicity requires an historical quality that is not so quickly ob-
tained. What newly acclaimed works lack—no less than those that have
belatedly become, or had once been, popular—is a cumulative history, a
continuum of judgments and rewritings over extended periods of time.
Some of the feminist calls for a novel and distinct canon of female writ-
ers, for example, betray a misunderstanding of the historical depth con-
stitutive of canonical works, Even though Aphra Behn or Alice Walker

are currently enjoying critical favor, their longevity remains doubtful as
long as they fail to become broadly assimilated, that is, as long as they
lack an historical continuity of attention and reproduction. 18 The same
could be said of the modern cliche "instant classic," an oxymoron that re-
veals more about the nature of today's cultural impasse than it does
about the discourse of celebration or the cunning of marketing. Instead, it
is indicative of the commodification of culture by which the historical
distinction of canonical literature is effaced in a market flooded with cul-
tural goods. It also discloses the inherent contradiction of canonicity per
se, a matter that is addressed in Chapter 6.
Bourdieu writes that "the history of the field is truly irreversible; and
the products of this relatively autonomous history present a kind of cu-
mulativity." In addition, "any interrogation [of the values of the field]
arises from a tradition, from a practical or theoretical mastery of the her-
itage which is inscribed in the very structure of the field."19 Like artworks
that are modeled on artistic precedent and tradition, even the periodic
challenges to the authority of consecrated works require some measure
of familiarity with the history of the field, without which legitimacy—in-
cluding that of the challengers—will be impossible. In other words, ac-
cording to the theory of the field of cultural production, "the practical
mastery of the specific achievements inscribed in past and recorded
works, codified and canonized by a whole corpus of professionals of con-
servation and celebration—historians of art and literature, exegetes, ana-
lysts, critics—is part of the conditions of entry into the field of produc-
tion." 20 One cannot even begin to pose an effective challenge to a canon
without in some measure entering the field of which it is a part. There-
fore, successful challenges to the literary canon—whether to the author-
ity of its keepers, to conventional evaluative criteria, or to its specific con-
tent—entail a high degree of proficiency within the literary field. Even
canon revision depends in some measure on the canon itself.
Rather than being a conservative restraint on the possibility of canoni-
cal change, in this model the very logic of the field keeps the canon rela-
tively open. Change occurs not by unprecedented revolution, but by a
gradual process of modifying the margins of the field. Nonetheless, it
could be argued that contesting the canon from without, that is, from out-
side the confines of official cultural institutions, need not depend on
canonical precedent, as in the arguments for wholly distinct, alternative
canons of historically marginalized social groups. Yet even these chal-
lenges require symbolic capital to succeed, to achieve some measure of
legitimacy beyond a small circle of initiates. Liberal-pluralists who advo-
cate separate but equal canons obviate the theory of the field of cultural
production only if "their own" institutions of cultural production were to
6S Cultural Reproduction
exist in complete isolation from the dominant culture and its institutions,
if they were devoid of social hierarchy themselves or could somehow
maintain a canon independent of the means of cultural reproduction—all
of which seems unlikely in a world where different societies are increas-
ingly interdependent and even the most remote cultures are mediated by
common economic principles and modes of production.
Given the means of material reproduction and cultural transmission,
the discrepancies of symbolic capital necessary for legitimization, and
the social logic of canonical change, an adequate sociology of literature
must historically consider which specific institutions most effectively deter-
mine these variables and therefore do most to canonize individual works
at any given time. Unlike others, Bourdieu is ambivalent about how fun-
damental formal education remains today. His own diagnosis of the in-
creasing "autonomization" of the field of cultural production, especially
in Europe since the nineteenth century, precludes any clear certainty that
the literary canon relies wholly on educational institutions. 21 In spite of
advising that "it would be foolish to search for an ultimate guarantor or
guarantee" of the power of consecration, however, Bourdieu does make
some appeal to the authority of education, albeit in a very loose sense.
The recognition of works of art as "art" begins, he alleges, with teachers
and parents because they are in charge of "the initial inculcation of artis-
tic dispositions." 22 But this assumption uncritically presupposes that ed-
ucation precedes culture or the processes of acculturation. It does not
even consider whether the reverse may be true, or whether both may ac-
tually coincide. In fact, Bourdieu ultimately does attribute the highest
power of consecration to educational institutions, writing that "it is im-
possible to understand the peculiar characteristics of restricted culture
without appreciating its profound dependence on the educational sys-
tem, the indispensable means of its reproduction and grow r th," and that
"the educational system plays a decisive role in the generalized imposi-
tion of the legitimate mode of consumption." 2 3 In even more explicit
terms, the process of canonization has led to "the constitution of a corpus
of canonic works whose value the education system tends continually to
reproduce by producing aware consumers (which means converted
ones) as well as sacralizing commentaries." Thus, "the infallible sign of
consecration" in the field of cultural production "is constituted by the
canonization of works as classics by inscribing them in curricula/' even if
belatedly.24
However, in Bourdieu's own account, the educational monopoly on
consecration and canonization historically ended in the nineteenth cen-
tury. In France, for example, the "monopoly holder of the legitimate def-
inition of art and the artist" had been the Academic Frangaise; but its
power was broken, Bourdieu suggests, with the "institutionalization of
anomie which resulted from a field of institutions placed in a situation of

competition for artistic legitimacy." 25 The dispersal of consecrating au-
thority allowed those informal institutions invested with enough sym-
bolic capital, such as the more influential salons of the bourgeoisie, to be-
gin directly affecting the prestige of certain writers and artists. Bourdieu
cites the example of Anatole France, who was initially praised by only a
small but influential coterie of salon "habitues" before attracting public
and critical acclaim and eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Litera-
ture in 1921. In addition to other non-academic institutions, the salons
constituted "a field of competition for the accumulation of social capital
and symbolic capital" that also exercised power over the field of cultural
production at large, as well as other sites of consecration, such as the
academies. 26 The collapse of the educational monopoly is therefore partly
a condition of the increasing autonomy of the literary and artistic fields,
which is a function of their relative independence from the conventional
"field of power" in general, such as the state apparatus and the economy
as a whole. 27 The process of autonomization is "correlated," Bourdieu
argues,
with the multiplication and diversification of agencies of consecration

placed in a situation of competition for cultural legitimacy: not only acade-
mies and salons, but also institutions for diffusion, such as publishers . . . ,
whose selective operations are invested with a truly cultural legitimacy
even if they are subordinated to economic and social constraints.28
For all these reasons, Bourdieu regards the power of the literary field by
itself to be relatively "weak."
Each of these assumptions—the collapse of the educational monopoly
on consecration, the autonomy and diversification of the field of cultural
production, and the competition for legitimacy—depends on the relative
strength or cohesion of the literary or artistic field, which Bourdieu finds
today to be characterized by "a weak degree of codification"; few fields,
he claims, are as "little institutionalized." 2y Indeed, so incohesive and
vulnerable to competition is the literary field in particular that even char-
acterizing it as an "institution," he believes, is a mistake:
There is nothing to be gained by replacing the notion of the literary field

with that of "institution:" besides the fact that it risks suggesting . . . a con-
sensual image of a very conflictual universe, this notion causes one of the
most significant properties of the literary field to disappear—its weak degree
of institutionalization. This is seen, among other indices, in the total absence
of arbitration and legal or institutional guarantee in conflicts of priority or
authority... 30
Taken independently, of course, the power of publishers, promoters,

critics, or authors, and the respective value of their symbolic capital, is
insufficient to maintain absolute and unchallenged cultural authority,
just as no canon is formed by individual judgments, no matter how as-
sertive. However, if they are only weakly institutionalized when taken
individually, it does not follow that they are equally ineffective when
taken together, as an ensemble of institutions that are subject to common
historical and economic tendencies and that share certain structural
characteristics, in spite of their internal differences or sometimes dis-
parate evaluations. If some concession is made for their collective influ-
ence and cultural impact, especially as they are falling under increas-
ingly concentrated control, then the inflated rhetoric of a "total absence"
of arbitration must be qualified, as would the disingenuous belief that a
lack of consensus prevails today.
Although the theory of institutional weakness goes some way to ex-
plain the diversity of factors that affect literary esteem and perhaps, by
extension, the context of the current crisis of canonical legitimacy—since
no single group, institution, or field any longer commands sole conse-
crating authority—it also reveals the limitations of that explanation.
Bourdieu's account of increasing autonomization, the foundation of his
whole sociology of art, is incomplete. Underlying its otherwise historical
analysis is an unhistorical projection of the literary field of the nineteenth
century onto that of the twentieth, at the expense of perceiving how the
composition of cultural institutions and the mass media has changed in
recent years, not least with their monopolization or formation into multi-
national conglomerates and cartels. Instead of seeing the academic mo-
nopoly of consecration as having given way to nothing but "weakness"
and "anomie," it should be considered whether the collectivity of other
cultural institutions and media has instead replaced the former academic
monopoly with commercialism and commodity production. Insofar as
the reproduction of cultural and artistic works, including the adaptation
of classics into different forms, genres, and media, increasingly relies on
the industries of culture and the attention of the mass media, it seems
that cultural commodification has begum to fill the void. If that is the case,
then the consequences of leaving canonization in the hands of institu-
tions whose primary concern is profit rather than education—let alone
critical thinking—need to be examined.
The institutional process by which certain works of art become familiar
is related to Bourdieu's conception of symbolic "aging," according to
which consecrated works, by entering into the general culture and ac-
quiring symbolic value, can also become devalued, "fossilized," and
eventually supplanted by the work of younger artists:
The aging of authors, works or schools is something quite different from a

mechanical sliding into the past, it is engendered in the fight between those
who have already left their mark and are trying to endure, and those who
cannot make their own marks in stopping time, in eternalizing the present
state; between the dominants whose strategy is tied to continuity, identity
and reproduction, and the dominated, the new entrants, whose interest is in
discontinuity, rupture, difference and revolution.51
This process does more than simply explain canon formation as an ongo-
ing contest between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the novel and the
conventional. The concept of aging also implies that established works
can become "dated" and aesthetically neutralized when their potential to
offer anything new—to remain compelling or critical—is diminished. The
"wearing out of the effect" of canonical works, Bourdieu believes, "is pri-
marily the result of the routinization of production associated with the im-
pact of epigones and academicism, which even avant-garde movements
do not escape, and arises from the repeated and repetitive application of
proved procedures and the uninventive use of an art of inventing already
invented." 32 In other words, the very process of familiarization that con-
tributes to the canonization of particular works of art and literature also
leads to their neutralization, or "banalization." When they become so fa-
miliar that they are reduced to simple cliches, memorized in disconnected
segments in school, fetishized in lists of "greatest books," or regarded
merely as sources of pleasure and entertainment, literary classics risk los-
ing whatever makes them distinctive and distinguished, including their
aesthetic force or potential for critical knowledge. As far as it dehistori-
cizes selected texts by elevating them into a pantheon of canonical au-
thors, traditional humanistic and forrnalistic academic criticism also con-
tributes to their neutralization. 33 Because canonical works are indeed
often trivialized as filler for textbooks, used as resources for profit, or
pragmatically reduced to being vehicles for preaching "traditional" cul-
tural values (whether of dominant or marginal social groups), the concept
of aging is especially revealing of the contemporary canon debate.
Such aging is not only a matter of consumption and how works of art
are used; it can also affect the production and specific content of the works
themselves. When authors and artists remain attached to modes of pro-
duction that have become dated, Bourdieu writes, "when they lock them-
selves into patterns of perception or appreciation that become converted
into transcendent and eternal norms and so prohibit the acceptance or
even the perception of novelty," both their own work and that on which it
is modeled may become aesthetically sterile. 34 As much as they might
complement or promote the status of canonical literature, the formulaic
imitations of a literary classic can also dim its aesthetic power or distinc-
tiveness. The stories of Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, now seem almost ir-
retrievably old-fashioned and even tame in light of subsequent horror fic-
tion, just as the film adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte
Bronte, and George Eliot have rendered them almost indistinguishable
from soap opera kitsch. In effect, the emulation, proliferation, and increas-
ing commodification into different media that historical canonization re-
quires can also be its undoing. As far as it cripples artistic innovation, sti-
fles original interpretation, or suppresses critical understandings—merely
reproducing the style of canonical works or the values that they are
thought to embody—imitation has serious ideological repercussions. In
the following chapters, I demonstrate that such aesthetic neutralization is,
in part, what the critical aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno tries to come
to terms with. Before turning to that, however, in the next section I con-
sider the ways in which canonization as a form of cultural reproduction
may also reinforce the status quo by reproducing social relations.
Canon Formation and Social Relations

Although a sociological account of cultural production can illuminate
canon formation as a broad historical and institutional process, tracing
the means by which, out of innumerable published works, comparatively
few acquire distinction, some of those accounts have found that process
to have definite political and ideological implications. They have there-
fore looked in greater detail at the specific class functions of the canon,
particularly at the institutional site in which it has been claimed to derive
its authority. In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation,
John Guillory proposes a theory of canon formation that emphasizes the
use of canonical works in schools and their role in defining what consti-
tutes not just literature of exceptional quality but literature and literacy
per se, which in turn works to reproduce class distinctions.-'5 Unlike the
liberal-pluralist arguments he criticizes, Guillory's theory makes clear
"the relative absence of class as a working category of analysis in the
canon debate," and he suggests that the concept of cultural capital—de-
rived from Bourdieu's sociological model—provides the basis for a more
historical account of canon formation: "[Wjhile the debate seems to its
participants to be about the contents of the literary canon, its significance
goes well beyond the effects of any new consensus about a truly 'repre-
sentative' canon." Rather, the canon debate signifies "nothing less than a
crisis in the form of cultural capital we call 'literature'."
[T]he problem of what is called canon formation is best understood as a

problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital, or more
specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and con-

sumption. The "means" in question are provided by the school, which regu-
lates and thus distributes cultural capital unequally . . . by regulating access
to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.36
What distinguishes the current crisis of canonical legitimacy from oth-

ers, Guillory believes, is an unprecedented transformation of specific so-
cial relations, namely, the emergence of a technically trained profes-
sional-managerial class for whom "literature" designates the cultural
capital of "the old bourgeoisie." Literature is a form of capital that is "in-
creasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational sys-
tem" because it is marginal to the interests of the new class itself.37 Far
from indicating a "personal failure" on the part of individual teachers or
the "degenerate influence" of relativistic literary theories in the universi-
ties, the declining enrollment of students for degrees in the humanities
lamented by conservative critics is actually due to the decreasing value
or relevance of such degrees—and of canonical works themselves—in the
current economic climate, where job training and specialization are more
and more becoming the primary function of education. According to
Guillory, "the professional-managerial class has made the correct assess-
ment that, so far as its future is concerned, the reading of great works is
not worth the investment of very much time or money." Therefore, the
true context of the canon debate is neither the conflict between progres-
sive and nostalgic pedagogies, nor that between multiculturalism and
Western culturalism, but "the transformation of cultural capital in re-
sponse to social conditions." 38
The literary canon, however, does more than simply represent, or fail to
represent, the interests of dominant or aspiring classes. In Guillory's ac-
count, it actually helps to maintain and reproduce class differences by di-
rect and indirect means. "[I]n its concrete form as a syllabus or a curricu-
lum [sic], the canon is a discursive instrument of 'transmission' situated
historically within a specific institution of reproduction: the school." The
social function of the school is "the distribution of knowledge by means of
techniques of dissemination and rituals of credentialization." 39 Fluency in
such knowledge is dependent on acquired familiarity with or evident
mastery of the curriculum, and the institutional recognition thereof bene-
fits especially those who reach the higher echelons of formal education:
Canonical texts, institutionally preserved and disseminated, constitute the

paradigmatic basis of literary language, the guarantor at the lower educa-
tional levels of simple grammatical speech, the exemplar, at higher levels, of
more expansive as well as more elite standards of linguistic use (stylistic or
rhetorical rather than simply grammatical norms)... 40
As a sociological process, canon formation is "the institutional interven-

tion by which the literary curriculum becomes the pedagogic vehicle for
producing the distinction between credentialized and uncredentialized
speech." 41 In Guillory's thesis, then, the canon is not simply a neutral,
pragmatic device for organizing conceptions of literary history a la Frank
Kermode, a political ensign of unambigtious cultural identity, or a even
buttress to nationalist ideologies. More discreetly, it functions as a regula-
tor of access to literacy, the means of literary production and consump-
tion and therefore the means of social discrimination: "The literary canon
has always functioned in the schools as a pedagogic device for producing
an effect of linguistic distinction, of 'literacy'." 42 Because it is always his-
torically determined, culturally dependent, and unequally distributed,
literacy serves to distinguish the educated from the ignorant, the cul-
tured from the philistine, those with cultural capital from those without.
Guillory goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the historical defini-
tion of literacy both stems from and shapes the corpus of literary works
that came to be regarded as canonical. For example, the formation of the
English vernacular canon, he finds, was an effect of the translation of
classical notions of literacy to the primary schools of the eighteenth cen-
tury. The Newr Critics' revision of the canon redefined the cultural capital
produced by literary study in the university to conform to their own val-
ues of aesthetic modernism. And the "canon of theory" that developed in
the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century for postgraduate edu-
cation exhibits the "technobureaucratic" priorities characteristic of the
professional-managerial class. Each historical phase has in turn served to
determine degrees of linguistic, literary, and theoretical competence and
expertise at every level of education. Nevertheless, Guillory's specific
conception of both literacy and canonicity imposes certain limits on his
own theory of canon formation and its functions. He defines literacy as
"not simply the capacity to read b u t . . . the systematic regulation of reading
and writing"—including the production and consumption of literature—
"the systematic effects of the educational system in the determination of
who writes and who reads, as well as what gets read and in what con-
texts." 43 However, this definition remains so strictly tied to educational
institutions in isolation that the other institutional forms also operative in
canon formation are excluded from view: "The educational apparatus
regulates, because it makes possible, access to this inheritable treasure.
. . . There is no other access to works: they must be confronted as the cultural
capital of educational institutions."44 Guillory's conception of literacy is
therefore restricted almost entirely to that which is formally learned in offi-
cial institutions of education; but if the school has indeed become "the ex-
clusive agent for the dissemination of High Canonical works," then cul-
ture and education themselves become that which is only officially
sanctioned as such. 45 And although he otherwise adopts Bourdieu's soci-

ological model, Guillory does not consider whether the former academic
monopoly on consecration may have long since collapsed, giving way to
institutional weakness and "anomie," or may have been superseded by
the monopolization of industries of cultural production today, as dis-
cussed above.
That canonization is at least as much a function of artistic reproduction
is not given much credence either, and Guillory maintains that "authors
learn whom to read and how to judge in the schools," that they "confront
a monumentalized textual tradition already immersed as speakers and
writers in the social condition of linguistic stratification."*' Like Bourdieu
before him, in all cases it seems to Guillory that the formal literacy ac-
quired in educational institutions necessarily precedes cultural produc-
tion and aesthetic consciousness. Guillory's specific idea of literacy
thereby affects his conception of canonicity as well, such that an author
or work is truly canonical only when studied in schools: "Even the judge-
ment of recent but uncanonized work must eventually be validated in
the passage of writers into school curricula in order for one to speak of
canonicity. One should not forget that literary history is filled with the
names of writers whose high standing with other, more famous authors
was still insufficient to insure their canonicity."47 However, the history of
literary curricula provides no shortage of counter-examples of authors
and works that have indeed been taught in schools but that could hardly
be described as "canonical," unless the meaning of the term is stretched
beyond recognition. Peter Taylor's "The Fancy Woman" (1941), for exam-
ple, has apparently been used for teaching American literature, and par-
ticularly techniques of writing, 48 but is that sufficient by itself to make it
canonical? If one sign of canonization is imitation and rewriting—not in a
purely linguistic sense, but in a variety of forms and by those with or
without academic credentials—then its role in the constitution of literacy
is but one of its social functions and a work's place in the school curricu-
lum only one of its manifestations. Without offering an account of canon-
ization that is more than just a function of formal education—that in-
cludes the processes of cultural, symbolic, and material reproduction at
large—Guillory himself ultimate!}' confuses the canon with the syllabus,
in spite of his own claims to the contrary. 49
Apart from these shortcomings, and unlike the case for social repre-
sentation in the canon, Guillory at least recognizes that class distinctions
are fundamental to any concept of a literary canon. The question of ac-
cess to the means of literary production and consumption, of who is
granted the opportunity to read and write works of literature, let alone
interpret them, is logically prior to the question of which particular ex-
emplary works should "represent" which specific social constituencies.
In every society and culture, both education and artistic production

have been a social privilege, a product of the division of labor and class
relations. Any account of canon formation that leaves out this fact ends
up ideologically legitimizing and mystifying that division. Even though
Guillory takes the class function of literacy as the ultimate source of lit-
erary and canonical distinction, he does not give adequate consideration
to whether social hierarchy and material inequality—as much as the
promise of their transcendence—may be constitutive of artistic produc-
tion per $e, both literary and otherwise. Indeed, in sociological accounts
such as his, the specific content of works of art is discounted from the
start. The linguistic and symbolic capital that constitute literacy, Guil-
lory believes, are "ultimately more socially significant in their effects than
the 'ideological' content of literary works." Moreover, "the form we call
'literature' organizes the syllabus and determines criteria of selection
much more directly than the particular social biases of judgement which
have been invoked to explain the canonical or noncanonical status of
particular authors." 50 Of course, an account of canon formation that con-
fines itself to the immediate social "effects" of art will have little concern
for its specific content, especially where it is too abstract to have obvious
or "direct" social consequences. But to deem literacy and cultural capital
in general as "more socially significant" than the aesthetic content of in-
dividual works—even though the latter is less tangible than the social
uses to which canonical works are put—is to resort to dubious epistemo-
logical and methodological assumptions that Guillory's thesis simply
takes for granted. Among those assumptions is an empirical bias for the
social reception of art, the immediate impact of artworks, and the con-
scious—that is, "learned"—intentions of authors. None of these factors,
however, need be considered the only or even the most significant as-
pect of canonical art.
That Guillory avoids considering the qualitative content of particular
works is partly because his purely sociological vantage does not discern
any single aesthetic property to be exclusive to an individual work of art.
Indeed, in his theory, the very conception of a "work of art" is nothing
more than a result of the circulation of cultural capital, the product of
judgments made by those with socially recognized credentials such as
education, training, or expertise in art history, interpretation, and criti-
cism: "[WJhen aesthetic artifacts are certified as 'works of art', they be-
come the bearers of cultural capital, and as such are unequally distrib-
uted." However, Guillory insists, "the aesthetic is not simply identical to
the form of cultural capital embodied by works of art." 51 Herein lies the
crux of Guillory's argument. The problem of the literary canon is not re-
ally about which particular works it comprises, nor about their specific
content, but about hoiv the aesthetic as such is perceived and defined. Because
"the relation between the aesthetic and the work of art cannot be defined
as their absolute distinction any more than the experience of the aesthetic
can be identified exclusively with the experience of a work of art," Guil-
lory finds the whole discourse of the canon debate to be founded on the
"illusion" that works of art are uniquely aesthetic:
[S]o far as the object of sociology is concerned, nothing exists besides the
cultural capital embodied on the one hand in the aesthetic disposition, and
on the other in the cultural products judged according to the criteria inter-
nalized as the aesthetic disposition. It is easy enough to recognize here the
largest effect of the discourse of canonicity: the illusion that aesthetic experi-
ence is really restricted to the experience of High Cultural works.52
To move away from this deception, an idea of aesthetic "experience"

broadly conceived is substituted in lieu of the concept of aesthetic
"value" which, Guillory shows, has historically been bestowed upon
works of art only since the eighteenth century, when it came to be distin-
guished from specifically economic conceptions of value. The conflation of
these two historically distinct notions of value today has led to the ten-
dency in the current debate to regard any attribution of aesthetic value as
ideological, either for disguising economic interests or for claiming as
universal evaluations that are actually culturally arid historically contin-
gent. 53 In contrast, Guillory argues that "the ubiquity of aesthetic experi-
ence" is such that it "utterly pervades the field of cultural production"
and is neither simply ideological nor wholly relative. Instead, he finds
that the "daily life" of an individual, whose preferences are greatly deter-
mined by objective social relations such as class, is "pervaded by innu-
merable and various aesthetic expressions, from the clothing he wears to
the situation comedies which entertain him in the evenings." 34
So capacious an idea of aesthetics, however, is problematic when
placed in the context of the canon debate. One consequence of discount-
ing the role of artistic reproduction in canon formation and confining it
exclusively to schools is that Guillory loses sight of the fact that works of
art are precisely what are at stake as far as the literary canon is con-
cerned. Certainly, anything from clothing and food to physical stimula-
tion and the natural world can be said to have aesthetic qualities, but in
what sense could these things be thought of as "canonical" or constitut-
ing a canon? In contrast to aesthetics as such, the very idea of a canon is
historically and quite specifically bound to the qualitative production of
works on the model of other works. Yet, for Guillory, the canonical or non-
canonical status of a work is simply a function of ascribing a high mea-
sure of aesthetic value to it, regardless of its particular content or its his-
torical impact on subsequent cultures: "[I]f it were possible to think of the
aesthetic without also thinking of value, we would in effect have dis-

carded the concept of the 'work of art' as we know it. For that object is by
definition the embodiment of a quantum of aesthetic value." 55 Whether or
not value is truly inseparable from the assessment or definition of art, in
this hypothesis the work is reduced to an abstract quantity at the expense
of its individual qualities or qualitative content, including its particular
formal characteristics and the specific techniques of its material produc-
tion. In his effort to clarify the social logic of distinction, therefore, Guil-
lory ends up abrogating the qualitative distinction of art itself: There is
nothing necessarily unique about the aesthetic content of canonical
works because there is nothing distinctive about works of art at all; the
aesthetic is distributed throughout a vast range of experiences, none of
which is more significant than any other.56 This concept of the aesthetic is
ultimately vacuous. If it were true, then canonical works that have per-
meated a range of cultures for generations, if not centuries or millennia,
would be virtually indistinguishable from personal tastes in fashion and
television shows, except that the former cany an ideological burden and
the latter, supposedly, do not.
The materia] conditions of this situation are recognized by Guillory
himself to be the increasing commodification of cultural production, par-
ticularly in Western societies. The contemporary crisis of canonical legiti-
macy is largely owing to the pervasiveness of an economic process by
which all products, artistic and otherwise, are measured by quantitative
value or reduced to an abstract equivalence for the sake of economic ex-
change. The fact that "works of art continue to be exchanged in the mar-
ketplace as commodities which are commensurable with other commodi-
ties" has become—indeed has long been—"the inescapable horizon of
social life," perhaps especially in the United States, where the canon de-
bate has been most pronounced. 57 Yet the commodification of culture also
accelerates the processes of reproduction by which more and more works
become widely familiar and institutionalized, increasingly eroding the
difference between the canonical and non-canonical, as well as between
works of art and aesthetic experience in general. If the academic monop-
oly of canonical consecration has indeed been broken, as Bourdieu be-
lieves, then the extent to which the industries and media of cultural re-
production have taken its place must also be considered. Beyond
Guillory's thesis, therefore, the contemporary canon debate signifies
more than the rise of a technically trained professional class with little
need for the literary monuments of an earlier bourgeois era. Instead, due
to commodification's blurring of qualitative distinctions for the sake of
economic exchange, the critical judgment of art seems to have become in-
capacitated.
Whither Aesthetics?
By understanding how artistic reproduction, cultural familiarity, histori-
cal cumulativity, and the social relations of production are all essential to
canon formation, the sociological theories reviewed above reveal the
material constraints of canon formation. If the social mechanisms of that
process are recognized, then the humanistic idealizations of the literary
canon as irreproachable or timeless should be tempered, if not refuted.
Equally, if the extent of historical reproduction and institutionalization
necessary for any work to become canonical is appreciated, then the lib-
eral-pluralist claims to alter the canon or spontaneously create alterna-
tive ones will also be understood to be idealistic insofar as they, too, ne-
glect those constraints.
Because canonization requires cultural dissemination and artistic re-
production, the degree to which the commodification of art and culture
affects canon formation must be factored into any account of the literary
canon. Although some critics have remarked that the commodification of
marginalized cultures has indeed contributed to the recognition and can-
onization of authors and books that would otherwise have remained ne-
glected, they have generally treated it as no more significant than other
factors, such as their establishment within academia. 58 But if the aca-
demic monopoly on literary consecration—if indeed there ever was
one—has actually eroded since the nineteenth century, then factors such
as cultural commodification may now play an even greater role in canon-
ization than academic institutionalization.
For all their insight into the processes by which certain works are made
culturally familiar and canonized, however, sociological accounts of
canon formation take these processes to be the social or political limit of
canonicity. Although they do, at least in principle, push the debate be-
yond purely academic discourse, they also reveal their own limitations
regarding the specific content of individual works. In particular, socio-
logical conceptions of the aesthetic find that to distinguish qualitatively
between canonical and non-canonical works, or between art and aes-
thetic experience in general, is always and necessarily ideological for
mystifying social relations in the name of detached "judgment." Guillory,
for instance, believes that the canon serves primarily to reproduce social
relations and perpetuate class distinctions via standards of literacy, and
Bourdieu barely considers the qualitative content of works of art at all
(see Chapter 5). Such conclusions implicitly or explicitly rule out the pos-
sibility that the aesthetic can also have a distinctive, non-ideological, cog-
nitive content, and that individual canonical works can thereby also have
a unique critical potential, subverting the status quo by pointing beyond
it. In Part 2,1 show how critical theory, and especially Theodor Adorno's
aesthetic theory, goes beyond the limitations of sociology.
Even though sociological theory does much to correct the idealistic as-
sumptions prevalent in the current canon debate, sociological theorists
say nothing about the instrumental or pragmatic justifications of art that
have also been shown to be characteristic of this debate. Chapter 4 shows
how critical theory's unique conception of art establishes a framework
through which a critique can be mounted of such instrumental and prag-
matic justifications. It also sets the stage for a further critique of sociolog-
ical accounts of canon formation that leave out the aesthetic content of
works of art and literature. Without succumbing to the limitations of con-
servative humanism, liberal pluralism, or sociological empiricism, criti-
cal theory provides a reading of art in modern societies that can be ex-
tended to both the nature of canon formation and the prevailing
assumptions about it.
PART TWO
Critical Aesthetic Theory

4
Critical Theory and Canonical Art
That tlte work of art lives on is due to the very moments that are suppressed when it is
elevated to the Pantheon.
—Theodor Adorno,
"On the Classicism of Goethe's Iphigenie" (1967)
The preceding chapters have illustrated the contours of the current situa-
tion regarding the literary canon and exposed certain key assumptions in
the rhetoric within the contemporary debate. To move beyond the ideal-
ism and narrow academicism of this debate, sociological theories of cul-
tural reproduction were used to highlight the material conditions and
constraints of canon formation. The sociological approach, however, re-
veals its own limitations when the social and institutional aspects of
canon formation are emphasized at the expense of the specific content of
individual works. Whereas liberal-pluralist and conservative-humanist
arguments have tended to neglect the concrete means by which certain
works become canonical, the materialism of sociology tends by contrast
to empty such works of any social purpose beyond the reproduction of
the status quo; the canon is redticed to being little more than a function of
class distinction. What is not sufficiently considered in either approach is
whether the very concept of art under modern socioeconomic conditions
has far more radical implications when not limited to pedagogical func-
tions or immediate political interests.
The purpose of this chapter is to construct an argument for the aes-
thetic content of works of art by appealing to the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School, and particularly the aesthetic theory of Theodor
Adorno. The first section provides an exposition of those aspects of his
theory that are most relevant to the literary canon, with specific attention
to the critical role of art in modern capitalist societies. I then demonstrate
83
84 Critical Theory and Canonical Art
how the explicitly political justifications for revising the canon, as well as
the instrumental applications of works of art in general, can be subject to
a dialectical and materialist critique. Contrary to pluralist arguments for
opening the canon on the grounds of social representation or pragma-
tism, Adorno makes the case that only the historical autonomy of art—free
from social, political, and practical obligations—is truly and substan-
tively critical of current social relations, and that any explicit political
content, or direct political application, of socially "committed" art actu-
ally ends u p serving the social order it ostensibly seeks to overcome.
Although originally articulated in response to the works of Bertolt Brecht
and the theories of Georg Lukacs, among others, this idea remains strik-
ingly pertinent to the canon debate today.
Finally, to show that critical theory does not simply defend the estab-
lished canon of Western literature nor automatically exclude works that
have not historically been regarded as canonical, I examine in detail a no-
tion of canonical change that is implicit to Adorno's and Walter
Benjamin's theories of art. Essentially, the image of configurations, or
"constellations," may be taken as a metaphor for canon formation itself.
The attempt to read the aesthetic content of canonical works against
the grain of critical orthodoxy or empirical sociology, with particular ref-
erence to class, capitalism, and materialism, is hardly unique to critical
theory. However, its distinctive conception of history and modernity—
and how they are inscribed in individual works of art—sets critical the-
ory apart from other schools of interpretation, including those that ap-
pear on the surface to be quite similar, such as traditional Marxist or
socialist literary criticism. It is hoped that this half of the book will also
help to distinguish it further.
Aesthetic Autonomy and Radical Critique

A founding claim of critical theory is that society is increasingly adminis-
tered in such a way as to compel social and intellectual conformity in
every sphere of life.1 Modem advances in the industrial reproduction of
culture are seen as wielding tremendous influence on consciousness and
effectively accommodating opposition to the status quo. 2 The critique, or
"refusal," of modern capitalistic industrial society is therefore taken as a
form of resistance. Critical theory locates one avenue of potential resis-
tance in the work of art, although without harboring any delusions about
its actual impact in the face of such a totalizing society. Because canonical
works of art are those that have become culturally institutionalized, as
explained in the preceding chapter, and especially because they are being
forced to fit into a "mosaic" of cultural diversity, as seen in Chapter 2,
they are no more exempt from accommodation and administration than
Critical Theory and Canonical Art 85
any other aspect of culture. In that case, what Marcuse writes of culture
in general could be applied to the literary canon today: "The absorbent
power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antag-
onistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests
itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory
works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference." 3 To the extent that
they are autonomous, however, works of art also provide a critique of the
society that would absorb them.
In his posthumous book, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno traces aesthetic au-
tonomy as historically derived from art's partial liberation from its ear-
lier cultic functions, which coincided with the emancipation of rational
thought from the superstitions of the mythical world during the
European Enlightenment. Because the concept of autonomy is a function
of "the bourgeois consciousness of freedom," its social origins are based
on class relations. 4 The historical development of art beyond religious
iconography and the imitation of nature, for example, depended on three
factors: the relative autonomy of the artist from the burden of common
wage-labor, which expanded his or her creative potential; the imagina-
tive, non-conformist perspective on the world that such independence af-
fords; and the peculiar space occupied by the artwork in cultural institu-
tions, which in turn allows the exceptional interpretative latitude that
commentators have traditionally ascribed to art. However, to the extent
that artworks are granted a special status as "Art," autonomy has also
contributed to their fetish character, an irrational devotion that has sup-
plied opponents of the Western canon with no shortage of reasons to
denounce it.
Due to its social quality, its dependence on the division of labor, and
the fetish character of its objects, aesthetic autonomy is never "pure" or
fully realized. Indeed, the autonomy of art in modernity is partly owing
to the commodification of culture in general because cultural artifacts are
treated, exchanged, and consumed as products not unlike those of mod-
ern industry, as Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital suggests. In
Adorno's aesthetic theory, "the absolute artwork converges with the ab-
solute commodity." Therefore, even autonomous works cannot be
wholly free from socioeconomic constraints. Art is not fully autonomous
because "absolute freedom in art" contradicts "the perennial unfreedom
of the social whole." Because art is always socially produced, its distance
from society can only ever be partial. Nevertheless, a degree of autonomy
from immediate social interests remains, albeit residually, in spite of ef-
forts to force individual works into various political roles, whether con-
servative or liberal, reactionary or progressive. And although it is neces-
sarily circumscribed or "shattered" as long as society itself remains
unfree, artistic autonomy "remains irrevocable," an irreversible historical
fact.5 This point is crucial to the critique of political art and its relevance
to the literary canon.
Apart from its social and historical origins, aesthetic autonomy is the
basis for what is perhaps the most vital aspect of art to critical theory: an
intrinsic opposition to a society dominated by destructive instrumental
rationality and founded on pervasive social injustice. This critical per-
spective furnishes art with its unique cognitive content, its capacity for
being a valid form of knowledge, revealing certain historical truths about
the world that other forms of knowledge, such as scientific or empirical
forms, either inherently cannot provide or would approach in qualita-
tively different ways. Because the work of art criticizes reality, it repre-
sents "negative knowledge of reality."6 As a unique form of critical in-
sight it acquires the capacity for being true, of illuminating both the
material conditions of society and its inherent contradictions. Thus, "the
truth content of artworks is fused with their critical content." 7 In particu-
lar, the truth content of art combines critical knowledge of economic rela-
tions that alienate people and the products of their labor into readily
transferable objects, a critique of society and the existent world at large,
and even a self-reflexive critique—an attack on the work of art itself. The
first is an indictment of social relations that are reduced to the status of
commodity exchange in which the irreducible individtiality of artworks
is violated. "On behalf of what cannot be exchanged," Adorno writes, art
must "bring the exchangeable to critical self-consciousness." In other
words, "artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer dis-
torted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity." 8
This theme is largely in keeping with the traditional Marxist opposition
between use-value and exchange-value, wherein the latter comes to pre-
dominate especially under the socioeconomic conditions of bourgeois
capitalism, although it would be inaccurate simply to equate critical the-
ory with Marxist orthodoxy.
Art stands as a critique not only of the exchange principle, but also of
society per se, insofar as the latter is organized on that principle. It is "the
social antithesis of society," of society in its present guise. 9 The work of
art remains effectively critical because it is simultaneously social and au-
tonomous, thoroughly implicated in the society that it criticizes.
According to Adorno, "art exists in reality, has its function in it, and is
also inherently mediated with reality in many ways. But nevertheless, as
art, by its very concept it stands in an antithetical relationship to the sta-
tus quo." Art is social by its "opposition to society," but it occupies this
position only as autonomous art; "it criticizes society by merely exist-
ing." 10 This critique becomes an indictment of what passes for "reality,"
of the status quo mentality that naturalizes given circumstances, how-
ever unjust or inhumane: "Today the socially critical aspects of artworks
have become opposition to empirical reality as such because the latter

has become its own self-duplicating ideology, the quintessence of domi-
nation." 11 The pervasive ideology of empiricism, of taking the world as it
is found—the political expression of which is evident in pragmatism and
the methodological influence of which appears in sociology—requires
the most emphatic critical moment, a determinate negation of all that
simply exists, especially when it excludes the possibility of what does not
yet exist, of what could be. The potential of negation is expressed in
Adorno's aesthetic theory as the implicit Utopian quality of art: "[T]he
constellation of the existing and nonexisting is the utopic figure of art." 12
The motif of Utopia in critical theory is as central as it is necessarily in-
explicit. It tends to work as a counter-factual signpost, guiding thought
from the actual to the possible: "[T]he fact that artworks exist signals the
possibility of the nonexisting. The reality of artworks testifies to the pos-
sibility of the possible." 13 In the face of the empirical world, the very exis-
tence of art, of that which has no immediate use-value, is almost miracu-
lous. Its very being—or, rather, continual becoming —is enough to cast a
glimmer of something beyond the given, to reveal the possibility of life
free from sheer necessity. Indeed, one comes to understand the most pro-
found implications of art only by contemplating its immaterial, Utopian
content: "If thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on
the basis that something in reality, something back of the veil spun by the
interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and
that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides." 14
The hidden side of reality is art's promesse du bonheur, the suggestion of
a world without social antagonism, material want, or prescribed needs.
However, because the Utopian moment of art is manifest only in appear-
ances, as illusion, even aesthetic freedom is not innocent of ideology:
"Stendhal's dictum of art as the promesse du bonheur implies that art does
its part for existence by accentuating what in it prefigures Utopia. B u t . . .
because all happiness found in the status quo is ersatz and false, art must
break its promise in order to stay true to it."15 Consequently, the affirma-
tive content of art is always suspect because, by both opposing the exis-
tent and promising a glimpse of Utopia, it also threatens to deny or di-
minish the actuality of social injustice, providing mere "representations
of fulfilment" in its stead. 16 As long as domination persists in society and
nature—including the division of labor that art is dependent on—the aes-
thetic promise must be broken, provoking an awareness of its social guilt,
an injunction against itself. This insight bears on the current situation be-
cause to affirm canonical works as essentially objects of reverence or cele-
bration, whether for the culturally hegemonic or marginalized, is to dis-
regard art's inherent burden, the injustices of history that are masked by
hollow veneration.
M Critical Theory and Canonical Art
In a famous passage that is often quoted but usually taken at face

value, Walter Benjamin exhumes the collusion with cruelty and oppres-
sion that lies beneath the surface of every cultural artifact, even the most
esteemed works of art. To Benjamin, the "cultural treasures" of civiliza-
tion, the "spoils" of history, cannot be appreciated without horror be-
cause "they owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds
and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of
their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism." Moreover, "barbarism taints
also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to an-
other," because all works that are celebrated or affirmed from one gener-
ation to the next exist in the continuum of history that is fraught with
struggle, misery, and injustice. 17 The division of labor that allows the
artist the means of aesthetic production but only a tiny fraction of hu-
manity to perceive the true social and historical import of art also pre-
vents the vast majority from realizing their own creative potential,
which is likewise attenuated by the division of labor. It blocks an under-
standing of why the very production of art expresses something more
than mere social privilege.
Critics who would use Benjamin's insight as a slogan with which to
dislodge canonical literature from its pedestal fail to realize that it cen-
sures not merely canonical "treasures" but any and all cultural artifacts
that are idolized, whether paraded as ensigns of a unique social identity
and cultural heritage or revered as fixed landmarks of a universal and
immutable tradition. Nor is Benjamin's concept of "civilization" to be
taken ironically, as if to connote only Western, white patriarchy and its
canon, as either feminists or postcolonial theorists might argue. Instead,
it broadly designates all hitherto existing societies and cultures, each of
which has been constitutively hierarchical and socially oppressive. When
canonical works are discounted by exposing their explicit or implicit
prejudices—whether misogyny in Milton's work, phallocentrism in
Lawrence's, or elitism in Eliot's—the wider social implications of their
very standing as canonical literature are reduced for the sake of isolating
individual ideological components. 18 But the social stratification to which
the stature of canonical works points can itself lapse into uncritical affir-
mation if it is emphasized at the cost of their negative, critical content.
Like certain vulgar Marxists, Benjamin could be accused of sentimental-
izing the "struggling, oppressed class" as the true "depository of histori-
cal knowledge." 19 In contrast, Adorno is more cautious of the possibility
that "sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with
degradation," especially if, in the name of faithfully registering social in-
equality, tine promise of artworks is forgotten and the existing antagonis-
tic world is inadvertently validated, in spite of intentions to the contrary.
Art that makes social injustice its explicit subject matter risks trivializing
real human suffering for the sake of aesthetic expression. That is why
"the artwork is not only an echo of suffering, it diminishes it," too. 20
If the ideological characteristics of art are recalled, then the inescapable
culpability of art becomes clearer. Owing to the division of labor, artistic
production achieves a measure of autonomy, but it also reinforces that di-
vision. Autonomy enables a critical perspective on the social totality, but
it also relies on a notion of freedom derived from bourgeois individual-
ism. Although art's Utopian content preserves the promise of social trans-
formation, it also jeopardizes consciousness of injustice if it merely sym-
pathizes with the victims, rather than denouncing the source of their
suffering. So thoroughly does critical theory expose any vestige of ideol-
ogy that it even challenges the idea that art can be understood in purely
aesthetic terms, without constant awareness of its social situation and
collusion with injustice. The maxim that "art perceived strictly aestheti-
cally is art aesthetically misperceived" implies much more than a simple
amendment to the "disinterestedness" of Kant's Critique of Judgement, the
nineteenth-century attitude of 1'art pour I'art, or sociology's latter-day cri-
tique of the "pure gaze." The actuality of a purely aesthetic understand-
ing, like that of an ideologically untainted work, is precisely what the so-
cial debt and guilt of art necessarily refutes.21
The aesthetic thus occupies an extraordinarily delicate position: "If art
cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the machinations of the sta-
tus quo; if art remains strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integra-
tion as one harmless domain among others." 2 2 Whether social or au-
tonomous, ideological or pure, celebrated or condemned, artworks are in
constant danger of being politically accommodated and aesthetically
neutralized, thereby losing what may be their greatest critical import.
Both critics of and apologists for the literary canon underestimate the
depth of this predicament. When liberal critics dissolve the autonomy of
art within society so as to expose and denounce the ideological complic-
ity and elitism of the canon, they sacrifice the radically critical perspec-
tive that artworks afford only to the extent that they are autonomous. A
critique of the social totality—the whole stratified social order and its
economic rationale—is abandoned in favor of showing how individual
social groups have been inadequately represented in literary history and
school curricula. Of course, such omissions are taken as symbolic of the
wider lack of representation in society at large, within all its institutions,
but the specific arguments for opening the canon, as reviewed in Chapter
2, have not been made in tandem with a critique of the division of labor
that permeates society on every level and that is a condition for the pro-
duction of art itself, including that of women, homosexuals, and ethnic
minorities. Alternatively, when the Western canon is justified on the tra-
ditional grounds of exemplary aesthetic value or cultural enlightenment,

the inescapable social guilt of art is simply ignored, if not denied.
The shortcomings of these positions may be clarified with reference to
a key concept of critical theory: the relation of the universal and the par-
ticular. All artworks involve a dialectic through which "the particular
becomes universal." Indeed, "the dialectical postulate that the particular
is the universal has its model in art." 23 A work affords critical insight
when it is understood within the totality of its social and historical situa-
tion, "in and through all its mediations, not in its individual inten-
tions." 24 Tracing the particular characteristics of any distinctive work—
the unique aspects of its form and content, the materials and techniques
of its construction—is the means by which interpretation yields "theo-
retical insight," or the "good universality that does not leave the particu-
lar out but rather preserves it."25 For example, the objective, social con-
tent of lyric poetry—along with the novel, perhaps the bourgeois
literary genre par excellence—is discerned through its most subjective,
idiosyncratic qualities: "even the solitariness of lyrical language itself is
prescribed by an individualistic and ultimately atomistic society."
Therefore, "reflection on the work of art is justified in inquiring, and ob-
ligated to inquire concretely into its social content." 26 Analogously, the
sense of isolation in Dostoevsky's work, or the solipsism of Proust's, is
"socially mediated and essentially historical in substance." 27 In critical
aesthetic theory, literature is limited neither to its overtly social subject
matter nor to the individual interests or conscious intentions of its au-
thors. Instead, critical theory perceives that "the entirety of society, con-
ceived as an internally contradictory unity," is manifest in every work,
in both its formal features and the social conditions of its production. 28
Artworks, no matter how unique, necessarily possess elements of social
universality, but an effective critique will also construe the truth content
of a work's particularity, its most singular characteristics. Indeed, in
Adorno's words, "the principium individuationis, . .. which implies the
need for the aesthetically particular," is "universal as a principle in its
own right." 29 Conversely, the universal qualities that disclose the objec-
tive totality of social and historical mediation are realized "only in and
through particular situations in their finiteness and fallibility." 30 In
short, every work must be interpreted individually rather than having
preconceived, abstract theoretical schema or predetermined political ap-
plications forced on it from without.
Despite the dialectical relationship of the universal and the particular
in every work of art, their unity is abrogated and necessarily "fails" as
long as society remains socially divided against itself.31 In this context,
the claim that canonical works such as Shakespeare's tragedies are sim-
ply "universal" is false to the extent that it glosses over peculiar elements
that contradict that claim, including the social caste of characters within
them or the very language in which they are written. Imposing an artifi-
cial universality on canonical works of art ends up serving only the ideo-
logical interests of the claimants. The opposite extreme, however, is no
better. "Particularity in the bad sense," which emphasizes "the antago-
nistic interests of individuals," is evident today in the assumption that
certain works can only or primarily represent specific social groups, such
as women, African Americans, or European males. If the culturally spe-
cific elements of artworks are emphasized at the expense of their univer-
sal social content, that assumption is equally ideological. 32 As shown in
Chapter 2, the emphasis on interest group politics, although confirming
certain objective social divisions like racial or gender differences, inad-
vertently legitimizes other social divisions, such as class hierarchy and
the division of labor on which it is based.
Although "artworks are, a priori, socially culpable," Adorno suggests
that "each one that deserves its name seeks to expiate this guilt." To do
so, works of art bear witness to human misery and social injustice.
Suffering, not celebration, is the "humane content" of art. 33 Like
Benjamin's "angel of history," art cannot look forward without glancing
back. "The reality of artworks testifies to the possibility of the possible,"
but at the same time, "the object of art's longing, the reality of what is
not, is metamorphosed in art as remembrance." 34 hi distinctive ways that
vary from work to work according to specific content, true art embodies
the "remembrance of accumulated horror," the historical memory of "ac-
cumulated suffering"—not of one or another individual social group, but
of humanity as a fragmented whole. 35 If the promesse du bonheur implies
that "art does its part for existence," then remembrance of injustice is
part of the debt to history which, along with the current productive ca-
pacity, is the basis of Utopian promise. 36 Benjamin implicitly qualifies
Utopian aspirations that are without this sense of debt: "Like every gen-
eration that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic
power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be set-
tled cheaply." 37 As Habermas writes of Benjamin's conception of history:
To all past epochs he ascribes a horizon of unfulfilled expectations, and to

the future-oriented present he assigns the task of experiencing a correspond-
ing past through remembering . . . [Ejach respective present generation
bears the responsibility not only for the fate of future generations but also
for the innocently suffered fate of past generations. 38
The obligation to the past, hope for the future, and critical demands on the
present cannot be forgotten in striving for a truly rational and qualita-
tively just, as opposed to formally equal, society. Ultimately, the debt to all
those who have suffered can only be paid by a reconciled future, in which
all irrational and arbitrary social antagonisms, not only a select few,
would be overcome and humanity would become truly emancipated.
Adorno suggests that a liberated, reconciled humanity may someday
be able to devote itself to the art of the past without guilt and thus "make
amends to the dead." 39 The intention, of course, is radically Utopian. Like
works of art themselves, the critical theory of art will indict reality, or the
current form of society, until art's promise is fulfilled, for "the idea of
art's implacable efforts has reconciliation as its end." 40 However, al-
though art clings to the promise of reconciliation even "in the midst of
the unreconciled," Adorno maintains that, for the sake of reconciliation,
"authentic works must blot out every trace of reconciliation in mem-
ory."41 Like the promesse du bonheur that is broken by the continuing real-
ity of barbarism and universal injustice, the reconciliation of irrational
social antagonisms is impossible as long as current social relations and
material conditions persist as they are, for "erecting truth directly amid
the general untruth . . . perverts the former into the latter."42 Only when
economic exploitation, the division of labor, and the domination of in-
strumental rationality and its ideology of pragmatism are vanquished
might true social reconciliation transpire. Only then would art cease to be
fetishized as inertly canonical, idealistically revered, appropriated as a
pedagogical tool, or employed as a useful pawn of cultural politics.
To anticipate an objection, it could be argued that the literature of his-
torically marginalized groups, perhaps even more than that traditionally
regarded as canonical, does indeed raise the specter of guilt, indict unjust
social relations, and attempt to record and redeem the historical suffering
of generations past, often even making these its explicit subject matter. In
spite of the best intentions, however, this argument is potentially ideo-
logical itself, as explained below.
The Dialectic of Aesthetics and Politics

Because historical injustice is constitutive of true works of art, the plain-
tiffs against the Western canon seem to be justified in wanting it opened
to those that have been marginalized, whether out of historical neglect or
active prejudice. Although scrutinized in methodological terms in Part 1,
the political justifications for inclusion of marginalized works have yet to
be examined from the perspective of critical theory. First, it must be un-
derstood that the cognitive truth content of artworks, like the utopic fig-
ure of art, is manifest only indirectly and abstractly, an enigma that de-
mands critical, philosophical interpretation to bring it to light.43 Critical
theory attempts to preserve non-identity, or true particularity, in the face
of empirical identity tliinking that conforms to the practical needs of an
administered society and that simultaneously mystifies and legitimizes

prevailing socioeconomic conditions. Art's own critique of these condi-
tions is emphatically negative: "To survive reality at its most extreme and
grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must
equate themselves with that reality." 41 Indeed, this is the historical
essence of aesthetic modernism and of any work that would remain criti-
cally distinctive in modernity: "[A]rt is modern art through mimesis of
the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a
mute reality, does art become eloquent." 43
To appreciate the relevance of critical theory to the contemporary liter-
ary canon debate, it is imperative to understand the concept of moder-
nity as a qualitative, not a chronological, category.16 Dialectical material-
ism recognizes an historical differential between the general forces of
production and the development of the cultural "superstructure" (to use
the conventional terminology), insofar as the latter remains relatively au-
tonomous of its material and economic "base." hi Marx's famous obser-
vation, "certain periods of the highest development of art stand in no di-
rect connection to the general development of society, or to the material
basis and skeleton structure of its organization." 47 In other words, the
most modern or advanced works of art are those that transcend the rou-
tine modes and materials of production, whose aesthetic form is distinct
from more common forms, either at the time of their inception or in peri-
ods thereafter. It is therefore not anachronistic to detect modern traits in
pre-modern or classical art, just as modern works are likely to bear cer-
tain "classical" traits, because they are historically entwined. According
to Simon Jarvis, in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment
the terms ancient and modern "do not designate given and radically sepa-
rate categories, but are concepts which each rely on their counterpart if
they are to have any meaning at all." 48 It is because of this that Adorno
and Horkheimer are able to read the instrumental rationality of the mod-
ern bourgeoisie out of the ancient canonical myth of Odysseus. Another
example is Adomo's assessment of Friedrich Holderlin's poetry as proto-
typically modern, despite being written in the early nineteenth century. 19
The interrelation of the modern and the ancient, the relevant and the out-
moded, is thus the basis of art's unfolding truth content. It may also be
the hidden rationale of canon formation in general (see below).
Contrary to a widespread misconception, then, critical theory is not
solely concerned with "modernist" works as such but with artistic forms
of the past that must be read from the standpoint of modernity. As Peter
Burger has remarked of Adomo's aesthetic theory, "the art of the past can
be understood only in the light of modern art." 50 Because they continue
to be reproduced in different forms and rewritten into the present, canon-
ical works are especially affected by the dialectic of history in which past
and present converge. With the material transformations of artistic tech-

nique, the history of artistic forms has been irrevocably affected, as evi-
denced, for example, by the impact of atonal composition in Western mu-
sic, Cubism in painting, and the "stream of consciousness" technique in
the modern novel. The obvious multicultural objection—that these forms
are characteristic only of Western art, unique to Europe, the United
States, and their environs—is true only to the extent that "Western" tech-
nology, institutions, economic systems, means of production, and forms
of rationality have not permeated the globe, colonizing in varying de-
grees even those cultures that had once been remote.
In ways that are distinct in every case, the most resonant art necessar-
ily bears modern characteristics. Indirectness and mediation, negativity
and fragmentation, as well as abstractness, dissonance, and difficulty
have all become the marks of art in modernity, the source of its secular-
ized, enigmatic quality. The collocation of any of these within individual
works betrays the crisis of meaning of art in general, its evasion of simple
or direct content, which is why authentic works of art cannot be "boiled
down to some unmistakable 'message'." 51 Artworks are akin to riddles
because their meaning is blocked, because they stand at a distance from
the reality they signify, providing at best only non-discursive "answers"
or promises as to their meaning or purpose. The negative, abstract, and
fragmentary forms are repercussions of the socially mediated and corn-
modified character of art, the last refuge of autonomy when culture itself
has become thoroughly absorbed by a capitalism based less on a nomi-
nally "free market" than on global monopolization and the homogeniz-
ing principle of exchange. "Asociality" becomes the social legitimation of
art because in a pragmatic, administered society, art "embodies what
does not allow itself to be managed and what total management sup-
presses." 52 This is the basis of Adorno's critique of committed, or explic-
itly political, art, a critique that hinges on the idea of art without immedi-
ate social or political functions.
In The Critique of Judgement, Kant proposes that true judgments of taste,
and specifically aesthetic judgments, are "disinterested." Adorno both
extends and refutes this claim by arguing on the contrary that aesthetic
judgments are inevitably interested, even if only obliquely. Works of art
are "purposeless" because they endeavor to fall "outside the means-ends
relation of empirical reality." If culture and its products are dominated by
commodity exchange and judged on the grounds of their social utility—
that is, justified in pragmatic terms—then the critical truth content of art
will reside precisely in its uselessness: "[T]he function of art in the totally-
functional world is its functionlessness." 53 In other words, art criticizes
society not by active intervention but by merely existing. Easily mistaken
for complacency, this is, rather, a silent protest, "an apolitical stance that
is in fact highly political," especially in the noisy arena of cultural poli-

tics, where artworks are ratified in the name of vested interests and
claimed to serve individual social groups. Through its functionless pres-
ence, its dissociation from immediacy, and its refusal of practical utility,
"the unqualified autonomy of works that refrain from adaptation to the
market involuntarily becomes an attack," a critique of the totality of so-
cial relations that involves much more than social identity and its repre-
sentation. 5 ' Of course, like the inevitably partial character of aesthetic au-
tonomy, the purely functionless artwork is at best an ideal, because it is
always already infused with social content. Nevertheless, the concept of
the uselessness of art preserves a fundamental critique of society, both
because idealism itself provides a kind of corrective in the face of the
dominant ideology of pragmatism, and because the dialectical method to
which it is historically linked erodes any static distinction between the-
ory and practice, the ideal and the real, the universal and the particular,
or the functional and the functionless.
1 have already shown that the aesthetic is thoroughly mediated by the
totality of social relations, the division of labor, and the principle of eco-
nomic exchange. Because each and every work of art is necessarily medi-
ated by society, the truth content of artworks cannot be immediately
identified. Indeed, "thought remains faithful to the idea of immediacy
only in and through what is mediated; conversely, it falls prey to the me-
diated as soon as it tries to grasp the unmediated directly."55 Once this is
recognized, the false immediacy of being directly functional, clearly rep-
resentative, or conventionally political is exposed. By its "aversion to
praxis," art denounces "the narrow untruth of the practical world."
Artworks that serve immediate political ends "enmesh themselves in
false consciousness" as a result of oversimplification, the attempt to
grasp and forcibly alter mediated reality by immediate means. 56 Hence
the appeal to formal negativity, abstractness, enigmatic meaning, disso-
nance, and so forth, all of which signify autonomous art's circumvention
of immediacy, a political gesture that is never more than insinuated but is
no less significant for being so.
It is on these grounds that Adorno criticizes Bertolt Brecht, whose
works, he finds, verge on political dogma. Compared to those of Samuel
Beckett, the ingenuousness of Brecht's dramas displays a "political
naivete" that could only give relief to the capitalists whom he opposes. 57
As with crude conspiracy theories, concentrating on the failures or cor-
ruption of a few individuals tends to disguise the systematic irrationality
of the whole socioeconomic order, mistaking the symptom for the dis-
ease. Brecht's plays can be taken as a paradigmatic case of putting art to
practical use but by which "political reality is sold short for the sake of
political commitment." 58
% Critical Theory and Canonical Art
These arguments need to be extended to the arguments over the liter-

ary canon, not just because many of the works championed to challenge
the orthodox canon are often (although admittedly not always) conspicu-
ously political, but because—not unlike the rationale for socialist art in
the 1920s—the blatantly political and utilitarian justifications for a multi-
cultural and socially representative canon dispense with the autonomy
and functionlessness of art that is so essential to its truth content in
modernity. Those justifications are founded on a pragmatic liberalism
that attempts to apply direct means for direct effects (e.g., rendering the
classroom syllabus or literary anthologies more socially representative so
as to "counterbalance" the canon), thereby sacrificing art's detachment
from the practical world, a detachment that would provide a more fun-
damental critique of society as a whole. Critical theory exposes the socio-
economic root of artistic production itself—the division of labor—rather
than taking it for granted and focusing instead on the affirmation of so-
cial identity and difference. Moreover, the doctrine of art's immediate
utilitarian application in practical politics is deeply ideological because
overtly political justifications of art, no less than the explicitly political
content of artworks, substantively fail even where they appear practi-
cally to succeed. The assumption this doctrine harbors is that art can
"speak to human beings directly,"
as though the immediate could be realized directly in a world of universal

mediation. But it thereby degrades word and form to a mere means, to an el-
ement in the context of the work's effect, to psychological manipulation; and
it erodes the work's coherence and logic, which are no longer to develop in
accordance with the law of their own truth but are to follow the line of least
resistance in the consumer.59
This is why Adorno condemns literalness in art as barbaric. 60

Of course, socially committed art, as much as direct interventions to
justify it, need not have anything to do with conscious intentions to be-
come a false politics; even the anti-ideological writer with the best ends
in mind still "paves the way for the degradation of his own doctrine to
ideology."61 By analogy, revising the literary canon for the sake of expos-
ing or correcting social injustice ultimately jeopardizes its own objective.
Even if such revision serves ostensibly progressive ends, it nonetheless
accommodates itself to the practical imperatives of the administered
world. The point is that any explicitly political intent in and for art is un-
wittingly self-defeating for diminishing the radical potential of the aes-
thetic before the established order it hoped to transcend. It is a "shortcut
to praxis" that leads back to where it began. 62
The context of this last remark is an essay in which Adorno attacks

"the stubborn antithesis of committed and pure art" by appealing to the
example of Paul Valery, whose art criticism highlights the distinction be-
tween the apolitical content of art and its political implications. 63
Contrasting too starkly between commitment and autonomy, as between
functional and functionless art, is undialectical. The dialectic of political
and pure art is exemplified by the bourgeois conception of Vari pour Vart,
whose pretense to absolute autonomy is ideological for presupposing
that art really could be "for itself." Conversely, political works and appli-
cations thereof may well lose the radical potential of the aesthetic, even
in spite of nominally critical intentions. However, since every work of art
has political implications, it is able to preserve at least a glimmer of truth,
if only for alluding to the possibility of a truly emancipated future.
Clinging righteously to one extreme or the other is as reckless as its op-
posite, either for denying the implicit responsibility of uncommitted art or
for neglecting the tacit irresponsibility of that which is overtly committed.
This insight is not intended to repeal the necessity that art remain func-
tionless or apolitical to the extent that it is able, for just as "the demand
for complete responsibility on the part of artworks increases the burden
of their guilt," so "this demand is to be set in counterpoint with the anti-
thetical demand for irresponsibility." 64
With this dialectic in mind, the critical theory of art should not be mis-
understood as idealizing aesthetic purity in the manner of reactionary
critics, who often resort to the apolitical purity of art in their defense of
the Western canon of "high culture." In a passage that brilliantly captures
the point, Adorno writes,
the ideological concern to keep culture pure obeys the wish that in the
fetishized culture, and thus actually, everything remains as it was. Such in-
dignation has much in common with the opposing position's indignation
that has been standardized in the phrase about the obsolete ivory tower
from which, in an age zealously proclaimed an age of mass communication,
art must issue. . . . [W]hat the two basic censorial positions of bourgeois
consciousness hold in common—that the artwork must not want to change
the world and that it must be there for all—is a plaidoyer for the status quo;
the former defends the domestic peace of artworks with the world and the
latter remains vigilant that the sanctioned forms of public consciousness be
maintained.65
This is precisely why both conservative-humanist and liberal-pluralist

critics end up on opposite sides of the same ideological coin. Because nei-
ther challenges the economic rationale of society or the division of labor,
the reification of consciousness or the politics of means, the dominance of

pragmatism or the nationalistic uses to which the canon has been put,
they both comply with the status quo—whether by passive endorsement
or by minimal intervention according to accepted modes of praxis.
Historical Content and Canonical Change

By now it should be clear why the direct social application or celebration
of works of art and literature is anathema to critical theory. As soon as
traditional aspects of culture such as significant artworks of the past are
"idolized as relics," Adorno suggests, "they degenerate into elements of
an ideology which relishes the past so that the present will remain unaf-
fected by it."66 The "so-called classics," or cultural canon of art and litera-
ture, "whose immortality was once rashly proclaimed," become inert
when drained of their critical capacity, treated as little more than com-
modities and "frozen into cultural goods." As shown in Chapter 3, the
processes of familiarization that ensure the canonization of selected
works of literature also affect the content of the canon itself: "[I]n the
process of the dissemination of culture, the meaning of what is dissemi-
nated is changed in many ways which are contrary to what one prides
oneself on disseminating." 67 Paradoxically, the social and institutional
means by which some works of art become socially acclaimed, artistically
reproduced, and culturally familiar contradict their status as irreducible
and emphatic artworks with critical potential, including the potential to
condemn those very means of preservation. By becoming officially can-
onized, the most critical aspects of their truth content—-the critique of ex-
change, society, and the empirically existent—are traded in for the sake
of broad accessibility. When "a pantheon of best-sellers builds u p , " as
Adorno writes of symphonic music, "the accepted classics themselves
undergo a selection" that has less to do with quality or content than with
maximum exposure and consumption. 68 To the extent that it has become
"neutralized," its critical capacity dulled, traditional culture has become
worthless. 69 The means by which artworks lose their critical content,
however, is not solely via conimodification, which is only one aspect of
their canonization. Adorno goes so far as to declare that "there is no eternal
canon ... but there is a relation to the past which, though not conserva-
tive, facilitates the survival of many works by refusal to compromise." 70
In critical theory, such a relation to the past depends on the historically
objective truth content of artworks and how it is revealed.
Like all physical phenomena and material objects, artworks exist in an
historical continuum. Any account of the significance or value of canoni-
cal works must therefore grasp the "immanently historical element of
aesthetic truth," which is not "external to history," but is "crystallized" in
artworks themselves, from the manner and materials of their construc-

tion to their explicit subject matter and implicit meanings. 7 ' Indeed, even
the apparent meaninglessness of certain works of art is historically medi-
ated. Aesthetics is a form of knowdedge distinct from the empirical sci-
ences or mathematical logic precisely in that artistic truth "exists exclu-
sively as that which has become"; it is not static but continues to unfold
through history. The truth of any cultural artifact is therefore not "a time-
less invariable, but rather, like people themselves, it has its life in a socio-
historical dynamic and can die." 72 Just as formal techniques, styles, and
genres fade with time, so do certain works of literature. When any of
them erodes, of course, the canon is affected. The decline of certain tradi-
tional works and genres today, however, is less determined by passing
fashion or ephemeral critical tastes than objectively dictated by irre-
versible developments mat impinge upon both the content of works and
the possibilities of how they may be interpreted. For example, in the
wake of modern technology and its often catastrophic impact on the en-
vironment, the idyllic innocence of nature poetry has become virtually
"anachronistic"; its truth content "has vanished." 73 Similarly, with the
loosening of monogamy and other social mores, it is hardly possible to-
day to be shocked by adultery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
novels. 74 With changes in production and social relations, the force of cer-
tain thematic content or literary styles has irretrievably waned, which is
apparent even in the simple observation that a particular work seems
"dated":
[Disputing the decay of works in history serves a reactionary purpose; the

ideology of culture as class privilege will not tolerate the fact that its lofty
goods might ever decay, those goods whose eternity is supposed to guaran-
tee the eternity of the class's own existence.75
Conversely, different elements within works may emerge as true only

after periods of lying dormant. Because artworks and their truth content
are not ontologically static or temporally fixed but are deeply historical—
always unfolding and continually becoming—canonicity can be belated.
Thus, Adorno finds that some of Heinrich Heine's poems resonate only
long after his death, just as the novels of Dickens and Balzac, who were
considered social realists in the nineteenth century, now betray certain
modernist qualities. 76 Analogously, the "dialectical truth" of Kierke-
gaard's writing "could only be disclosed in the posthumous history of
his work." 77 The potential discrepancy observed by Marx between the
material basis or social organization of society and the forms of its artistic
expression appears again in this context: "In the afterlife of works . . .
qualitative differences become apparent that in no way coincide with the
level of modernity achieved in their own periods. . . . But works can be

actualized through historical development, through correspondence with
later developments." 7 8 Benjamin formulates this another way: "The
medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is al-
ways different from the one in which they affect their own age." 79
In critical theory, the cognitive content of works is disclosed via imma-
nent critique, the analysis of the formal qualities and historical determina-
tions of particular works of art, whether literary or otherwise. Immanent
critique "pursues the fragility of canonical works into the depth of their
truth content; the full potential of such critique still remains to be devel-
oped and discovered." 80 The internal components of works and their in-
terrelations are illuminated by dialectical sociohistorical analysis.
Because of the irreversible development of artistic forms, works of the
past become canonical only to the extent that they become modern, or
bear modern characteristics, no matter when they first appeared in
chronological history. This is strikingly demonstrated in Adorno's essay
on Holderlin, whose canonical stature, he finds, has only increased since
the nineteenth century. What "unfolds and becomes visible" in his
works, "the source of their authority, is none other than the truth mani-
fested objectively in them." Despite its age, Hcilderlin's poetry remains
vital today because of its "eminently modern" formal qualities, the real-
ization of which allows "an incomparably broader understanding of
Holderlin than was formerly possible." 81 Modern characteristics are dis-
cernible in the content and form of the poems, whose words are "di-
vested of immediacy," whose style exposes the spurious abstractions of
aesthetic idealism, whose tone exhibits a "rebellion against harmony,"
whose paratactic rather than syntactic construction "shatters" the sym-
bolic unity of the work, and whose "sacrifice" of the subject "unsettles
the category of meaning for the first time," all of which demonstrates the
"historical core" of Holderlin's poetry that has emerged as true insofar as
modern society itself has become marked by these same characteristics. 82
That Holderlin can thus be interpreted as powerfully revealing of the so-
cial situation today is the strongest argument for his canonical stature.
Contrary to the likely objection that Adorno's aesthetic theory is elitist
or ethnocentric for being grounded in a prohibitively difficult, abstract, or
specifically Western conception of aesthetic modernism, there is nothing
in the critical theory of art that categorically prescribes that hitherto ne-
glected works—of whatever social origins—could not, in principle, be or
become canonical. A better criticism is one that is concerned with the in-
strumental grounds on which canonicity has been claimed for alternative
works in the contemporary debate. As long as individual works of litera-
ture are sufficiently modern—even those whose significance is claimed to
be their social representativeness—and thereby inherently expose the
contradictions of capitalist society, they have the capacity for being true,
for being truly critical and exemplary works of art. The judgment of aes-
thetic content is therefore not simply subjective, arbitrary, or culturally
relative—a matter of "taste," ephemeral social and intellectual fashions,
or the timely strategies of cultural politics. Rather, it is objectively deter-
mined by the cumulative history of society and material developments,
both of which are indirectly inscribed in the works themselves.
Central to critical theory's conception of history and philosophical in-
terpretation is the idea that the truth content of art and literature is dis-
closed in a configuration, or "constellation" of concepts. According to
Benjamin, ideas are related to objects as constellations are to stars. 83 Ideas
bind together otherwise disparate and particular objects to form a newly
coherent and distinctive body of knowledge. In terms of art, the various
components of an individual work—its formal, thematic, material, and
even spiritual elements (or even the absence thereof)—as well as the ten-
sions and contradictions between them, may likewise be interpreted as
existing in changeable configurations. As a constellation of constitutive
elements—some of which are ideological, others true—a work of art
forms and transforms over time. That is why "even in artworks that are
to their very core ideological, truth content can assert itself. Ideology, so-
cially necessary semblance [illusion], is . . . also the distorted image of the
true." 84 Thus, residues of aesthetic truth can be found even in the work of
reactionary artists, such as Stefan George. 85 Aesthetic evaluation, and ul-
timately canonicity, is therefore never simply a matter of determining
which works are ideological or false and which ones are true, which
works are politically progressive and which ones are regressive. Rather,
"what the work demands from its beholder is knowledge"—that is, that
both "its truth and untruth . . . be grasped." 86 Indeed, the very idea of a
canon, as an aesthetic concept that has been multifaceted or contradic-
tory since its inception—combining practical and idealistic elements, aes-
thetic and moral values, universal and nationalistic connotations—can it-
self be thought of as a constellation whose elements are the particular
works that it comprises at any given historical moment. Different config-
urations will be seen at different times, but the component stars remain
objects of illumination even as they recede. Equally, new configurations,
the relationship of whose constitutive parts cannot now be conceived,
will emerge in the future via changing social conditions and developing
artistic forms.
Although wary of the consequences of official, institutional canoniza-
tion, the critical theory of art strives to realize what is worth preserving
of the canon, without being nostalgic about what is not. Neither endors-
ing the Western canon nor banishing it as wholly ideological, neither con-
fining it to immediate political interests nor acclaiming it as timeless and
universal, critical theory instead is concerned ultimately with the social

significance of art and the ends for which it ought to be interpreted.
Immanent critique discloses what becomes modern and therefore vital in
any artwork whose value lies in being more than an inert artifact or an
instrumental resource. As opposed to the ritual exegesis that officially
canonized works usually attract, the critical theory of art exhumes what
they bear of both historical injustice and redemptive potential. If the con-
stellation of their true as well as ideological elements is grasped, then
such works may still be critically enlightening and cognitively valuable.
The following passage should be read in this context:
Authentic art of the past that for the time being must remain veiled is not
thereby sentenced. Great works wait. While their metaphysical meaning dis-
solves, something of their truth content, however little it can be pinned
down, does not; it is that whereby they remain eloquent. A liberated human-
ity would be able to inherit its historical legacy free of guilt. What was once
true in an artwork and then disclaimed by history is only able to disclose it-
self again when the conditions have changed, on whose account that truth
was invalidated: Aesthetic truth content and history are that deeply meshed.
A reconciled reality and the restituted truth of the past could converge.
What can still be experienced in the art of the past and is still attainable by
interpretation is a directive toward this state.87
It is in these terms that critical theory applies to the literary canon.

5
Subverting the Canon:
Sociology, New Historicism,
and Cultural Studies
Note let us imagine an extreme ease: that a book speaks of nothing but events that He
altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience—tlmt it is the
first language for a new series of experiences. In that case, simply nothing will be
heard, but there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is
there.
—Fricdrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 0888), part III, section I
In Chapter 4, critical theory was shown to offer a novel critique of the

contemporary canon debate as well as a unique conception of canon for-
mation. Unlike either conventional criticisms or justifications of the
Western canon, Adorno's and Benjamin's aesthetic theories yield an un-
derstanding of art that emphasizes its social constraints as much as its
critical potential, its historical and material determinations as much as its
Utopian promise. The objective of this chapter is to show how a critical
aesthetic theory that is neither socially idealistic nor politically pragmatic
also provides a critique of various sociological accounts of art, including
those examined in Chapter 3.
As much as sociological and materialist treatments of canon formation
serve as a corrective to the idealism and narrow academicism of the cur-
rent debate, critical theory in turn exposes the shortcomings of sociolo-
gies that would abandon the validity of qualitative aesthetic distinction.
In particular, the sociology of art and authorial reputation, new histori-
cism, and cultural studies all have serious implications for the literary
canon. By stressing what they take to be the ideological fallacies of aes-
thetic distinction, they threaten to subvert the very idea of a canon. In
703
W4 Subverting the Canon
this chapter I will show how these sociological approaches dispense with
the most critical attributes of art in modern society.
The Anti-Aesthetic Impulse of

the Sociology of Art
Although they differ in points of detail—whether tracing the changing
fortunes of authorial reputation, attributing literary value to class distinc-
tions and the function of literacy, or theorizing the structure of the field in
which literature is reproduced and made familiar—the sociological ap-
proaches to the literary canon discussed in Chapter 3 have several impor-
tant features in common. Among them are a method that prioritizes the
social impact and reception of works of art, a suspicion of claims of artis-
tic merit that fail to acknowledge specific beneficiaries, and an almost
complete neglect of the content or critical implications of the specific
works in question. Each approach is so concerned with the immediate so-
cial effects of art that a less direct, but more broadly historical, conception
of art's significance is curtailed from the start. The sociology of art ex-
cludes those aspects of the artwork's truth content that now rest, under
prevailing socioeconomic conditions, precisely in being indirect}}/ social.
As explained in Chapter 4, that works of art in modernity are in some
measure even antisocial for being abstract, difficult, or negative is itself an
effect of alienated social relations and the reification of consciousness in a
commodified society.
Studies emphasizing how particular groups especially benefit from the
canonization of authors who are thought to share their ideological inter-
ests (e.g., "the literary works that make up the canon do so because the
groups that have an investment in them are culturally the most influen-
tial" 1 ) rely on several unfounded assumptions. Besides uncritically ac-
cepting the idea that particular works clearly or primarily "represent" a
single identifiable social group, which has already been shown to be
problematic, this method shifts concern onto the conscious or uncon-
scious motivations of its author or those who are thought to gain most
from his or her canonization. In doing so, it lapses into biographical and
psychological speculation, drawing conclusions that are at best conjec-
tural. In contrast, a critical theory of canonical works goes much farther.
Theodor Adorno's claim that "the author's motivations are irrelevant to
the written work, the literary product," has less to do with academic for-
malism or the close reading of New Criticism than with avoiding "the
veil of personalization, the idea that those who are in charge, and not an
anonymous machinery, make the decisions," as he writes of Sartre's
plays. 2 Like the deceptions of politically committed art, those sociologists
and literary critics who discern specific beneficiaries of the canon exag-
Subverting the Canon 105
gerate the power of individuals or groups over that of objective social

conditions, masking with readily apparent data (e.g., the author's iden-
tity) or hypothetical intentions (e.g., the interests of others) the broadest
features of social domination. In contrast, Adorno suggests that "the task
of cultural criticism must be not so much to search for the particular in-
terest-groups to which cultural phenomena are to be assigned, but rather
to decipher the general social tendencies which are expressed in these
phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize them-
selves." 3 These interests are emphatically not those of one or another in-
dividual group, no matter how evident their immediate political influ-
ence. "What unfolds and becomes visible in the works, the source of their
authority," is not simply whatever aspects best serve individual interests,
but "none other than the truth manifested objectively in them, the truth
that consumes the subjective intention and leaves it behind as irrele-
vant." 4 To reiterate an earlier point, the sociology of vested interests relies
on a "bad particularity," overemphasizing the antagonistic interests of in-
dividuals or individual groups at the expense of comprehending how
thoroughly mediated the whole of society is, in which each and every so-
cial constituency is inextricably implicated. 5
The sociological critique of canon formation, however, does not neces-
sarily ascribe credit for an author's or a work's esteem to a single group
or institution. For example, the "sociology of literary repute," as seen in
Chapter 3, documents how particular authors and works are appropri-
ated by numerous contending factions, including other artists, profes-
sional academics and critics, political circles, and the public at large. It
sifts through myriad textual sources, empirical and symbolic minutiae
culled from specialist criticisms, literary biographies, publishing statis-
tics, school reading lists, film adaptations, and miscellaneous representa-
tions in the mass media to show by what diverse means and variety of lo-
cal interests only some authors, and but few of their works, prevail over
others in the institutional process of canonization. 6 In so doing, the soci-
ology of authorial reputation conceives of a writer's "impact" as "a wide-
ranging cultural phenomenon" whose influence is "a matter of cultural
effect, rather than merely literary effect."7 Without denying the evident
influence of certain artists, however, critical theory faults sociological
methods that primarily define works and calculate their significance
based on their social impact:
Sociology of art, according to the meaning of the words, embraces all as-
pects of the relationship between art and society. It is impossible to restrict it
to any single aspect, such as the social effect of works of art. This effect is it-
self only a moment in the totality of that relationship. To extract it and de-
clare it the only worthy object of the sociology of art, which cannot be con-
706 Subverting the Canon
tained in any pre-empting definition, would be replaced by a methodologi-

cal preference, namely a preference for the procedures of empirical social re-
search, with which people claim to be able to ascertain the reception of
works of art, and to quantify that reception. Dogmatic restriction to this sec-
tor would endanger objective cognition. 8
That is because any method by wbich the social impact of a work be-
comes the primary criterion of analysis or evaluation implies that the so-
ciology of art must be guided by the status quo. It succumbs to the imme-
diate circumstances of the empirical world as it stands, yet overlooks the
degree to which the work of art is relatively autonomous of that world, in
terms of its specific form and the historical developments that have made
it so: "[T]he principle that governs autonomous works of art is not effect
but their inherent structure.'"* Through its formal qualities—its abstract,
negative, or enigmatic aspects; its degree of freedom—art, as explained
in Chapter 4, implicitly opposes existent social reality. It is social "not
only because of its mode of production, in which the dialectic of the
forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of
the social derivation of its thematic material"—nor, it could be added, be-
cause of its social impact or appropriation. "Much more importantly, art
becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position
only as autonomous art." 10
Although he recognizes that society as an abstract whole is indeed
manifested in the work of art, Adorno adds that true aesthetic contem-
plation must include an immanent critique of the work itself, of its for-
mal attributes and their own historical rationale broadly conceived.
Contrary to purely sociological reflection, immanent critique involves a
relationship to the aesthetic object that is opposed to "a genetic method
that confuse[s] the specification of the conditions under which literary
works were created—the biographical circumstances, the models, the so-
called influences—with knowledge of the works themselves."' 1 The aim
of critical aesthetic theory is the truth content, whereby the formal prop-
erties of autonomous works, not simply their social impact, influence,
and appropriation, disclose the sociohistorical truths that are otherwise
obfuscated by those very effects. What Adorno writes of the psychoana-
lytic theory of art likewise applies to the sociology of art: It "treats art-
works as nothing but facts, yet it neglects their own objectivity, their in-
ner consistency, their level of form, their critical impulse, their relation to
nonphysical reality, and, finally, their idea of truth." 12
Because it presupposes the relativity of artistic value from the start, the
sociology of reception and authorial reputation also jeopardizes critical
judgment. To take for granted the radically contingent nature of reputa-
tion or the existence of an infinite variety of canons for any group that
claims one is to forfeit the historically determined, objective content of

aesthetic distinction, of works of literature as works of art, not nonde-
script texts that are canonical simply because they have been declared to
be so. The sociology of repute may well describe the historical fact of the
endurance of some few works, but if it circumvents the matter of their
content—as a constellation of elements whose respective validity
changes with social and material transformations —it is ultimately un-
able to explain that endurance.
For example, John Rodden can only speculate that George Orwell
"continues to exert influence because what he said to his age still some-
how speaks to our own, and because the force of his example and the
symbolic power of his work upon his contemporaries somehow grip us
too." 13 Without any detailed analysis of individual works in Orwell's
oeuvre, however, Rodden only mystifies whatever cognitive content re-
mains vital in them that would answer why they still "grip" us. If the so-
ciology of repute leaves the determination of literary value simply to
"the cacophony and the number of competing claims" on an author or
work, 14 then it has ideological implications as well, obscuring which his-
torical, economic, and political tendencies, or what specific institutions,
are dominant in certain periods and why. Where no particular tendencies
or institutions are thought to predominate, then an idealistically egalitar-
ian pluralism ends up doing so by default. Thus, without any historical
constraints, Orwell is said to endure "in the form of multiple new identi-
ties . . . a human kaleidoscope whose variegated imagery has represented
nearly all things to all people," as if an infinite number of interpretations
were equally possible at all times. Paying no heed to the inequalities of
individual or institutional powers of legitimization, Rodden concludes
with striking political naivete that "posterity . .. the 'test of time' is ad-
ministered by us all. We [readers] decide" which authors will survive. 15
Even more explicitly, in his account of the making of Thoreau's reputa-
tion, Gary Scharnhorst simply declares that "the process of canonization
is market-driven." 16 These examples of the sociology of literary reputa-
tion are typical of the genre. Ostensibly exposing the variety of social and
political interests involved in canonizing individual authors and works,
they instead take for granted and reinforce the liberal ideology of com-
petitive "interest groups," whose belief in a level playing field fosters an
idealistic faith in a neutral marketplace. Yet the mystifications of the mar-
ket are anything but equal or free.
Unlike these cases, there are more theoretically developed versions of
the sociology of art that have gone farther to uncover broad social and
economic tendencies beneath the veneer of interest group politics. In his
book on Adorno, Fredric Jameson recounts the radical implications
Adorno's dialectical critique of culture has for the Ideologiekritik of
W8 Subverting the Canon
Mannheim, Spengler, and Veblen. Their theories of society, Jameson

finds, are driven by "an anti-cultural, anti-aesthetic impulse" that seeks
to expose every last vestige of ideology in modern culture and its prod-
ucts. 17 Although remarking in a brief note that, "Pierre Bourdieu renews
this position in our own time," Jameson fails to apply a dialectical cri-
tique to the kind of sociology practiced by Bourdieu and his proteges. 18
But if an account of the remaining aesthetic import of canonical works is
to have any credence, that sociology must also be critically assessed.
Literary sociology perceives aesthetic value to be entirely constructed
within a network of social, symbolic, and institutional legitimizations. As
seen in Chapter 3, Bourdieu's theoretical model of the field of cultural
production attempts to characterize how social discourse and interrela-
tions continually reproduce artistic value: "Questions of the meaning and
value of the work of art, like the question of the specificity of aesthetic
judgement," he writes, "can only find solutions in a social history of the
field." The "historical anamnesis" of sociology is meant to recall the "re-
pressed truth" of the "collective labour" behind every work of art, reveal-
ing the "entire set of social mechanisms" that produce the fetish of art
and the ideology of the artist as creator.19 To do this, Bourdieu's sociology
of the cultural field examines the social context of artistic production and
traces the reproduction of belief that sustains the high regard of canonical
literature and art in general. It therefore describes canon formation in
terms in which works of art are either recognized or repudiated accord-
ing to the dictates of a "market of symbolic goods." Recall, for example,
how Bourdieu suggests "constructing a model of the process of canoniza-
tion which leads to the establishment of writers . . . to observe the fluctu-
ations in the stock of different authors." 20 From this perspective, canonic-
ity is so dependent upon the given structure of society and social
relations that the specific content of artworks is almost incidental, except
insofar as it reflects and reproduces that structure (see below). In the
same way, Guillory asserts that "canonicity is not a property of the work
itself but of its transmission . . . canonical works do not in themselves re-
produce values." 21 By diluting art and literature wholly within the social
totality, however, the sociology of the field of cultural production per-
ceives only those social functions that best suit its own models, while
failing to acknowledge any qualitative content that may not be easily as-
similated into that totality, or that may even contradict it. As Adorno
writes,
With the continuing organization of all cultural spheres the desire grows to
assign art its place in society theoretically and indeed practically. . . . Once
art has been recognized as a social fact, the sociological definition of its con-
text considers itself superior to it and disposes over it. .. . Such endeavors
themselves call for social criticism. They tacitly seek the primacy of adminis-
tration, of the administered world even over what refuses to be grasped by
total socialization or at any rate struggles against it. The sovereignty of the
topographical eye that localizes phenomena in order to scrutinize their func-
tion . .. ignores the dialectic of aesthetic quality and functional society.22
Although sociology certainly discloses some of the social functions of art,

which critical theory does not deny, it goes so far toward fixing every
facet of art within the given society that it overlooks the degree to which
the opposite is also valid: "Art is the social antithesis of society, not di-
rectly deducible from it."23
Professing a remainder in art that is irreducible to society as it stands
or beyond the immediate interests of specific social groups is, of course,
precisely what the sociology of art criticizes. In doing so, however, it
characterizes—and even caricatures—advocates of the value of aesthetic
distinction as employing a bankrupt notion of "pure" art that presumes
to divorce artworks entirely from their social attachments or the field of
cultural production. For example, Bourdieu describes his own work as a
"deliberate refusal" of "traditional philosophical or literary aesthetics."
By philosophical aesthetics, however, Bourdieu means only that of the
Kantian tradition, the critique of whose false "universality" and "disin-
terestedness" leads him to dismiss all aesthetic philosophy that is not so-
ciological on his own terms as disingenuously "pure." 24 However well this
critique applies to outmoded or reactionary arguments of aesthetic value,
it is not the case that every claim of artistic merit must be made on the
grounds of absolute "purity" or, by extension, that arguments attempting
to salvage the aesthetic significance of the canon are necessarily aloof
from social concerns. By taking Kant's critique of judgment as the sole
example of philosophical aesthetics, Bourdieu disregards the entire tradi-
tion of post-Kantian aesthetics, including the work of Schiller, Hegel, and
the Frankfurt School, none of which makes any pretense of art being pure
or disinterested. Adorno, for example, repudiates the doctrine of I'art
pour I'art just as much as the claim of its direct political utility. The maxim
that "art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived"
can well be reversed: Art perceived strictly socially is art socially misper-
ceived. 25 Because art's truth content relies simultaneously on its social
dependence and its relative autonomy, a sociological account that sacri-
fices the latter for the sake of the former will be inadequate to its object,
paving the way for undermining any judgment that finds something
more in art than merely a lens through which to view the contemporary
state of society. "If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the
machinations of the status quo;" but, equally, "if art remains strictly for
itself, it nonetheless submits to integration as one harmless domain
among others." 26 To oppose the idea of pure aesthetics with an appeal to

pure sociology is not just limited; either extreme to the exclusion of the
other is false. In contrast, critical theory emphasizes both the social and
the antisocial content of artworks, adhering neither to pure taste and dis-
interestedness nor to purely sociological appraisals of art as a species of
"cultural capital."
Hie sociology of the field of cultural production does not simply set all
works of art, canonical or otherwise, within their immediate social mi-
lieu; it also passes the verdict that aesthetic value per se is ideological for
shrouding true social relations behind a veil, the illusio of belief in art and
the artist (recall Guillory's critique of both aesthetic value and the very
concept of the "work" of art). According to Bourdieu, "the work of art,
like religious goods or services, amulets or various sacraments, receives
value only from collective belief as collective misrecognition, collectively
produced and reproduced"—the value it acquires is little more than a
fetish.27 Adorno's aesthetic theory likewise discerns the historical fetish
of art to be an illusion, but it also recognizes that the ideological complic-
ity of art need not be the limit of what it reveals:
[Ejach artwork could be charged with false consciousness and chalked up to

ideology. . . . But the guilt they bear of fetishism does not disqualify art, any
more so than it disqualifies anything culpable; for in the universally, socially
mediated world nothing stands external to its nexus of guilt. The truth con-
tent of artworks, which is indeed their social truth, is predicated on their
fetish character. 28
If aesthetic value is deemed nothing more than a fetish and determined

solely by a "collective misrecognition" that conceals art's role in the re-
production of social relations—an illusion that awaits the sociologist to
be exposed—then whatever potential it signifies besides complicity with
the status quo is lost. But if nothing remains of the autonomy of art other
than the fetish character of the commodity, then the critique of art as ide-
ological is itself ideological, veiling on the one hand what it discloses on
the other. 29 It is indeed revealing that, although Bourdieu's sociology
grants a measure of autonomy to the field of cultural production, it with-
holds autonomy entirely from individual artworks, because granting any
to the latter, Bourdieu claims, would be a deception. 30
To the sociology of art, the "dialectic of distinction" is such that indi-
vidual works become either "classic or outdated," either timeless for
falling "outside history" or antiquated for passing into "the eternal pre-
sent of consecrated culture, where trends and schools which were totally
incompatible 'in their lifetime' may now peacefully coexist, because they
have been canonized, academicized and neutralized." 31 In this account,
as reviewed in Chapter 3, to be canonical means to be aesthetically ster-

ile, to have been made impotent by familiarity and the corrosive force of
institutional accommodation. It is partly for this reason that Adorno dis-
poses of conservative cultural criticism, writing that "only when neutral-
ized and reified does Culture allow itself to be idolized." 32 However, to
unmask the fetishistic idolatry of art and culture need not be to discount
aesthetic value per se, as Guillory does. The problem with the sociology
of the field is that it fails to distinguish between canonization as an institu-
tional process in collusion with the status quo and canonicity as the aes-
thetic judgment of a work's cognitive content. This failure is made con-
spicuous by the automatic conflation of the canon with neutralization, a
homology that neglects the dialectic of aesthetic quality and ideological
complicity, whereby the one is neither simply equal, nor in inverse rela-
tion, to the other.
As with art being simultaneously social and autonomous, political and
apolitical, functional and functionless, the qualitative distinction of indi-
vidual works coexists with, and in contradiction to, their potential for be-
ing neutralized by institutional accommodation. Indeed, one of the pur-
poses of critical aesthetic theory is to salvage the truth content of
individual works from their neutralization. If the sociology of the field of
cultural production overlooks or simplifies the interrelation of content
and complicity, it becomes the negative image of the cultural conser-
vatism that it challenges. Where the latter entirely absolves what it per-
ceives as great art, the former irredeemably implicates it in the reproduc-
tion of social relations. Yet, as Adorno writes of the kind of cultural
criticism that discovers only lies in culture, "in the face of the lie of the
commodity world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective.
That culture so far has failed is no justification for furthering its fail-
ure." 33 Thus, "true criticism of barbarian culture . . . cannot be content
with a barbaric denunciation of culture." 34 When canonical works are
categorically marked "outdated," or consecrated culture wholly "neu-
tralized," the sociology of art relinquishes the cognitive content of art to
the status quo. The radical potential that artworks themselves contain, as
an implicit critique of the whole socioeconomic order, is thereby lost.
Nevertheless, even the purest sociology of art sometimes appeals to
qualitative distinctions, which at least suggests that the particular con-
tent of works does indeed affect their worth. With reference to Flaubert's
novel, Sentimental Education, Bourdieu himself admits of a certain truth
content submerged in the formal features of a canonical work of litera-
ture: "It is doubtless the form, the literary form in which literary objectifi-
cation takes place, which enables the most deeply buried and the most
safely hidden truth to emerge." However, in his account, only a sociolo-
gist of literature can disclose this, "for the sociologist lays bare a truth
that the literary text will reveal only in veiled terms, that it will say only
in such a manner as to leave it unsaid." 35 In the sociology of the field, the
hidden truth content of literature reveals the social structure and histori-
cal determinations of cultural production, particularly regarding the re-
production of literary value. It is on these terms that Bourdieu declares
Sentimental Education to be "a true example of the absolute masterpiece,"
because it contains "an analysis of the social space in which the author
was himself located," that is, a "sociological content" within the work it-
self.36 In Bourdieu's reading, the actions and motivations of characters in
the novel, as well as the social disposition of Flaubert as an autonomous
bourgeois author (e.g., his "aloofness from the social world"), exhibit as-
pects of the social relations and objective functioning of the literary field
in France in the nineteenth century. 37 However, Bourdieu's interpretation
is so sociological that the quality of a work literally comes down to how
good a sociologist its author is: "Flaubert the sociologist gives us a socio-
logical insight on Flaubert the man." 38 The content of literature is there-
fore reduced to explicit socioeconomic relationships, and its aesthetic
quality is measured only by the light that the work sheds on them.
In contrast, the immediate social context of a work is only one aspect of
a constellation of elements that critical theory perceives in art, and not
necessarily the one most vital in modernity. "Certainly," Adorno writes,
"art, as a form of knowledge, implies knowledge of reality, and there is
no reality that is not social. Thus truth content and social content are me-
diated." Even so, contrary to the sociology of cultural production, "art's
truth content transcends the knowledge of reality as what exists."39 As seen in
Chapter 4, this is because "something in reality, something back of the
veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively de-
mands art"; for works of art are "plenipotentiaries of things that are no
longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded
humanity." 40 Yet the sociology of the field of artistic production discounts
anything about literature that does not involve its own social context;
nothing points beyond it. As Bourdieu himself writes, "the transcendent
world of cultural works does not encompass within itself the principle of
its transcendence; neither does it contain the principle of its becoming,
even if it helps to structure the thoughts and acts which are the source of
its transformation." 41 In critical theory, though, it is precisely social real-
ity in its current form—its dependence on economic exchange and
means-over-ends rationality, its recourse to pragmatism, and its domina-
tion by scientistic rationality (of which the totalizing sociology of the
field is itself an example)—that the most successful works of art oppose.
Those elements that escape the purview of the sociology of the field—for
example, aesthetic abstractness or non-representational art; a Utopian vi-
sion of a world beyond current social conditions; the memory of histori-
cal injustice and human suffering, and the promise of redemption—are

also integral components of art in a society that is mediated by capitalis-
tic social relations. If sociology restricts itself to revealing only the imme-
diate workings of contemporary society within literature, appraising a
work only according to whether it illustrates the social facts of a single
historical era, then literature as art loses its essential distinguishing char-
acteristics. It is transformed into an empty repository of sociological data.
With its predilection for situating everything within the immediate social
totality, then, the sociology of the field of cultural production appropri-
ates canonical works of art for its own limited objectives, divesting them
of their most radical potential by excluding anything that falls outside of
that totality. Then they are truly neutralized.
New Historicism and Aesthetic Heteronomy

If the sociological approaches analyzed so far embody assumptions and
practices that are antithetical to art, then the so-called new historicism
threatens the very idea of canonical distinction. As discussed above, the
sociology of the field employs an implicit conception of history that binds
the content of art to its immediate social milieu. Bourdieu's model works
to "historicize those cultural products which all share a pretension to uni-
versality . . . giving them back their necessity by tearing them out of the
indeterminacy which stems from a false etemalization and relating them
back to the social conditions of their genesis." 42 It demonstrates both how
all individual works of art are historically contingent as well as the extent
to which they are socially determined at the time of their inception, that
is, fixed by objective social structures of the field such as class relations
and cultural capital. However, even though it inhibits the potential of art
to stand as a radical critique of society, at least sociology recognizes cer-
tain material constraints on artworks and the conditions of their evalua-
tion. By contrast, the proponents of new historicism emphasize the ab-
solute contingency of art at the expense of almost any objective historical
determinations at all. Although new historicism has been described as a
corrective to "the forgetting of history which seems to characterize an in-
creasingly technocratic and commodified society," the kind of history it
would remember needs to be scrutinized, especially if it annuls the dis-
tinction between canonical literature and textuality in general. 43
Not unlike sociology, new historicism wishes to put historical consid-
erations at the center of literary analysis, to substitute a particular con-
ception of history and a flexible notion of context in place of the "empty
formalism" of traditional aesthetics. History is taken as inextricably tex-
tual, and approaches to it—themselves textual—are necessarily mediated
by other texts that aggregate continually to form and reform "History"
U4 Subverting the Canon
into a changing ensemble of local "histories." 44 These histories are com-

posed of masses of microphenomena, sociological details, and endlessly
discursive, multiple narratives out of which new historicists assemble an
interpretation with neither pretense to objectivity nor a necessary under-
lying rationale. According to Herbert Lindenberger, new historians are
not inclined to justify their projects and insights with the word "objec-
tive." 45 In fact, they "eschew overarching hypothetical constructs in favor
of surprising coincidences." 46 To this end, new historicists juxtapose a va-
riety of texts, mingling historical documents with literary works, neither
of which is granted any privileged ontological status. Aesthetic distinc-
tion is either taken for granted or suspended for the sake of illustrating
some point about social context. For example, The Tempest has been read
by Stephen Greenblatt as the cultural expression of the religious and so-
cial anxieties of its audiences, and even of Shakespeare himself.
Moreover, Greenblatt interprets the essential function of the play to be
the legitimization of power in Renaissance England. 47
From the perspective of critical theory, however, there are several in-
herent problems with the methodology of new historicism. Like the
"over-accumulation" in museums lamented by Paul Valery, under the
gaze of historicism art becomes "a matter of education and information;
Venus becomes a document." 48 Rather than treating all cultural discourse
on a level playing field, as if "the circulation of social energy," to use
Greenblatt's phrase, really did grant equal cognitive potential to any and
every textual source, critical theory stresses that aesthetic content is pre-
cisely what does make certain works distinctive and valuable for pur-
poses beyond either historical data or ideological functions. To Adorno,
"the opposite of a genuine relation to the historical substance of art-
works—their essential content—is their rash subsumption to history,
their assignment to a historical moment." 49 The unique cognitive value of
works, their objective truth content, is embedded in their formal aesthetic
features:
The historical moment is constitutive of artworks; authentic works are . . .

the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch; this, not least of all, es-
tablishes their relation to knowledge. Precisely this makes them incommen-
surable with historicism, which, instead of following their own historical
content, reduces them to their external history.50
In other words, historical knowledge lies buried within the material of

individual works, which depends on immanent critique, no less than
contextualization, to be exhumed: "Historical consciousness is concen-
trated in the indispensable reflection on what is and what is no longer
possible, on the clear insight into techniques and materials and how they
fit together." 51 As Lambert Zuidervaart writes in his book on Adorno's

aesthetic theory, "an artist's unconscious experience is not merely artistic.
It absorbs a highly industrialized and capitalistic society, and it connects
an artist with artistic problems that reflect the current level of society's
productive forces."52 That is, the historical knowledge provided by the
work of art is materialistic and objective. But the knowledge or con-
sciousness thus imparted involves much more than the textual informa-
tion from which authors may have assembled their work or the cultural
mores to which they may or may not have been reacting, consciously or
unconsciously (Greenblatt's work is full of hypothetical reconstructions
of personal motivation); it also involves understanding that the truth
content of art appears in a constellation of formal elements, a truth that
changes over time and thereby explains the historical rationale of canon
formation, as discussed in Chapter 4.
If history is viewed as purely textual, then new historicism disregards
an integral element of art's own historical content: the actuality of depri-
vation and barbarism from which the bulk of humanity has suffered and
continues to suffer, and to which any authentic work of art attests, albeit
only indirectly. To Greenblatt, however, the Utopian motifs of The
Tempest that still resonate today are reduced to merely contemporary ex-
pressions of power and manipulation, anxiety and longing, in
Renaissance England. He asks his readers to "recall" that "the distinc-
tion between those who labor and those who rule . . . is at the economic
and ideological center of Elizabethan and Jacobean society," as if that
distinction were no longer central in society today. 53 The main part of
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory ends with the question, "what would art be, as
the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffer-
ing?" 54 To reduce the content of canonical art such as The Tempest to
sheer textuality is to treat even human anguish as a textual phenomenon
of the past, with little more than archival interest for the present. This is
not only unconscionable, it also jeopardizes the capacity of art to envi-
sion a future rid of injustice and inhumanity, a vision that cannot, how-
ever, be literally inscribed.
In a critique of other forms of historicism, Jameson has remarked that
"it is not we who sit in judgement on the past, but rather the past . . .
which judges us, imposing the painful knowledge of what we are not,
what we are no longer, what we are not yet." But judgment, he finds,
comes also from the future, from "the Utopian impulse." 55 As far as it
limits the understanding of literature and history to social contexts, new
historicism neglects the other half of history—the future to which it
points—and thereby divests canonical works of their greatest critical po-
tential: the Utopian promise of art. To critical theory, by contrast, the
promise of reconciliation and redemption persists in an artwork's most
abstract formal configurations, evident at some moments, inaccessible at

others: a necessary illusion that art holds out, only to be broken as long as
society itself is not free from domination and misery. Without regard to
this aspect of the aesthetic—what it points to as much as what it embod-
ies—new historicism is shortsighted, emptying canonical works of art of
their essential historical content: the judgment of the past and present
"for the sake of the possible," from "the standpoint of redemption." 56
Like the blurring of text and context, or the subsuming of materiality
in textuality, one of the "key assumptions" of new historicism, according
to H. Aram Veeser, is that "literary and non-literary 'texts' circulate in-
separably." 57 The indeterminateness and endlessly mediated interrela-
tions that new historicism assumes of all texts—indeed, on which its
method is based—explicitly question whether the work of art is qualita-
tively distinguishable from other documents and historical data. To
Lindenberger, "literary texts need not be accorded any status differentiat-
ing them from texts not customarily defined as 'literary'," because "the
traditional demarcations between literature and other forms of writing
have broken down." The lack of any literary distinction has obvious im-
plications for the canon. In fact, the "refusal" to discriminate,
Lindenberger argues, does not merely call attention to, but may even
"help canonize" certain works not traditionally accorded artistic status. 58
So it is suggested that sermons, romances, and autobiographies; journal-
istic, medical, and legal texts; political tracts; and correspondence are all
forms of literature no less deserving of critical attention than those tradi-
tionally regarded as such, some of which are even granted an aesthetic
content comparable to works of art.59 Robert Ferguson, for example, ap-
propriates aesthetic motifs for historical and political documents, refer-
ring to "a unified aesthetic" in the writings of the American "Founding
Founders," who created "a consensual literature for a diverse and di-
vided citizenry. They write [sic] to reconcile."61'
The suspension of aesthetic evaluation in new historicism, its reluc-
tance to acknowledge what distinguishes artworks from other texts, is
due to the denial of aesthetic autonomy. Jonathan Arac advocates "aban-
doning 'literature' as an autonomous sphere of aesthetic contemplation."
Montrose defines new historicism as "a re-problematization or wholesale
rejection" of literature as "an autonomous aesthetic order." 61 More am-
bivalently, Greenblatt simultaneously refuses the autonomy of individual
works (e.g., "there can be no autonomous artifacts"), even though he im-
plicitly grants it to the milieu in which they function, just like Bourdieu
does with the concept of the field of cultural production. For example,
because the Elizabethan theater was only loosely regulated, Greenblatt
grants it an "improvisatory freedom" that he nonetheless denies to the
dramatic works themselves. 62 In spite of consistently commending the
Subverting the Canon in
quality of Shakespeare's art, Greenblatt's emphasis on "the social dimen-
sion of an aesthetic strategy and the aesthetic dimension of a social strat-
egy" in Renaissance England actually situates Shakespeare's works com-
pletely within a heteronomous social order, sacrificing their autonomy
and, along with it, qualitative distinctions between the textual and the
contextual, the ordinary and the exemplary. 63 This is partly owing to
Greenblatt's narrow conception of aesthetic formalism, which he charac-
terizes as solely concerned with "artistic completeness," "untranslatable
essences," and even aesthetic objects "uncontaminated by interpreta-
tion," as if concentration on the formal aspects of a work wrere necessarily
so limited. 64
Apart from arguments already made—that the idea of autonomy need
not resort to a reified concept of absolute purity, which would only reen-
act the obsolete and mystifying notion of Yart pour I'art—the new histori-
cism fails to recognize that the lines of "demarcation" between literary
and non-literary works have themselves been historically drawn, that
autonomy is itself an objective historical characteristic of art that is disre-
garded at the expense of truly historical reflection. That Western art has
gradually been freed from the explicit religious and political iconogra-
phy to which it had been bound, that it came to be liberated from a slav-
ish imitation of nature, culminating in the abstract, non-representational
forms of aesthetic modernism, are but two revolutionary episodes in the
history of autonomization. 65 According to Peter Burger, "the moment of
truth in the talk about the autonomous work of art" lies in the fact that
its detachment from practical contexts, functions, or applications is "a
historical process, i.e. . . . it is socially conditioned." 66 As Adorno puts it,
"the artwork's autonomy is, indeed, not a priori but the sedimentation
of a historical process that constitutes its concept." 67 New historicism
may well discern the subtleties of other social and economic processes,
but because of its purely textual and contextual conception of history, it
does not account for the historical basis of aesthetic autonomy. In addi-
tion although autonomy is certainly subject to changing social, material,
and institutional conditions (it is always a relative autonomy), these de-
pendencies are not the limit of its significance; the relative freedom of art
is precisely what enables it to indict the status quo, to refuse to affirm or
adapt to the merely empirical, existent world. By discounting every last
vestige of aesthetic autonomy, new historicism does not simply dupli-
cate the shortcomings of the sociology of the field of cultural production,
it also drains the work of art of the cognitive, critical content which that
autonomy enables, and which is implicitly what does distinguish aes-
thetic artifacts from other documents, literature from other texts, or truly
canonical works from those that have only been institutionalized as
such.
If the content of literature as a distinctive form of art is thus dis-

counted, then it is unsurprising that nothing is left to differentiate it from
other objects. The new historicist can then conclude that canon forma-
tion, like everything else, works on the model of modern economics. Like
sociology's "market theory" of canonization discussed in the preceding
section, canon formation becomes a function of the market. To
Lindenberger, for instance,
the power struggles that must be waged in order to achieve canonical status
for a particular figure require a redistribution of what often turns out to be
limited resources: just as the manufacturers of consumer products struggle
for consumer shelf space, so those who seek to expand the canon must com-
pete for limited space in anthologies, limited time in college courses, and . ..
the limited capacity of readers to hold a lengthy list of towering authors in
mind at once.68
Like liberal pluralism and the sociology of repute, new historicism takes
aesthetic value to be determined by contending and immediate social in-
terests. Not only are canonical works trivialized as filler for textbooks—
commodities as expendable as any other—but canonicity is anachronisti-
cally reduced to being the product of modem economic rationality. In a
passage reminiscent of Bourdieu, Greenblatt remarks that the work of art
is not "a pure flame," but "the product of a negotiation between a creator
or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared reper-
toire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society. In order
to achieve the negotiation, artists need to create a currency that is valid
for a meaningful, mutually profitable exchange." 69 By characterizing the
value of texts as dependent on an economy of symbolic negotiations and
social profitability in the manner of cultural capital, however, new his-
toricism imposes on the canon what is perhaps most inimical to aesthetic
autonomy: the principle by which all difference, individuality, and par-
ticularity collapse into identity for the sake of exchange. Like sociology,
new historicism divests artworks of their potential to criticize current
socioeconomic relations and the calculating, pragmatic rationality that
reinforces them. Unhistorically, it universalizes the modern conception of
exchange so that it becomes its own "overarching" historical construct,
elevating the governing principle of the status quo as the final arbiter,
now and always, of aesthetic value. In short, new historicism's pretense
of "remembering" history within a technocratic and commodified society
ends up doing little more than conforming to the very logic of that soci-
ety, willfully subjecting to exchange and commodification the artifacts
that would best embody a critique of them.
The Extorted Reconciliation of Cultural Studies

If new historicism's failure to perceive the historical development of aes-
thetic autonomy leads to the collapse of canonical distinction—sacrific-
ing the critical potential of art as much as its remembrance of human suf-
fering—then the inverse logic of indiscriminately granting equal
aesthetic value to virtually anything has similar consequences. Like new
historicism, the discipline of cultural studies replaces or supplements the
literary canon with a variety of cultural texts and objects; discourses and
practices; individuated bodies, subjects, and selves; or, perhaps most of-
ten, with popular works past and present as all worthy of the same criti-
cal attention, applying common analytical methods to each. In Literary
into Cultural Studies, Antony Easthope suggests that "both literary and
popular cultural texts operate through a system of signs, meanings aris-
ing from the organisation of the signifier, so both can be analysed in com-
mon terms." To illustrate "a new paradigm for the study of high and
popular forms together," he argues that Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes should be studied
together because they both "develop equally on the common ground of
textuality."70 According to Simon During, when society is seen as "struc-
tured by various, interacting fields through which various discursive/
cultural practices are transmitted, then the binary opposition 'popular'
versus 'elite' begins to fall away." 71 like one of the pluralistic strategies
for opening the canon, the appeal to popular culture is used to justify
putting neglected books, genres, and modes of cultural production on
the classroom syllabus, if not to "canonize" them. Since highbrow and
lowbrow texts have been increasingly viewed together in the 1980s and
1990s, "the boundaries of the canon," in the words of Martin Ryle, have
been "blurred or eroded" by cultural studies. 72 In this academic climate,
the study of popular culture alongside canonical texts has been actively
encouraged. Easthope goes so far as to suggest that "the binary which ex-
cludes popular culture as an outside while conserving as an inside a
canon of specially endowed literary texts simply cannot be sustained as a
serious intellectual argument." 73 Thus, the complete dissolution of litera-
ture as a distinctive body of works of art, and the substitution of "cul-
tural theory" for supposedly defunct literary theory, has been called for
by those who would replace it with the political analysis of discourse,
rhetoric, and other expressions of culture broadly conceived. 74
Blurring the boundary between literature and other products of cul-
ture relies in part on a relativistic treatment of aesthetics as a category
that is entirely a matter of opinion, rather than a form of knowledge or a
cipher with objective, cognitive content. To Ian Hunter, for example,
"aesthetics is not a failed knowledge because it is not a knowledge at

all." 75 In Literature, Culture and Society, Andrew Milner writes:
[T]he literary canon has normally been seen as "authentic" and "inspired"
in ways that other (merely "fictional") texts are not. Such distinctions be-
tween more or less authentic and more or less inspired texts are, of course,
judgements of value rather than statements of fact. But in so far as literary
studies understands itself as the study of great literature, then such value-
judgements enter into the very definition of its subject matter, and thereby
take on the quasi-objectivity of what we might well term a pseudo-fact.76
Whether or not "authenticity" or "inspiration" are indeed the most es-

sential qualities of canonical distinction, such characterizations preclude
the objectivity of aesthetic content and any objective, historical rationale
of canon formation: The claim of its cognitive truth content, its determi-
nate negation of the empirically existent, is simply discoimted from the
start. So, "if literature is no longer the 'canonical' other of non-literature,"
it is an easy step to the conclusion that it "becomes merely some texts
amongst many, each in principle analyzable according to analogous intel-
lectual procedures and operations." 77
The relegation of aesthetics to the spheres of subjective value and opin-
ion—and, therefore, the absolute relativity of all appraisals of cultural ar-
tifacts—has equivocal implications. As an inherent quality of certain ob-
jects, some dismiss aesthetic content outright, whereas others would
appear to grant it to virtually anything:
One of the most damaging charges that the cultural studies movement has
leveled against aesthetics is that it is wedded to a ("high cultural") canon of
works expressing the taste and values of a particular class. . . . [However,]
the aesthetic is not identified with a particular kind of literary object but
with an attitude individuals can adopt in relation to all kinds of objects, lit-
erary or not.78
In either case, the pundits of cultural studies will just as readily analyze
the semiotics of cigarette advertisements as that of canonical literature;
the literary tropes of Ridley Scott's film, Blade Runner, as those of Milton's
Paradise Lost; or the aesthetic value of fine wines and even professional
cricketers as much as that of Titian's work.7y
Such an all-embracing application of aesthetic value or content is per-
haps taken to its farthest extreme with the "aesthetic practice of the self,"
in which aesthetics becomes "a distinctive way of actually conducting
one's own life," in Hunter's words, of "bringing oneself into being as the
subject of an aesthetic experience." 80 Whatever it means for individual
subjects to "realize" themselves aesthetically, at this remove cultural

studies betrays its own immanent tendency to lapse into a culturally spe-
cific form of individualism—the political analogue of its relativism—and
an exaggerated subjectivity akin to the bad particularity of liberal plural-
ism, the solipsism of Harold Bloom's aesthetics, or the lack of canonical
specificity in John Guillory's thesis. Such extreme individualism does not
even consider whether, "in a society that is perpetually unfree, the eman-
cipation of the subject . . . both remains illusion and contributes to the
general illusion," or whether, "as long as the conditions of unfreedom ob-
jectively persist, culture is impossible as mere subjective freedom." 81
Moreover, to grant aesthetic value indiscriminately to any individual or
thing, no matter how distorted by commodification and unjust social re-
lations, is also ideological for legitimizing the status quo:
In a phase when the subject is capitulating before the alienated predomi-

nance of things, his readiness to discover value or beauty everywhere shows
the resignation both of his critical faculties and of the interpreting imagina-
tion inseparable from them. Those who find everything beautiful are now in
danger of finding nothing beautiful.82
If everything under the sun is to be liberally granted "aesthetic" value,

then in effect nothing is. Without qualitative distinctions between the crit-
ical content of works of art, the experience of individual subjects, and the
literary allusions of cultural products generally, the very concept of the
aesthetic becomes so diluted and undifferentiated as to be ultimately
meaningless, while the empirical world is allowed to stand exactly as it is.
This aesthetic amorphousness is both a consequence and a condition of
the impoverished idea of canonicity to which cultural studies subscribes.
For example, in spite of his comparative readings of Genesis, Paradise Lost,
Frankenstein, and Blade Runner, discovering in each a rich vein of com-
mon metaphors and intertextual references, Milner concludes that "no
film has ever been admitted to the canon. And this is so because a canon
of sacred texts can never be expanded to include even a single one of
even the most interesting or exciting of profane texts." Indeed, one
"should give up on the idea of a canon altogether," he continues, particu-
larly when "it becomes impossible to believe in 'primal aesthetic value'
somehow adhering strongly" to some of these works and not to others. 83
Milner's notion of canonicity, however, derives exclusively from Harold
Bloom's (the phrase "primal aesthetic value" is his), and his conception
of the aesthetic is consequently limited. Traditional literary studies,
Milner finds, "defined literature as a timeless, 'aesthetic' category," tend-
ing towards "an often politically conservative cultural elitism." Cultural
studies, by contrast, "insists that there are more interesting ways to ap-
proach canonical 'literary' texts than through acts of quasi-religious wor-

ship."*4 Once again, the canon is taken as necessarily unhistorical and re-
actionary, as little more than a fetish, and the strict dichotomy between
neutralized, accommodated culture and marginalized, politically pro-
gressive works is preserved. However, as explained in Chapter 4, critical
theory endorses neither extreme by itself but perceives elements of each
within every individual work of art. By repudiating the canon on the
grounds of a narrow and exclusive conception of aesthetics, cultural
studies itself bars "profane" works such as films or popular fiction from
canonical recognition. As long as it caricatures the idea of canonicity as
based on "primal aesthetic value," cultural studies ignores the fact that
works that are artistically reproduced in a variety of forms, generate ex-
ceptional amounts of commentary, become socially familiar and en-
dorsed by a range of cultural institutions, and are qualitatively judged to
be exceptional works of their kind could very well become canonical,
even in spite of individual doubts to the contrary.
Because society on every level now operates in accordance with the
dictates of commodity exchange, affecting even the consciousness of
value and beauty, it is unsurprising that the collapse of critical aesthetic
judgment has become so pervasive and even institutionally ratified in the
form of cultural studies. As Terry Eagleton has written in The Ideology of
the Aesthetic, the nature of the commodity mediates the consciousness of
culture itself:
The commodity . . . is transgressive, promiscuous, polymorphous; in its sub-

lime self-expansiveness, its levelling passion to exchange with another of its
kind, it offers paradoxically to bring low the very finely nuanced superstruc-
ture—call it "culture"—which serves in part to protect and promote it. The
commodity is the ruin of all distinctive identity. . . . Traversing with superb
indifference the divisions of class, sex and race, of high and low, past and
present, the commodity appears as an anarchic, iconoclastic force which
mocks the obsessive rankings of traditional culture even as it in some sense
depends upon them to secure the stable conditions for its own operations.85
Indeed, "a transgression of the frontiers between high and low, esoteric
and demotic, lies in the very nature of capitalism itself."86 Cultural stud-
ies as a discipline seems to be the institutional expression of an overbear-
ing market society that reduces true individuality to equivalence and
conformity for the sake of exchange, the process of which it also acceler-
ates. Whether it focuses on solitary subjects, commercial advertising,
products of the entertainment industry, or officially consecrated works of
art, cultural studies finds identical qualities in everything it fixes upon.
Critical theory, however, is not content with acquiescing to the status
quo. To Adorno and Horkheimer, "that art may best serve human eman-
cipation which detaches itself from the controlled and levelling interrela-
tions of a consumption, the democratic nature of which now only serves
as ideology." 87 Without sufficiently critical discrimination—which in-
cludes recognizing the historical and critical legitimacy of canonical dis-
tinction as well as its potential to be neutralized by institutional accom-
modation—cultural studies disregards the fact that true culture, like
canonical art, involves "an irrevocably critical impulse toward the status
quo and all institutions thereof. . . . [It is]a protest against integration
which always violently opposes that which is qualitatively different," an
objection "directed against the idea of levelling unification itself."88
Both products manufactured by the industries of culture and works
historically considered canonical may wrell be "torn halves of an integral
freedom"—as in Adorno's famous phrase—but the pretense of cultural
studies to have overcome the divide fails to realize the force of the pro-
viso that those halves "do not add up."89 The division cannot be glossed
over because it is historically objective, that is, the result of actual social
and material processes. It therefore remains both true and inevitable as
long as society itself is governed by a divisive rationale that endorses ex-
ploitation and inequality. "The dual character of culture . . . is derived
from the unresolved social antagonism which culture would like to cure
but as mere culture caniiot." 90 The idealistic liberal faith in educational
reform shows up again in this context: Without radical social change
founded on qualitative material transformation, aesthetic distinctions
will not simply evaporate, despite declarations to the contrary. Although
its specific content changes over time, the canon of "high art" remains
valid—indeed, indispensable—because it provides qualitative alterna-
tives, not concessions, to both the dominant pragmatic rationality of the
administered world and its quantitative notion of democracy, as well as
to the antagonistic social relations fostered by capitalism and its bour-
geois ideas of freedom. Just as the claims of socialist art (and Lukacs's de-
fense of it) amount to an "extorted reconciliation," and those of a plural-
istic canon to a fraudulent equality, the claim of cultural studies to
collapse the distinction between works high and low, canonical and pop-
ular, is ideological as long as social and material inequality prevails.
Because "the elitist isolation of advanced art is less its doing than soci-
ety's," 91 a critique of the canon cannot draw a line at art, but must take in
the whole socioeconomic order and the variety of ways in which it is le-
gitimized, including the specific methods by which cultural studies itself
ends up serving the status quo. The populist critique of the canon in the
guise of an egalitarian curriculum may well succeed in the classroom, but
the rationality of society as currently constituted—its governing princi-
ples of instrumentality, economism, and exchange—is left thoroughly in-
tact, if not reinforced: "[Sjocial injustice continues after it has been offi-
cially declared to have been eliminated." 92
This is also why the "indignation that has been standardized in the
phrase about the obsolete ivory tower from which . . . art must issue" has
something in common with the conservative concern to "keep culture
pure." 9 3 In the name of equality, these demands would abandon that
which perhaps best stands as a measure of how far from true reconcilia-
tion society remains. Where social, economic, and educational privilege
persists—including that of the professional artist and the specialist
critic—so will the distinction of canonical art; to dissolve the latter with-
out a radical critique of the former is false. More than simply negligent, it
is also ideological for preserving those privileges while claiming to have
overcome them. As long as society continues to be governed by prag-
matic, means-over-ends rationality, the "rational irrationality" of art re-
mains valid, if only to contradict it.94 This is certainly not to recommend a
static, lofty canon such as that exalted by cultural conservatism, which
would only reproduce the fetish of art in the service of the status quo, but
to stigmatize art, high culture, or the canon as primarily elitist is not only
unhistorical and politically dubious, it also willfully sacrifices the truth
content of art to the commodification of culture that passes itself off as
democratic.
One remarkable passage from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory draws the
connections between each of the preceding approaches to understanding,
subverting, or abolishing the canon:
Those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its
commodities... perceive art's inadequacy to the present life process of soci-
ety—though not society's own untruth—more unobstructedly than do those
who still remember what an artwork once was. They push for the deaes-
theticization [Entkutistung] of art.... The humiliating difference between art
and the life people lead, and in which they do not want to be bothered be-
cause they could not bear it otherwise, must be made to disappear: This is
the subjective basis for classifying art among the consumer goods under the
control of vested interests.95
The sociology of art, new historicism, and cultural studies might offer bet-
ter alternatives than the appeal to "pure" aesthetics or the institutional
neutralization of the canon, but the price these approaches pay for the
challenge does not amount to what they bargained for. In the end, one set
of ideologies is exchanged for another, each of which leaves the radically
critical, cognitive content of canonical works out of the equation.
6
The Boundaries of
a Critical Theory of
Canon Formation
Philosophy offers no place from which theory as such might be concretely convicted of
the anachronisms it is suspected of, now as before. Perhaps it was an inadequate inter-
pretation which promised that it would be put into practice. Theory cannot prolong
the moment its critique depended on. ... Having broken its pledge to be as one with
reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself.
—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966)
The arguments in Chapters 4 and 5 have shown that a distinctive concep-

tion of the literary canon and its relationship to the functions of art in
modern society can be found in critical theory. In terms of the debate pro-
voked by canon revision, it is distinguishable from both socially commit-
ted and pedagogically pragmatic accounts of art, according to which
canonical works would be justified on strictly instrumental grounds.
Equally, critical theory rejects the assumption that canonization works by
public consensus or academic decree, a belief that underestimates the
socioeconomic and historical mediation of all works of art. Critical aes-
thetic theory is also distinguishable from sociological and historicist
methods that would subvert the very idea of canonical distinction by
emptying individual works of their aesthetic import and critical content.
Although its unique advantages should be clear by now, various objec-
tions to critical theory have been made that have yet to be addressed, and
several remaining ambiguities have so far not been explored. The pur-
pose of this chapter is to examine the objections that are most relevant to
the literary canon and canon formation in general. This will help to deter-
mine where the boundaries of a critical theory of canon formation lie;
125
726 Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation
that is, where it could respond to criticisms of its apparent limitations

and where certain weaknesses in its own arguments remain.
The chapter is divided into two parts, the first of which is devoted to
addressing various criticisms of Adorno's aesthetic theory and literary
criticism.1 In particular, the common observation that Adorno's work is
almost entirely confined to Western or canonical art must be considered,
especially if critical theory is taken as having relevance to works outside
of the European traditions. Closely related to this is the issue of whether
Adorno's aesthetic theory adheres to an outmoded conception of the in-
dividual and determinate "work of art," which would date it as charac-
teristically modernist and therefore, presumably, less relevant to the
"postmodern" conditions of today. This leads to the question of critical
theory's concept of totality. Insofar as canon revision is taken as a chal-
lenge to the very idea of a social or cultural center, does the concept of a
social totality or underlying socioeconomic rationale still hold? Rather
than avoiding such questions, however, I will show that Adorno actually
raises most of them himself.
Nonetheless, certain remaining ambiguities and contradictions can be
found in critical tlieory that indeed point to its limitations. For example,
to the extent that Adorno resists making qualitative aesthetic distinctions
among popular works of art, it needs to be asked whether critical theory
recognizes or would even be able to account for the existence of a canon
of such works, especially in light of its own critique of the culture indus-
try. Adorno's aesthetic theory makes room for the truth content of works
mat have been adapted or reproduced in other media. At the same time,
however, he is hostile to cultural and artistic reproduction that he be-
lieves to be functions of the culture industry. Given that artistic reproduc-
tion is historically one of the most essential characteristics of the canon-
ization process, this discrepancy indicates where a critical theory of
canon formation remains to be developed. It also reveals a tension, or
contradiction, that is inherent to canonicity itself.
Limited Literary Horizons?

Peter Uwe Hohendahl's book on Adorno, Prismatic Thought, is one of the
few in English to treat his literary criticism in detail. Although
Hohendahl has little to say about its implicit relevance to the current cul-
tural debate—except that Adorno's analyses seem bound to the tradi-
tional Western canon at the expense of alternative works of literature—he
does assess what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of
Adorno's critical readings of canonical German authors. Following his
essays on Goethe, Eichendorff, and Heinrich Heine, Hohendahl illus-
trates how Adorno reads classic German literature "against tlie grain" of
Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 127
conventional interpretation that has appropriated these authors for the

limited purposes of literary appreciation or cultural preservation. 2 Where
traditional readings have taken Iphigenie in Tanris to be an example of
Goethe's artistic maturation and classicism, or the poetry of Eichendorff
to be an exemplary instance of German patriotism and Catholicism,
Adorno reverses such claims. Instead, he finds that the former actually
internalizes the dialectic of enlightenment and contains various formal
contradictions that are hardly consonant with the ideals of "classicism,"
and that the latter ultimately undermines its own conservative ideology
in spite of itself.3 As explained in Chapter 4, Adorno attempts to rescue
canonical literature from latter-day ideological appropriation by disclos-
ing its immanent truth content.
Although Hohendahl sympathetically appraises Adorno's critical
readings of the German canon, he also believes they are marred by cer-
tain inconsistencies and "blind spots," not least of which are their limited
historical and geographical horizons. In his view, Adorno ignores both
premodern literature and almost any that does not originate in Europe:
For him, literature is European—particularly West European—literature.

Outside the German tradition, he is primarily drawn to French authors.
Excursions into English literature are rare (Dickens, Beckett), and there is no
indication that he was ever interested in American literature, even though
he lived in the United States for more than a decade. . . . By and large, he
stayed fairly close to the pantheon of great figures and masterpieces. There
is no attempt to discover and come to terms with marginal traditions such as
proletarian literature or that of ethnic groups.4
Nor is he alone in his parochialism: "the literary horizon of Adorno is

largely identical to that of Benjamin."5
Apart from its overstatement or simple inaccuracy,6 Hohendahl's criti-
cism imposes what are clearly recent interpretative values on the past
and faults others for not evidently sharing them. He takes what are
largely consequences of historical and material circumstances and re-
duces them to mere preferences or biases, as if "ethnic" literature were as
widely produced or readily available in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s
(or, for that matter, in the United States in the late 1930s and 1940s, when
Adorno was living there) as it has become since. To expect critics of that
era to have been as thoroughly familiar with such literature as critics to-
day are is anachronistic, precisely because that literature was not regarded
as canonical then. More important, even if more attention had been given
to alternative works, it is unlikely that they would have been found to es-
cape the totalizing tendencies of modern administrative society or the
process of cultural commodification: As long as those conditions persist,
the critical theory of art in modernity would still apply. Moreover, the
"neglect" of "proletarian" literature is not a case of simple methodologi-
cal oversight or bias but rather a function of the critique of committed art
and skepticism regarding the orthodox Marxist faith in the proletariat. 7
Ultimately, the critique of their specific choice of literary subjects is a cri-
tique of Adorno and Benjamin as subjective individuals, foregrounding
their personal idiosyncrasies rather than engaging objectively with criti-
cal theory as such. When the actual content of Adomo's literary criticism
is engaged, however, other revealing problems arise.
Hohendahl devotes an entire chapter to Adorno's essay on Heine. He
tries to construct a case for why Adorno seems to have had "doubts" and
"reservations" about the value of Heine's poems, why "he cannot fully
acknowledge Heine's poetry as part of the German canon." 8 Adorno be-
lieved that Heine's status as an outsider inhibited his use of the German
language: "[H]is lack of resistance to words that are in fashion is the ex-
cessive mimetic zeal of the person who is excluded." 9 Because of Heine's
alienation from the language and because, "for Adorno, the idea of an
authentic poetic language remains crucial—particularly after the
Holocaust," Hohendahl believes that Adorno is initially reluctant to rec-
ognize Heine's modernity, his value as a modern writer; only "grudg-
ingly" does he admit him into the canon. 10 In Hohendahl's view, it is
Heine's German-Jewish identity that leads Adorno to surmise that he is
not "at home" in the German language. However, Hohendahl finds this
reasoning to rely on a problematic notion of linguistic authenticity that
contradicts Adorno's own thesis that anti-semitism is foimded in part on
the false essentialism of an "authentic" Jewish character:
Anti-semitism, Adorno rightly argues, has little to do with Jews; its mecha-
nisms do not depend on but rather exclude real experience with its victims.
At the same time, however, Adorno suggests that there is a link between
Heine's Jewishness and his lack of an authentic language, that there is real
difference after all between a German poet and a Jewish-German writer.
Obviously, these arguments are not quite compatible. The psychological
model of racism as a mechanism in which the victim is replaceable presup-
poses that there can be no essentially Jewish character, that the "Jewish"
character—its otherness—is the invention of the racist. Yet Heine's linguistic
deficit, his not being quite at home in the German language, appears to be
real—a specifically Jewish deficiency."
However sound on the surface, the problem with Hohendahl's critique

is that it reveals more about his own preconceptions than it does about
the weaknesses of Adorno's literary criticism. Critical theory is never so
unhistorical or essentialist as to adhere to a static conception of either cul-
tural identity or "authentic" language. On the contrary, it consistently

emphasizes that all identity is historically mediated. Indeed, in this very
context Adorno remarks that even the apparent immediacy of Heine's
lyric poetry is "thoroughly mediated/' undermining the bourgeois faith
in the purity of art by being infused with the reality of commodification
and exchange. 12 It is not Adorno but Hohendahl who clings to rigid cate-
gories, taking Heine unproblematically to be a "German-Jewish liberal"
or "Jewish-German writer," 13 whereas Adorno's essay attempts to wrest
Heine's poetry from such reductive identity thinking, which is exactly
what its ambiguous and largely prejudiced reception in Germany had re-
lied on. 14 Adorno concentrates instead on the latent truth content of
Heine's work: "Now that the destiny which Heine sensed has been ful-
filled literally, however, the homelessness has also become everyone's
homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their be-
ings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for
their words." 13 The truth content of Heine's poetry lies in his experience
becoming subsumed, via his art, under a more universal concept of alien-
ation. Although Hohendahl is rightly skeptical of the notion of an au-
thentic German language, he takes the social identity of Heine for granted.
Rather than reading the poems from within, he imposes predetermined
sociological categories from without, betraying his own essentialism in
the process. This contradiction perhaps owes less to a logical inconsis-
tency or methodological failure on the part of the individual critic than to
the dominant ideology of liberalism he adopts, whose contemporary em-
phasis on authorial identity has already been shown to be highly prob-
lematic, especially in terms of its application to literature.
Apart from the critique of Adorno's approach to canonical literary
works, there is a more general criticism of his apparent confidence in the
concept of the "artwork" as such. That critical theory depends to a great
extent on the work of art as a singular artifact should be clear from
Chapters 4 and 5. However, it has also been mentioned in Chapter 3 how
certain sociological approaches to art have cast doubt on the concept of a
unique work. Recall, for example, that Bourdieu's model of the field at-
tributes the boundaries of any given work to be a function of discourse,
and that Guillory maintains that there is nothing necessarily distinctive
about works of art at all. From both perspectives, the definition of art is
nothing more than the product of cultural capital. What has been dubbed
the postmodern, or post-structuralist, critique similarly problematizes
the concept of a coherent work by emphasizing its open and het-
eronomous character. Michel Foucault, for instance, questions the con-
cepts of both "author" and "work" as unified or closed entities and like-
wise finds them to be functions of discourse and open-ended. 1 6 By
contrast, according to Hohendahl, "Adorno clearly gives priority to the
concrete artifact as the basis for aesthetic theorizing. His emphasis on the
objective status of the artwork, on its structural and material features,...
could be perceived as specifically modernist," and therefore, presumably,
less relevant to cultural and theoretical concerns today. 17
Although there is indeed much in Adorno's theory that lends itself to
this interpretation, the conclusion that it is narrowly modernist for being
bound to a strict concept of the unified work is not entirely accurate. On
the opening page of Aesthetic Theory, the assertion is made that "nothing
concerning art is self-evident any longer, not its inner life, not its relation
to the world, not even its right to exist."18 Amid such radical skepticism,
not even the concept of the artwork itself can be taken for granted; criti-
cal theory implicitly subverts dogmatic definitions, whether of the work
of art or of authentic language and unmediated identity. In the section in
Aesthetic Theory entitled "Toward a Theory of the Artwork," Adorno re-
marks that "the thesis of the monadological character of artworks is as
true as it is problematic." Even though aesthetics "irrevocably . . . pre-
supposes immersion in the particular work," the notion of a determinate
or fully coherent work is as thoroughly mediated by abstract conceptual-
ization as the idea of art is by history and society, because any such con-
cepts are necessarily "introduced externally to the monad" rather than
derived directly from it.19 To that extent, the critical theory of art is not
simply wed to a unequivocal idea of the artwork, and may be more com-
patible with the post-structuralist conception of an open "work" than is
widely believed. The emphasis on artworks as historically becoming,
rather than simply "being," attests to Adorno's and Benjamin's implicitly
open-ended concept of the work.
A similar case has been made against critical theory's assumption of a
totally administered society, or socioeconomic totality, on which the idea
of art as radical critique depends. In opposition to the claim that modem
society is closed and monolithic, many critics have countered that critical
theory overestimates the cohesion of advanced capitalism and exagger-
ates its powers of social control. 20 In historical terms, its characterization
of society is thought at best to be more applicable to the period of mo-
nopoly capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century than to the
socioeconomic conditions of the latter half, when economic "Fordism"
gave way to decentralized, postindustrial capitalism. 21 In sociological
terms, the concept of a totally integrated, administered society may also
be criticized for its ethnocentrism, extrapolating solely from European
bureaucracy or Anglo-American experience at the expense of non-
Western societies that do not obviously fit into its model.
Although these criticisms might provide a more complex or nuanced
account of late capitalism, the degree to which they contradict the claims
of critical theory is less certain. For one thing, in spite of other structural
changes, it is debatable whether monopolization is in fact a thing of the

past. The frenzy of recent and escalating corporate mergers and
takeovers, both within and across national borders, only confirms that
capital and ownership continue to be concentrated in fewer and fewer
hands. Pedantically, this might be dismissed as the formation of oligopo-
lies or cartels (with which critical theory is also concerned) rather than
bona fide monopolies, but it can hardly be taken as evidence of an open,
diverse, or truly competitive society. Second, even if the period of strict
monopoly capitalism has come to an end, capitalist societies continue to
be governed by the principle of economic exchange and the rule of profit,
and they still rely on class division, commodification, and exploitation to
function. With the advent of economies of scale and globalization, these
are, if anything, more pervasive than before, imposing a single economic
rationale on hitherto diverse cultures and societies the world over. As al-
ready suggested in Chapter 2, the imperative of cultural diversity in the
current canon debate is itself in large part oioitig to the commodification
and consequent homogenization of cultural diversity.
The concept of social totality, however, is not simply identical with
capitalism. Rather, it entails the entirety of relationships between con-
sciousness, society, and the economy—from the ideology of the "free
market" to the predominance of instrumental rationality, from the con-
tent of the mass media down to the psychology of individuals. 2 2 The
popular conviction that there is no longer any real alternative to capital-
ism bears witness to totalizing thought and says even more about its ef-
fects than it does about capitalism per se. The counter-argument that
within late capitalist society the media, for example, have become more
heterogeneous than homogeneous, a public forum of criticism rather
than conformity, is undermined by the striking homogeneity of their con-
tent. According to one commentator,
The media do engage in social critique, but only . . . to facilitate the further
rationalization of advanced capitalism by eliminating social anachronisms
or lingering dysfunctional features, such as racism, sexism and any kind of
discrimination that resists the collective homogenization that is already, for
the most part, fairly well accomplished. Far from subverting anything other
than obsolete traditional remnants, this social critique is one of the most
powerful legitimating forces at work, positing advanced capitalism, as it is,
as the best of all possible emancipatory and democratic social systems.23
Because they tend to reflect the immediate interests of society, the various
organs of the mass media are incapable of providing alternatives to the
status quo, and often serve to reproduce and legitimize it instead.
Moreover, the criticism of the concept of totality on the grounds that it
conceals the actual diversity of Western society, or the critical nature of its
institutions, is itself subject to criticism. If the idea of a qualitatively dif-
ferent or non-capitalist society is excluded in favor of accurately repre-
senting social diversity, then the concept of "difference" on which the cri-
tique of totality relies is not radically critical, but merely empirical. Like
the liberal-pluralistic arguments for opening the canon, without address-
ing the division of labor and the social relations of production, it leaves
the class basis of society essentially intact.
However problematic the concept of totality may or may not be when
applied to global capitalism and the reproduction of social relations, it is
even less clear whether it can be usefully extended to encompass the cul-
tural diversity of artistic production. In other words, the concept of total-
ity might be better suited to capitalism than to culture, unless one simply
reduces the latter to being a mechanical function of the former. Given
critical theory's own emphasis on mediation and its move away from the
crude base/superstructure model of Marxist orthodoxy, however, the
category of culture cannot be reduced to merely reflecting the socio-
economic "base." 24 If not, then to what extent does the concept of totality
extend to cultural forms such as art and literature? One of art's most dis-
tinguishing characteristics is a cognitive content distinct from positivistic
knowledge and forms of ideology; therefore, it poses, at least abstractly,
alternatives to totalizing thought. By their very existence, artworks sig-
nify something beyond the status quo. And although the current ten-
dency is for diverse cultures and artistic canons to flourish under the
socioeconomic conditions of market capitalism, it can still be argued that
decisive differences persist between canonical works, even in spite of the
inclination of administered society to categorize and homogenize them.
Indeed, the historical marginality of certain literary forms, authors, and
works has been seen as pointing to the fissures and gaps of totalizing sys-
tems and, by extension, of a static or closed literary canon. Yet, paradoxi-
cally, to make the case for their validity, import, or comparable value is
also to risk assimilation by the totality: The marginal remains dependent
on the center, just as the non-canonical is on the canonical. In other
words, non-Western or historically neglected works, cultures, and tradi-
tions might be presented as alternatives to the Western canon, but they
can hardly be said to lie outside the social totality for being so; that is,
even alternative works of literature, in terms of both their composition
and their reception, inevitably rely on the division of labor and the corn-
modification of culture. Nonetheless, given critical theory's own empha-
sis on the autonomy of art, which enables its critical perspective on the
empirical world, a concept of totality that really does embrace every
manifestation of culture and society could at least be refined, so as to ac-
count differentially for forms of art and culture that do not conform
wholly to the dominant ones and that are therefore potentially more au-
tonomous than those that do.
In Chapter 4, I explained that the critical theory of art does not auto-
matically or necessarily exclude the truth content of hitherto neglected
works of literature, that immanent critique can be applied to them as
much as to the most canonical works of art. However, the qualitative dis-
tinctions that can be made among popular forms of art, which are notori-
ously lacking in Adomo's aesthetic theory, have not yet been examined.
In the following section I show how this absence, along with Adomo's
ambiguous view of canonization, may ultimately point to the limits of a
critical theory of canonical art.
Canonical Reproduction and

the Limits of Critical Theory
Critical theory is highly skeptical about the cognitive value or truth con-
tent of popular works of art and literature. Because the production and
reproduction of these works is standardized for the purpose of wide dis-
semination, they are taken to be products of the culture industry, which,
in Adomo and Horkheimer's account, has inherently pernicious effects
on both individual consciousness and the quality of the works them-
selves because they are no longer allowed to develop according to their
own logic but must conform to the commercial and ideological interests
of the industry. 25 On the basis of the detailed attention Adorno gives to
works of "high" culture such as literature, painting, and symphonic or
chamber music, and his comparatively dismissive accounts of "light art"
and entertainment, he does not appear to find much aesthetic merit or
critical value in works of "popular culture." 26 Just as the idea of canonic-
ity has been found wanting in cultural studies, so Adorno may be ac-
cused of insufficiently addressing the issue of the qualitative aesthetic
distinctions that can be made even within the culture industry. Many crit-
ics have taken up this point, two of whom will be examined more closely.
In David Held's survey of critical theory, Adomo's view of popular
music barely considers the technical innovations that had begun to de-
velop in the realm of recorded music by the 1960s. Held points to the mu-
sic of The Beatles as an example of formal innovation within a popular
mode. 27 Similarly, Lambert Zuidervaart believes that Adorno fails to give
a satisfactory account of the truth content of popular, heteronomous art:
To claim that autonomy is a precondition for truth in art is to ignore the abil-
ity of heteronomous works and events to challenge the status quo, some-
times in ways that are more effective than those available to autonomous
works. . . . Adomo's aesthetics [is] inadequate with respect to popular art.
Traditional emphases on disinterested contemplation, artistic autonomy,

and aesthetic normativity clash with the realities of popular art.28
In the first case, The Beatles' music is held up as an example of advanced

popular music, but without any analysis of its specific content. Its quality
is simply taken as self-evident. In the second case, it is automatically as-
sumed that "popular art makes little or no pretense at [sic] autonomy,"
and so should not be judged according to its standards. 29 However, this is
to make a far more drastic separation between heteronomous and au-
tonomous art than critical theory itself does. 30
As argued toward the end of Chapter 5, the commodihcation of culture
affects both popular and autonomous art, both high and low culture. To
claim that popular artworks are necessarily or wholly heteronomous is to
deny whatever residue of autonomy they may still have and therefore to
discount the possibility that they could indeed preserve some critical
content, in spite of whatever popularity they subsequently excite.
Moreover, unlike critical theorists, Zuidervaart takes "popularity" to be
an unambiguous concept. Without providing an analysis of any particu-
lar work, he actually suggests that the quality of popular art is to be deter-
mined according to its popularity: "[E]ven when popular art measures
u p to aesthetic norms such as originality or authenticity, these hardly
seem like the most important or only relevant norms for popular art. No
matter how original or authentic, for example, a movie that proves un-
popular has less merit as a product of popular art." 31 By equating the
merit of such works with their popularity or unpopularity, this argument
effectively reduces the qualitative content of popular works to being a
function of their reception. In doing so, it takes the critical consciousness
of their audiences for granted, as if it were unmediated, non-manipula-
ble, and subject to straightforward empirical measurement. However, in
contrast to those who would "depict the relationship between art and its
reception as static and harmonious, according to the principle of supply
and demand," the critical theory of society argues that "conformity to the
consumer . . . which likes to masquerade as humanitarianism, is nothing
but the economic technique of consumer exploitation. Artistically, it
means the renunciation of all interference with . . . the reified conscious-
ness of the audience. . . . The consumers are made to remain what they
are: consumers." 32 Instead of referring to the dubious "popularity" of
popular art to determine its merit, whether of film or of rock and roll mu-
sic, a critical theory of art would subject each particular work to imma-
nent critique, appealing neither to its self-evident "greatness" nor to its
thoroughly mediated reception.
Because Adorno himself fails to provide such analysis, systematically
avoiding making qualitative aesthetic distinctions among products of the
culture industry, the question remains as to whether a critical theory of art

could admit, in principle, of a canon of popular artistic forms, despite the
fact that they are industrially produced and therefore especially subject to
administration, standardization, and commodification. As some commen-
tators have argued, Adorno's own late essay on film seems to grant some
critical potential to motion pictures, at least provisionally.33 But even here
there is no sustained critique of any one film that would disclose its spe-
cific truth content as much as ideological content. The implication is that
Adorno's concept of great art does not allow that comparatively recent,
popular, or historically "lower" art forms can also be canonical, that they
could indeed be exemplary works in their respective media.
In terms of canonization as a process of institutional consecration, cul-
tural familiarity, and artistic reproduction in various genres and media
over time, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, there is no logical reason why
selected works of popular culture—even those of the culture industry—
should not be considered canonical. To use the examples already men-
tioned, the fact that The Beatles' music has influenced and been subse-
quently reproduced by countless musicians, permeating Western music
and culture in various ways, is enough at least to begin to make the case
for its canonical value. Moreover, in terms of aesthetic content—an aspect
of canonicity no less significant than artistic reproduction—it is possible
to use immanent critique to reveal the ideological and critical aspects of
popular music, as Ben Watson suggests in Frank Zappa's Negative
Dialectics of Poodle Play (1995). Much the same can be said of motion pic-
tures, despite the argument made by certain advocates of cultural studies
that films are somehow "excluded" from the canon (see Chapter 5). As
far as movies like Blade Runner have been the source of imitation for any
number of science fiction films, they, too, may be regarded as canonical
works of their kind. And no less than popular music, the content of films
can also be the subject of immanent critique, as Fredric Jameson demon-
strates with reference to The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Diva, and The
Shining?4 Not unlike cultural studies, Adorno's aesthetic theory may be
faulted for underestimating the extent to which reproduction and institu-
tionalization are as constitutive of canonization, within any medium, as
cognitive content is of autonomous works of art. Although critical theory
condemns the familiarity of works that have become culturally accom-
modated and neutralized, it manages nonetheless to salvage the truth
content of some of the most familiar literature of all, including the works
of Goethe, Baudelaire, Kafka, and other exemplars of the Western literary
canon. Why should the most exemplary works of popular art be any less
salvageable?
The reason seems to lie in Adorno's rather restricted sense of canonic-
ity as a concept. His specific use of the term usually has negative conno-
tations, as when he writes of a "canon of prohibitions" [Kanon der Verhote]

against materials and techniques that are no longer historically viable, or
when he insinuates that canonization is tantamount to artistic decline
and the destruction of culture. 35 For example, Adorno remarks that the
"official canonization" that is said to have "befallen" Stefan George
served only to prohibit the free criticism of his work, and that being "ele-
vated to the Pantheon" necessarily suppresses the truth content of art-
works. 36 As several critics have pointed out, Adorno's concentration on
autonomous works of art is often at the expense of equal attention to the
institution of art. 37 To extend that criticism, his theory pays insufficient at-
tention to the institutionalization of art as a cultural and historical process.
Instead of recognizing the degree to which this process is necessary for
any work to become canonical (even though it has ambiguous conse-
quences), Adorno essentially condemns it. In his mind, to be institution-
alized is to be accommodated, commodified, and ultimately neutralized,
nothing more.
As much as institutionalization is a centra) component of canonization,
so too is artistic reproduction. In direct contrast to the sociology of art,
critical theory may be said to overestimate the aesthetic content of works
in isolation while underestimating how artistic reproduction—from literal
adaptations and figurative rewritings to public and academic dis-
course—is essential to the survival, if not the truth content, of any work
of art. Although the sociology of art was criticized in Chapter 5 for ob-
scuring the aesthetic content of literature by overemphasizing the institu-
tional process of canonization, immanent critique may go too far in the
other direction. This becomes especially clear when Adorno writes, in
reference to attempts to dramatize the novels of Kafka, that "for works of
art which deserve the name, the medium is not a matter of indifference.
Adaptations should be reserved for the culture industry." 38 If so, then
what of The Aeneid, Romeo and Juliet, and Doctor Faustus, each of which is
explicitly based on earlier works? Surely the significance of Troihts and
Cressida, Ulysses, and—as we have seen—Iphigenie in Tauris is not limited
to the interests and conformism of the culture industry? If not, then the
concepts of artistic adaptation and dissemination that are so central to
canon formation need to be refined rather than denounced. Although it is
understood that the reproduction of individual works of art also has the
potential to undermine them, it is no less true that some form of repro-
duction is essential for any work, great or small, to begin circulating
within society, attract critical attention, and have any significance at all
beyond itself. Critical theory leaves under-theorized the qualitative dis-
tinctions that can be made between different forms or incidents of adap-
tation. To imitate is not identical to being imitative.
At this point, the question is raised as to whether the culture industry

thesis is too historically unspecific, especially in terms of its implications
for literary canon formation. On the one hand, Adorno dismisses artistic
adaptation into different media as the domain of the ctilture industry. On
the other, he maintains that the truth content of certain works is some-
times belatedly disclosed through just such adaptations and rewritings.
Thus, "it was not until Mahler's songs . . . that the music of Heine's
verses was released. In the mouth of a stranger, what is old and familiar
takes on an extravagant and exaggerated quality, and precisely that is the
truth [of Heine's poetry]." 39 Likewise, Schumann's Liederkreis op. 39, a
setting of Eichendorff's verses to music, is said to "bring out a potential
contained in the poems" that was otherwise unknown. 40 So what makes
these cases examples not of ideological reproduction but of the means by
which the truth content of earlier artworks is illuminated? It cannot be
that they predate the commodification of culture and are therefore inno-
cent of its effects, since nascent tendencies of the ctilture industry are de-
tectable in the contemporaneous works of Alexandre Dumas, Eugene
Sue, and James Fenimore Cooper, if not earlier. In Adorno's own words,
"Reading popular novels a hundred years old like those of Cooper, one
finds in rudimentary form the whole pattern of Hollywood." 41 Indeed,
Don Quixote de la Mancha already implies that literary production was be-
coming standardized as early as the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Cervantes's parody of the stultifying formulas of the chivalric ro-
mance is one aspect of Don Quixote's continuing truth content, precisely
for embodying a critique of the proto-culture industry. 42 Critical theory,
however, cannot simply resolve this contradiction, not because its con-
cept of the culture industry is too historically indeterminate but because
it is an objective contradiction, a necessary tension within the process of
canon formation itself.
Because canonization at some times elicits and at other times represses
the truth content of exemplary works of art, the discrepancy between
truth content~z?ra-reproduction and truth content-uersi/s-reproduction is
an inherent source of tension. Canons of art and literature essentially in-
volve both qualitative judgment of the critical-aesthetic content of indi-
vidual works and some manner of reproduction and cultural familiarity,
each of which may function at the expense of the other. If the critical the-
ory of art is limited for concentrating in any given instance on only one of
these aspects, men it is partly owing to its own limitations and partly to
the inherent contradictions of canonicity itself. Just as canons have been
used both as practical working models for artists and as universal aes-
thetic ideals, as pedagogical tools for education in the humanities and as
ideological devices in the service of nationalism, as apolitical and time-
less exemplars of the Western tradition and as representative of distinct

social groups in contemporary cultural politics, so their commodification
and reproduction coincides with an aesthetic quality that betrays the
principles of identity and exchange on which they rely.
Of course, contradictions such as these are not foreign to critical the-
ory. That works of art have critical, cognitive value and are also in some
sense an "absolute commodity" is recognized in Adorno's aesthetic the-
ory as one of the essential paradoxes of art in modernity. 43 When art-
works are raised to canonical status, they become the ultimate commod-
ity fetish, a betrayal of culture in the name of culture. Indeed, Adorno
finds that "culture is inherently structured in antinomies." 4 4
Nonetheless, insofar as he emphasizes the negative aspects of canoniza-
tion, Adorno appears to lose sight of his own aphorism that the failure
of culture is no excuse for furthering its failure.45 A more meticulous crit-
ical aesthetic theory would instead consider when and if the cognitive
content of canonical works actually provides a more critical perspective
on society than other works precisely because of their historicity, their re-
production over time. Conversely, it would also have to judge at what
point, and in what configurations, the truth content of canonical adapta-
tions, even in popular forms, may outweigh their commodification and
distortion by the culture industry. In any case, until an emancipated so-
ciety no longer makes a fetish of canonical works or compromises their
truth content for the sake of political expedience, the tension between
canonization and canonicity will persist, even if the ideology of the cul-
ture industry and its false pluralism of opening the canon have so far
been successful in covering up that tension.
Conclusion:
A Canon of Art,
a Politics of Ends
As is known, when a people vanishes, the first to disappear are the upper classes, and
with them literature; all that remains are books of late, which the people know In/
lieart.
Milorad Pavic,
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words (1989)
Given the tensions between canonicity as the qualitative judgment of a

work's aesthetic content and canon formation as an historical process of
artistic reproduction and institutional consecration, it would be disingen-
uous to draw any transparent conclusions that would deny the true com-
plexity of the contemporary debate. The persistence of the impasse alone
suggests that no single or simple conclusion can presume to be definitive.
That canons have historically had a variety of applications is enough to
undermine any one-sided assertion about their precise political and ideo-
logical significance or their social and pedagogical purposes. The concept
of a canon has had both pragmatic and idealistic connotations since its
inception. Individual canonical works have been instruments of national-
ism, invented traditions, and exclusive cultural identity, but they have
also endured beyond specific historical contexts, affected cultures be-
yond that of their own origin, and transcended the immediate political
interests in whose name they have been used. As much as canonical dis-
tinction relies necessarily on the division of labor and the reproduction of
social relations, the notion of a canon of exemplary works is also an aes-
thetic ideal with a cognitive content that negates narrow assumptions
about the affirmative or ideological character of art. If canonization is the
cultural process by which selected works are continually rewritten and
reproduced, becoming so absorbed in a culture that they are perceived as
familiar and even commonplace, then canonicity as a measure of aes-
139
HO Conclusion
thetic quality can also be the judgment of a work's radically critical po-
tential, one which is as subversive of the status quo as it is of its own in-
stitutional accommodation. In spite of these tensions, contradictions, and
ambiguities, it is possible to make some general concluding remarks
without denying those tensions or forcing them into a premature and ar-
tificial reconciliation.
Superficially, the "either/or" terms of the debate as it has been framed
suggest that its arguments are divided along ideologically opposed lines
that are wholly incompatible and irreconcilable. The Western literary
canon is either pedagogically useful or socially oppressive, a source of
enlightenment or of deception, a fetish disguising political interests or an
instrument of democratic humanism. The individual works it comprises
are either socially committed or aloof, historically autonomous or het-
eronomous, politically populist or elitist, representative of society or re-
moved from it, products of the dominant culture or independent of it. Yet
each of these antinomies has served to obscure the actual ideological
affinities between them. For all the diverse claims that have been made
about the canon, characteristic of each is an idealistic conception of the
role of aesthetic judgment in the appraisal of canonical works or a prag-
matic notion of their political and pedagogical functions, both of which,
it has been shown, are inherent to the concept itself, but neither of which
accounts for the material constraints of canon formation as a social and
historical process. The idealism of those who take the aesthetic quality of
literature to be timeless, subjective, or without social implications is
matched by those who find the Western canon to be the result of an his-
torical prejudice that can be overcome with a substitution of texts in the
classroom. In neither case are objective historical and material determi-
nations seen as constitutive of both the production of all works of art and
the specific content of a canon in any given period.
Literature is not made in a social vacuum, and neither are its critical
reappraisals. To be at all comprehensive, therefore, any critique or analy-
sis of the canon must also include a metacritique of the claims that are
made about it, an assessment of the social and material conditions of
their own possibility, especially those that have done most to influence
the form the debate has taken. To the extent that specific modes of pro-
duction affect not only the form and dissemination of cultural works but
also the discourse about them, the economic principles and ideological
mystifications of capitalist society affect not only the production and re-
production of literary canons but also the rhetoric surrounding them.
That even those works of literature raised to challenge the hegemony and
unjust exclusions of the Western canon owe their authorship in part to
the division of labor mitigates from the start whatever measure of social
justice and equality is actually achieved by their recognition. To promote
Conclusion Ul
alternatives to the monuments of Western culture without perceiving the

social guilt behind every work of art is to deny the injustice and barbarity
of "culture" itself, whether dominant or marginalized.
Because the reproduction of works is part and parcel of any canon, and
if whatever monopoly academia may have once had on artistic consecra-
tion has vanished, then it needs to be asked what other institutions and
industries are responsible for the production and reproduction of culture
today. Because the commodification of cultural diversity has become an
essential feature of modern capitalism, it, too, must be considered in the
context of the canon debate. Indeed, the imperative of cultural diversity
and the growing emphasis on social identity may well be subliminal re-
actions to capitalism, if not an indirect product of commodity production
itself, insofar as societies the world over increasingly operate according
to the same economic principles and a similar instrumental rationale. In
this light, the apparent success of opening or diversifying the canon
seems to be due more to commodification and exchange than to social
justice. Thus, literary works of whatever cultural origins now "compete"
as so many products on the market. That the terms classic and canonical
are used so loosely and unhistorically as to designate anything from
practically unknown works of literature to today's best-seller is itself an
indication of the effect that commodification has had on historical con-
sciousness and critical thought.
Of course, recognizing this does not imply endorsing the simple mar-
ketplace theory of canon formation, whereby the competition between
cultural goods is assumed to take place on a mythically level playing
field. It is merely to speculate on whether the lack of belief in objective
aesthetic judgment occasioned by cultural relativism today is in part due
to the reification of consciousness and cultural commodification,
whereby works of art are reduced to equivalence for the sake of ex-
change. If that is the case, then leaving aesthetic judgment in the hands of
liberal pluralism and identity politics will give up its radically critical po-
tential to the new status quo. One consequence of doing so is that the
socioeconomic conditions of artistic production are disregarded for the
sake of furthering one or another individual group's immediate political
interests. By contrast, critical theory affords a distinctive sociological, ma-
terialistic, and politically radical perspective on cultural phenomena
such as canon formation and the function and fate of art in capitalist soci-
eties. Insofar as canon formation is dictated by the logic of the culture in-
dustry and justified primarily in instrumental terms, critical theory has
perhaps even more to say about it now than it did before the advent of
the latest cultural controversy.
This is another reason why the belief that the literary canon provides,
or ought to provide, an accurate representation of society is deeply ideo-
U2 Conclusion
logical. The grounds on which canon revision is to be achieved, as much

as the arguments for leaving it intact, are more often than not pragmatic
and instrumental: one for taking art to be politically effective in promot-
ing the interests of marginalized social groups, the other for assuming
that canons are tools for organizing conceptions of the past, and both for
valuing them only to the extent that they are useful pedagogical devices.
In either case, canons of art and literature are taken as an empirical reflec-
tion of society as it is or as it is believed to have been. Yet reducing the so-
cial significance of art to empirical accuracy is akin to reading individual
works in purely realistic terms, as if literalism were the best or only basis
on which to evaluate them. Not only does this end up endorsing society
in its present form, it also jeopardizes the political import of art's ab-
stract, indirect, and enigmatic qualities, the significance of which may
not be readily "applied." In the process, the unique cognitive content of
art is forfeited, and it is forced to mimic that which is already provided
by other forms of knowledge, such as empirical description or scientific
measurement. This reduction dims the imaginative potential of artistic
production and interpretation to see beyond current existence, and it lim-
its the critical capacity to unveil the socioeconomic order that sustains
artistic production as a privileged category. To cripple the ability of art to
conceive of things as other than they happen to be is to naturalize reality
as given, which is the most insidious form of ideology.
More than just acknowledging human suffering and universal social
injustice, art in modernity has become a corrective to instrumental reason
and its strict empiricism. Contrary to the dogma of pragmatism, art is a
politics of ends, not means. It is both a negation of what merely exists
and a promise of what has yet to be. Because the very concept of art im-
plies critical aesthetic judgment, it is simultaneously descriptive and
evaluative, concerned not only with how society is but with what it
might become. If an individual work is taken at face value as nothing
more than an accurate reflection of the material world, then its prescrip-
tive aspect is forsaken. Equally, if the canon is confined to being strictly
representative of society, then its greatest critical potential is lost. Art
judges society no less than society judges it. As a changing constellation
of works of art, the literary canon is a reflection of society's distance from
true justice and reconciliation. As long as arbitrary social hierarchies are
maintained, it will continue to be an indictment of the present, a remem-
brance of the past, and an abstract glimpse of a world free from domina-
tion:
When classless society promises the end of art, because it overcomes the ten-
sion between reality and the possible, it promises at the same time also the
beginning of art, the useless, whose intuition tends towards the reconcilia-
Conclusion 143
tion with nature, because it no longer stands in the service of the exploiter's
use. 1
Such promise may be incomprehensible to tliose whose concept of art or

notion of politics is confined to the "real world." However, like the gap
between the canon and contemporary society, it cannot be idealistically
wished away.
Notes
Introduction
1. Andrew Bowie's book, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of
German Literary Theory (1997), has made a start in suggesting how critical theory
addresses many of the most salient issues in literary theory today. Because his
primary concern is with the philosophical heritage of critical theory, however, he
devotes only a few pages of his introduction and conclusion specifically to the
canon debate (pp. 6-8 and 284-289).
2. Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms (1981), pp.
17-34. See also Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), p. 74.
3. For example, "The struggle between curricular multiculturalism and the
conservative redefinition of Western intellectual traditions has little relevance
outside the American academy, where it expresses local anxieties about 'multicul-
turalism,' ethnicity and American cultural identity rather than any more univer-
sal issues.... It is difficult to see how this debate could be of deep interest to any-
one outside the United States." John Gray, "Classic Problems" (review of Terence
Ball's Reappraising Political Theory), Times Literary Supplement, (April 28, 1995),
p. 28.
4. This is one of the points made by John Guillory in Cultural Capital: The
Problem, of Literary Canon Formation (1993). Guillory has written extensively about
the literary canon debate, and his arguments are examined in detail in Chapter 3.
5. Theodor Adorno and Helmut Becker, "Education for Autonomy," Telos,
no.56 (Summer 1983), p. 109. Adorno's skepticism that purely educational re-
forms can resolve a cultural crisis is also found in "Theory of Pseudo-Culture,"
Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), pp. 15-20 and 25.
6. On the canon of political theory, see Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal
of Classic Texts (1985) and the title essay of John Dunn, The History of Political
Theory and Other Essays (1996), pp. 11-38. On the canon of sociology, see Peter
Baehr and Mike O'Brien, "Founders, Classics and the Concept of a Canon,"
Current Sociology, vol. 42, no. 1 (Spring 1994). On challenges to the canon of
American history, see Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on
Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (1997). On the canon of Western mu-
sic, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Worts (1992). For a specifi-
cally feminist challenge to the Western canon of music, see Marcia J. Citron,
Gender and the Musical Canon (1993).
145
146 Notes
Chapter O n e
1. One notable exception is Jan Gorak, The Miking of the Modem Canon: Genesis
and Crisis of a Literary Idea (1991), especially pp. 9-88.1 am indebted to his work
for the first part of this chapter.
2. John Boardman, Creek Sculpture: Tire Classical Period (1985), p. 7.
3. Gisela Richter, A Handbook of Greek Art: A Survey of the Visual Arts in Ancient
Greece (1959; eighth edition, 1983), p. 120.
4. Nigel Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture: Ancient Meanings, Modern
Readings (1996), pp. 40 and 222.
5. Boardman (1985), p. 21, and Gorak (1991), pp. 10-12. A hypothetical recon-
struction of the details of Polykleitos's rules for sculpture, deduced from the evi-
dence of the Doryphoros and Diadoumenos, may be found in Brunilde Sismondo
Ridgway, Fifth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture (1981), pp. 202-204.
6. Ridgway, p. 202.
7. Citations to Platonic Dialogues are noted parenthetically by line number in
the text and are taken from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters,
edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1961).
8. Cf. also Republic, book ii, 1.379a; and Laws, books ii, 1.660a, and vii, 1.817d.
9. Edward Alexander Parsons, The Alexandrian Library, Glory of the Hellenic
World: Its Rise, Antiquities, and Destructions (1952), pp. 219-228. See also Adrian
Marino, The Biography of "The Idea of Literature": From Antiquity to the Baroque
(1996), p. 32.
10. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953),
pp. 249-255.
11. The Church pronounced a dogmatic definition of the biblical canon at the
Council of Trent in 1546, which "required equal reverence for all forty-five books
of the Old Testament and all twenty-seven books of the New Testament on the
grounds that God is their author." Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Concise
Theological Dictionary (1965), p. 65. See also Hans von Campenhausen, The
Formation of the Christian Bible (1972) and the detailed account by Bruce Metzger,
The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (1987).
12. On the canon's use for the instruction of grammar, see John Guillory,
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), pp. 71-74.
Guillory's own theoiy that the formation of canons depends on socially mediated
conceptions of literacy is examined in Chapter 3.
13. Curtius (1953), pp. 48-52 and 260-264.
14. Ibid., p. 264. Cf. also Marino (1996), p.59: "Throughout the Middle Ages,
national vernacular literature is little appreciated and, therefore, little used. The
enormous prestige of Latin keeps it permanently on the fringe, where it receives
little attention"—that is, before the emergence of the modern nation-state.
15. Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan
Age (1991), p. 5. "Already under Queen Elizabeth the curriculum is determined
that will govern English education for two or three centuries."
16. Ibid.
17. For a concise account of the cultural impact of print technology, see
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983).
Notes 147
18. Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters & Samuel Johnson (1987), p. 7.
Although it is true that litieratura had signified grammar in general and all man-
ner of writing, words and phrases of literary distinction were hardly new to the
era of printing: The phrase ars poetica in the Middle Ages had long served a dis-
criminating purpose for Latin and Greek texts. See Curtius (1953), pp. 42 and
437-439; and Marino (1996), pp. 1-28.
19. Kernan (1987), p. 159.
20. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From "The Spectator" to Post-
Structuralism (1984), pp. 29-43.
21. On the dependence of the modern sense of professional "author" on copy-
right law, see Mark Rose, "The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the
Genealogy of Modern Authorship," Representations, no. 23 (Summer 1988), pp.
51-85; and Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and
Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author'," Eighteenth-Century Studies,
vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer 1984), pp. 425-448.
22. Kernan (1987), pp. 97-100 (quotation from p. 98).
23. On the formation of the modern French literary canon, see Ann Jones and
Nancy Vickers, "Canon, Rule and the Restoration Renaissance," Yale French
Studies, no.75 (1988), pp. 9-25; and Joan Dejean, "Classical Reeducation:
Decanonizing the Feminine," Yale French Studies, no.75 (1988), pp. 26-39.
"Increasingly, the modern writers who continued to be read were only those who
could be promoted as French classics, that is, as part of a national, and nationalis-
tic, literary program." Dejean, p. 36.
24. Peter Uwe Flohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany,
1830-1870 (1989), pp. 140-200; and James Sheehan, German History: 1770-1866
(1989), pp. 160-174. On the Schillerfest, see Hohendahl, pp. 179-192; and
Sheehan, pp. 867-868.
25. Andrew Sanders, "Poets' Corner: The Development of a Canon of English
Literature," in The Short Oxford History of English Literature (1994), pp. 1-7.
26. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and
Authorship, 1660-1769 (1992), pp. 3,5 and 14.
27. D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English
Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School
(1965); Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 (1983); and
Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (1992).
28. Terry Eagleton, Literary Tiwory: An Introduction—Second Edition (1996), p. 26.
Although the chair of English was founded at Cambridge in 1912, the Final
Honours School, which awards the degree in English, was established only in
1917. Eagleton notes that the war "signalled the final victory of English studies at
Oxford and Cambridge," and the national patriotism it aroused serviced "less
English literature than English literature" (pp. 24-25).
29. Sanders (1994), p. 7; and Terry Eagleton, "The Crisis of Contemporary
Culture: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 27
November 1992," (1993), p. 3.
30. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), pp. 28-51,
130, and 211-214.
148 Notes
31. David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American

Literature as an Academic Discipline (1994), pp. 87-95. In a review of its latest edi-
tion, Stephen Fender writes that "the first Cambridge History of American Literature
. .. may be said to have established the academic study of American literature.. . .
[I]t virtually set the canon." "Textual America: Pioneers of the Critical
Revolution?" Times Literary Supplement (March 3,1995), p. 4.
32. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (1983).
33. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1993); T. S. Eliot, "The Classics and
the Man of Letters" (1942), in To Criticize the Critic and Otlier Writings (1965), pp.
145-161; F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948).
34. Frank Kermode, "Institutional Control of Interpretation," in Essays on
Fiction, 1971-82 (1983), pp. 177-178.
Chapter Two
1. William J. Bennett, To Reclaim A Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher
Education (1984), pp. 2-4,11, and 16.
2. Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (1991), p. 227.
3. Lynne Cheney, Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress,
and the American People (1988), pp. 7 and 14.
4. Lynne Cheney, 50 Hours: A Curriculum for College Students (1989), p. 22 and
11.
5. Hilton Kramer and Rober Kimball, eds., Against the Grain (1995), p. x.
6. Ibid., pp. 79 and x. For a comparable British version of the same argument,
with particular reference to the literary canon, see Anthony Quinton, "Clash of
Symbols," Times Higher Education Supplement (April 30,1993), pp. 15-16.
7. James Tuttleton, "Back to the Sixties with Spin Doctor Graff," in Kramer and
Kimball (1995), p. 88.
8. Kramer and Kimball (1995), pp. x and 77.
9. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), pp.
18 and 35.
10. Ibid., pp. 29 and 16.
11. Ibid., p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 522.
13. Ibid., pp. 54 and 8.
14. Ibid., pp. 6 and 8-9.
15. Despite his own admission that "capital is necessary for the cultivation of
aesthetic values," Bloom still ridicules Marxist insights into artistic production
and consumption. Ibid., p.33. The respective contributions of Marxism and new
historicism to understanding canon formation are considered in the following
chapters.
16. Ibid., pp. 30 and 524.
17. Ibid., p. 23.
18. Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (1985), pp. 78-79.
19. Ibid., p. 89.
Notes 149
20. Frank Kermode, "Canon and Period," in History and Value (1988), p. 115.
21. Ibid., pp. 116-117. "Some workable notion of canon, some examined idea of
history, though like most human arrangements they may be represented as un-
just and self-serving, are necessary to any concept of past value with the least
chance of survival, necessary even to the desired rehabilitation of the unfairly ne-
glected. So the tradition of value, flawed as it is, remains valuable" (p. 127).
22. Kermode (1985), p. 89, and Kermode (1988), p. 115.
23. Kermode (1985), p. 62.
24. Ibid., p. 90: "To be inside the canon is to be protected from wear and tear, to
be credited with indefinitely large numbers of internal relations and secrets, to be
treated as a heterocosm, a miniature Torah."
25. Kermode, Essays on Fiction 1971-82 (1983), p. 29.
26. Kermode (1985), p. 75, and Kermode (1988), pp. 115-116.
27. Kermode (1985), pp. 33-63.
28. "The Institutional Control of Interpretation/' in Kermode (1983), pp.
169-174.
29. Ibid., pp. 180-181.
30. Ibid., pp. 173 and 184. Kermode's optimism about institutional authority is
slightly qualified in a later writing, when he comes to consider other forms of
control and coercion that institutions may also exercise. Nevertheless, he still
manages to legitimize at least the more subtle forms of "institutional power" as
unavoidable, even if sometimes "arbitrary," by naturalizing them as simply "the
old contest between authority and freedom." Kermode, "Freedom and
Interpretation," in Barbara Johnson, ed., Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford
Amnesty Lectures 1992 (1993), pp. 62 and 67.
31. "Canon and Period," in Kermode (1988), p. 126.
32. See the 1979 selection of papers from the English Institute, subsequently
collected in Leslie Fiedler and Houston Baker, eds., English Literature: Opening Up
the Canon (1981). On the MLA forum, see Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (1991),
pp. 7 and 170, note 3.
33. George McFadden, "'Literature': A Many-Sided Process," in Paul Hernadi,
ed., What Is Literature? (1978), p. 52; Paul Lauter (1991), p. 23; and Lillian
Robinson, "Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon," in
Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (1986), p. 115.
34. Robert Weimann, "Shakespeare (De)Canonized: Conflicting Uses of
'Authority' and 'Representation'," New Literary History, vol. 20, no. 1 (1988), pp.
69-70.
35. Jan Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon (1991), p. 6.
36. The idea of counterbalancing the canon is made explicit in Anne Haselkorn
and Betty Travitsky, eds., The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing
the Canon (1990).
37. H. Bruce Franklin, "English as an Institution: The Role of Class," in Fiedler
and Baker (1981), pp. 98 and 104.
38. Richard Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975/' in
Robert von Hallberg, ed., Canons (1984), pp. 378-397. It is worth noting a flaw in
Ohmann's method: To determine a periodical's presumed complicity with the
publishers' agenda, he attempts to establish a correlation in a given year between
150 Notes
pages of advertising by particular publishers and the pages of reviews those pub-
lishers are granted. However, Ohmann fails to support his claim that the largest
advertisers get "disproportionately large amounts of review space" with any
supporting figures of the total number of books published by each company each
year.
39. Ibid., pp. 382-384.
40. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction
1790-1860 (1985), pp. xii, 30, and 32.
41. Ibid., p . 4
42. John Guillory, "The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and Cleanth
Brooks," in Robert von Hallberg, ed., Canons (1984), p. 339.
43. Charlotte Pierce-Baker, "A Quilting of Voices: Diversifying the
Curriculum/Canon in the Traditional Humanities," College Literature: The Politics
of Teaching Literature, no. 17.2/3 (June/October 1990), pp. 152-161 (quotation
from p. 154).
44. Paul Lauter, "Canon Theory and Emergent Practice," and "Reconstructing
American Literature: Curricular Issues," in Lauter (1991), p p . 161-162 and
110-111.
45. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(1992), pp. 3 and 53.
46. Marilyn Butler, "Literature as a Heritage, or Reading Other Ways" (1987),
pp. 7-8.
47. Morris Dickstein, "Popular Fiction and Critical Values: The Novel as a
Challenge to Literary History," in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American
Literary History (1986), pp. 29-66.
48. Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American
Fiction Exclude Women Authors," in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist
Criticism (1986), pp. 63ff. Cf. also Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, The Canon
and the Common Reader (1990), pp. 66-96, in which Doris Lessing and Alice Walker
are claimed to have been made canonical by a combination of popularity and aca-
demic endorsement.
49. Tompkins (1985), pp. 84-85, her emphasis.
50. Lauter (1991), pp. 36-40. For an almost identical proposal, see also Gregory
S. Jay, American Literature and the Culture Wars (1997), pp. 205-206.
51. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current
Debate," English Literary History (Fall 1987), pp. 491 ff.
52. John Beverley, Against Literature (1993), pp. 97-98, his emphasis.
53. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the
African-American Tradition," in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992), p.
35.
54. See John Searle, "The Storm Over the University," in Paul Herman, ed.,
Debating P.C.: Tlw Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (1992),
pp. 106-108; and W. B. Carnochan, The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal
Education and American Experience (1993), pp. 100-103.
55. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
(1968), p. 20. King encouraged "programs that impinge upon the basic system of
Notes 151
social and economic control"; those that "go beyond race," for example, "and
deal with economic inequality, wherever it exists" (p. 17).
56. Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, "(Post)modern Critical Theory
and the Articulations of Critical Pedagogies," College Literature: The Politics of
Teaching Literature, no. 17.2/3 (June/October 1990), pp. 54-55.
57. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of
Tradition (1983).
58. For example, Dale Spender, "Women and Literary History," in Catherine
Belsey and Jane Moore, eds., The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of
Literary Criticism (1989); Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History
(1993); Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet
(1995); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature (1997).
59. Hilde Heirs, "Refining Feminist Theory: Lessons from Aesthetics," in Hilde
Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds., Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (1993), p. 14,
note 1.
60. Diana Coole, "Is Class a Difference That Makes a Difference?" Radical
Philosophy, no. 77 (May/June 1996), pp. 20-22.
61. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical
Materialism (1995), pp. 238-263 (quotation from p. 246). Like Diana Coole, Woods
writes that "the 'difference' that constitutes class as an 'identity' is, by definition,
a relationship of inequality and power, in a way that sexual or cultural 'differ-
ence' need not be. A truly democratic society can celebrate diversities of life
styles, culture, or sexual preference; but in what sense would it be 'democratic' to
celebrate class differences?" (p. 258).
62. James Davidson, "To the Crows!" (review of Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead
White European Males, and Other Reflections on the Classics, 1993), Loudon Review of
Books, (January 27,1994), p. 20.
63. Jonathan Culler, "Excerpts from the Symposium on 'Humanities and the
Public Interest,'" Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1987), p. 187.
64. Lauter (1991), p. xii. Despite paying lip service to class, the fact that Lauter
ends up challenging the conventional canon almost entirely with literature writ-
ten by women and minorities is perhaps indicative of the liberal inability to sus-
tain the rhetoric of difference with respect to class.
65. Marjorie Perloff, "An Intellectual Impasse," Salmagundi, no. 72 (Fall 1986),
p. 128.
66. Eric Hobsbawm, "Identity Politics and the Left," New Left Review, no. 217
(May/June 1996), p. 40. Cf, also Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: TIK Short
Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994), pp. 428-430.
67. Charles Altieri, "An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon," in Robert von
Hallberg, ed., Canons (1984), p. 43.
68. Ibid., p. 44.
69. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), pp. 80-81.
70. Ibid., p. xiv.
71. Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of
Imaginative Ideals (1990), pp. 109-188. Cf. also "If Richard Rorty's critique of foun-
752 Notes
dationalist thought did not exist, literary theory would do well to invent it" (p.
163).
72. Ibid., pp. 109-111.
73. Ibid., pp. 36-37 (quotation from p. 36).
74.1bid.,p.34.
75. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), p. 131.
76. Ibid., pp. 260-261.
77. Gregory S. Jay, American Literature and the Culture Wars (1997), pp. 56 and
176.
78. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in
Liberal Education (1997), pp. 6 and 295.
79. Jay (1997), pp. 199 and 190-191.
80. Ibid., p. 14. Cf. pp. 56,171, and 199.
81. Ibid., p. 138.
82. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction—Second Edition (1996), p.
173.
83. Lauter (1991), p. x.
Chapter Three
1. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rides of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
(1996), pp. 225-230, his emphases'.
2. Ibid., pp. 225, 253, and 292. See also Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993), Part I, pp. 29-141.
3. Bourdieu (1996), p. 159.
4. Bourdieu (1993), p. 108, and Bourdieu (1996), pp. 253 and 225.
5. E. H. Gombrich, Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (1979),
p. 12.
6. Bourdieu (1993), p. 110, my emphasis, and Bourdieu (1996), p. 171.
7. Andre Lefevere, Translation, Reuniting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame
(1992), p. 112.
8. E.g., Thomas Dabbs, Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth-century Canonization
of a Renaissance Dramatist (1991); Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers:
Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (1992); John Timberman Newcomb,
Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons (1992); Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts:
Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (1992); Gary Scharnhorst, Henry David Thareau:
A Case Study in Canonization (1993); John Xiros Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of
Four Quartets (1995), especially chapter 4; and Joan Acocelta, "Gather and the
Academy," The New Yorker (November 27,1995), pp. 56-71.
9. John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of
"St. George" Orwell (1989).
10. Lawrence Schwartz, Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern
Literary Criticism (1988), p. 47.
11. Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration
to the Present (1990), p. 371. See also Michael Dobson, The Making of the National
Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (1992).
Notes 153
12. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., "Introduction," in John Milton
(The Oxford Authors edition) (1991), p. ix.
13. Dustin Griffin, "Milton's Literary Influence," in Dennis Danielson, ed., Tlte
Cambridge Companion to Milton (1989), pp. 243-244.
14. Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan,
Robinson Crusoe (1996). See especially the appendix, pp. 277-283, on the "world-
wide diffusion" of the myths.
15. Charles Rosen, "The Scandal of the Classics," New York Review of Books
(May 9,1996).
16. Jonathan Freedman, "Autocanonization: Tropes of Self-Legitimation in
'Popular Culture'," Yale journal of Criticism, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1987), p. 208.
17. Bourdieu (1996), pp. 224 and 271.
18. For claims about the canonical status of Aphra Behn, see, for example, W. R.
Owens and Lizbeth Goodman, eds., Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon (1996).
A similar claim for Alice Walker is made by Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose,
The Canon and the Common Reader (1990), pp. 89-93.
19. Bourdieu (1996), pp. 242-243, his emphases.
20. Ibid., pp. 300-301.
21. "Artistic development towards autonomy progressed at different rates, ac-
cording to the society and field of artistic life in question. It began in quattrocento
Florence,... was interrupted for two centuries under the influence of absolute
monarchy and of the Church . . . [and] accelerated abruptly with the Industrial
Revolution and the Romantic reaction." Bourdieu (1993), p. 113. Bourdieu re-
gards the nineteenth century in particular as the "critical" or "heroic phase of the
conquest of autonomy." Bourdieu (1996), pp. 60-61.
22. Ibid., pp. 230 and 229.
23. Bourdieu (1993), pp. 123 and 37. Cf. also: "The educational system con-
tributes very substantially to the unification of the market in symbolic goods, and
to the generalized imposition of the legitimacy of the dominant culture, not only
by legitimizing the goods consumed by the dominant class, but by devaluing
those transmitted by the dominated classes . . . and by tending, in consequence,
to prohibit the constitution of cultural counter-legitimacies" (p. 292, note 26).
24. Bourdieu (1996), pp. 304 and 147. The process is belated, Bourdieu explains,
because "the education system .. . does not grant, except post mortem, and after a
long process," such curricular consecration.
25. Ibid., p. 230.
26. Ibid., p. 250.
27. Rather than being fully independent of the economy, however, the field of
cultural production bears an inverse relation to it—such that the value of works
of art becomes greater, the less they have obvious economic value—which is why
Bourdieu speaks of the field of cultural production as operating within "an in-
verted economic world." Bourdieu (1993), pp. 29 and 75-76; and Bourdieu (1996),
pp. 83 and 216.
28. Bourdieu (1993), p. 112. On the potential role of non-academic publishers in
canon formation, see, for example, Alan Golding, "Little Magazines and
Alternative Canons: The Example of Origin," American Literary History, vol. 2, no.
4 (Winter 1990), pp. 691-725.
154 Notes
29. Bourdieu (1996), pp. 226, 231, and 238.

30. Ibid., p. 382, note 22 (translation amended), his emphasis.
31. Ibid., p. 157.
32. Ibid., p. 253.
33. Ibid., pp. 304-305.
34. Ibid., p. 156.
35. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(1993).
36. Ibid., pp. viii-ix, his emphasis.
37. Ibid., p. x.
38. Ibid., pp. 44-47 (quotations from pp. 46 and 47).
39. Ibid., pp. 56 and 59.
40. Ibid., p. 68.
41. Ibid., p. 63.
42. Ibid., p. 62.
43. Ibid., pp. 18-19, his emphases.
44. Ibid., p. 56, my emphasis.
45. Ibid., p. 133.
46. Ibid., p. 355, note 67, and p. 63.
47. Ibid., pp. 355-356, note 67.
48. See John Gardner and Lennis Dunlap, eds., The Forms of Fiction (1962), an
anthology that was explicitly "designed for use in such courses as freshman com-
position, introduction to literature, modern fiction, and creative writing" (p. 5)
(Taylor's story appears on pp. 281-304).
49. Guillory (1993), pp. 29-32.
50. Ibid., pp. ix and xiii, my emphasis.
51. Ibid., p. 281.
52. Ibid., pp. 292 and 336, his emphases.
53. On the supposedly contingent nature of aesthetic value and its effects on
literary evaluation and canon formation, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988), especially
pp. 24-53. Guillory criticizes Smith for her unhistorical conception of "value."
Guillory (1993), pp. 271-317.
54. Ibid., pp. 336 and 281.
55. Ibid., p. 322, my emphasis.
56. In an argument at the close of his book, Guillory entertains the idea that a
world without canonical distinctions would give way to concern for distinctions
in "life-style," or "a vast enlargement of the field of aesthetic judgement. What
we call a canon would then become a much larger part of social life, because not
restricted to the institutions of the materially advantaged." Ibid., p. 339. This ad-
mittedly Utopian vision has much in common with the project of cultural studies,
which is considered in detail in Chapter 5.
57. Ibid., pp. 316 and 322.
Notes 155
58. E.g., Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Preface," in The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature (1997), pp. xxxiii-xxxvi; and Gregory S. Jay, American Literature
and the Culture Wars (1997), pp. 36-37.
Chapter 4
1. Cf. Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," in Critical Theory:
Selected Essays (1992), pp. 188-243; Theodor Adorno, "Society," in Stephen
Bronner and Douglas Kellner, eds., Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (1989), pp.
267-275; and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society (1964).
2. Theodor Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture," "Culture Industry
Reconsidered," and "Culture and Administration," in Jay Bernstein, ed., The
Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (1991), pp. 53-113. Cf. also
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), pp.
120-167.
3. Marcuse (1964), p. 61.
4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 225.
5. Ibid., pp. 21 and 1.
6. Theodor Adorno, "Extorted Reconciliation," in Notes to Literature: Volume
One (1991), p. 225.
7. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 35.
8. Ibid., pp. 83 and 227.
9. Ibid., p. 8.
10. Adorno, "Extorted reconciliation," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991),
p. 224; and Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 225-226.
11. Ibid., p. 255.
12. Ibid., p. 233. "[UJtopia is essentially in the determined negation . . . of that
which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at
the same time to what should be." Theodor Adorno, "Something's Missing: A
Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions
of Utopian Longing," in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature:
Selected Essays (1988), p. 12.
14. Ibid., p. 18.
15. Ibid., p. 311.
16. Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), p. 140. "There is no art that is entirely de-
void of affirmation, since by its very existence every work rises above the plight
of degradation and daily existence. . . . This apriority of the affirmative is art's
ideological dark side." Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 160.
17. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," thesis vii, in
Illuminations (1969), p. 256.
18. On misogyny in Paradise Lost, see, for example, Christine Froula, "When
Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no.
2 (December 1983), p. 325; on T. S. Eliot's and D. H. Lawrence's elitism, see John
756 Notes
Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992).
19. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (1969), p.
260.
20. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 48-49 and 39.
21. Ibid., p. 6. The critique of aesthetic "purity" is assessed in detail in Chapter 5.
22. Ibid., p. 237.
23. Ibid., pp. 207 and 202.
24. Adorno, "Extorted Reconciliation," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991),
p. 232.
25. Theodor Adorno, "The Artist as Deputy," in Notes to Literature: Volume One
(1991), p. 100.
26. Theodor Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," in Notes to Literature:
Volume One (1991), p. 38, my emphasis.
pp. 223-229 (quotation from p. 223).
28. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," in Notes to Literature: Volume One
(1991), pp. 38-39.
30. Theodor Adorno, "On the Final Scene of Faust," in Notes to Literature:
Volume One (1991), p . 117.
31. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 220. Cf. also: "In its relation with collec-
tivism and individualism art today faces a deadlock.. . . This deadlock is a faith-
ful expression of the crisis of our present society itself." Theordor Adorno,
"Theses upon Art and Religion Today," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992),
p. 295.
32. Theodor Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame," in Notes to Literature:
Volume One (1991), p. 257. "Subjective differences . . . have degenerated into the
conspicuous consumption of those who can afford individuation.
. . . Differentiatedness cannot absolutely and without reflection be entered on the
positive side of the ledger. . . . Differentiatedness, once the precondition of hu-
manness [Humanitat], is gradually becoming ideology" (p. 248).
33. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 234 and 260.
34. Ibid., p. 132. On the "angel of history," see Benjamin, "Theses on the
Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (1969), p. 257.
36. Ibid., p. 311. Uncharacteristically, Adorno insinuates that, "given the level
of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise," an assumption
that is certainly debatable (p. 33).
37. Benjamin/Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (1969), p.
254, his emphasis.
38. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures
(1987), p. 14.
39. Adorno, Aestlwtic Theory (1997), p. 194.
40. Adorno, "Valery's Deviations," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p.
173.
Notes 157
42. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1974), p.
172.
43. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 120-124.
44. Ibid., p. 39.
45. Ibid., p. 21.
46. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1974), p. 218.
47. Karl Marx, "Grundrisse," in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected
Writings (1977), p. 359.
48. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), p. 22.
49. Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry," in Notes to
Literature: Volume Two (1992), especially pp. 123-137.
50. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), p. 59.
51. Theodor Adorno, "How to Look at Television," in The Culture Industry
(1991), p. 141. On the "crisis of meaning" in art, see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
(1997), pp. 152-157.
52. Adorno, Aesthetic Tlieory (1997), p. 234.
53. Ibid., pp. 139 and 320.
54. Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992),
pp.76 and 89. To the end of his life, Adorno maintained that willful inactivity can
itself be a meaningful political gesture, especially in times when resistance is re-
duced to the crudest forms of political expression, such as mass "demonstra-
tions," flag waving, and finger pointing. See "Resignation," in Theodor Adorno,
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1998), pp. 289-293.
55. Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form," in Notes to Literature: Volume One
(1991), p. 20.
56. Adorno, Aestlietic Theory (1997), p. 241.
57. Adorno, "Commitment,"in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), p. 83. On
the comparatively autonomous aspects, in formal terms, of Beckett's plays, see
pp. 90-91.
58. Ibid., p. 84.
59. Adorno, "The Artist as Deputy," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991),
p. 103.
61. Adorno, "Commitment," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), p. 83.
62. Adorno, "The Artist as Deputy," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991),
p. 99.
63. Ibid.
65. Ibid., pp. 247-248.
66. Theodor Adorno, "On Tradition," Telos, no. 94 (Winter 1992-1993), p. 77.
67. Theodor Adorno, "Theory of Pseudo-Culture," Telos, no. 95 (Spring 1993),
pp. 28-30. "Under prevailing conditions, the blithe dissemination of culture is ex-
actly the same as its destruction. .. . [W]hat aids the dissemination sabotages
what is disseminated" (pp. 29-32).
68. Theodor Adorno, "On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of
Listening," in The Culture Industry (1991), pp. 31-32.
69. Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms (1981), p. 34.
158 Notes
70. Adomo, "On Tradition," Telos, no. 94 (Winter 1992-1993), p. 79, my em-
phasis.
72. Ibid., p. 3; and Adorno, "Theory of Pseudo-Culture," Telos, no. 95 (Spring
1993), p. 28.
73. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 219. Cf. Adorno, "Valery's Deviations,"
in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), pp. 156-157.
75. Theodor Adorno, "Nachtmusik," quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin
of Negative Dialectics (1977), p. 45.
76. Theodor Adorno, "Heine the Wound," in Notes to Literature: Volume One
(1991), pp. 80-85; Adorno, "Extorted Reconciliation," in Notes to Literature: Volume
One (1991), p. 228; Theodor Adorno, "On an Imaginary Feuilleton," in Notes to
Literature: Volume Tivo (1992), p. 36; and Theodor Adorno, "On Dickens's Tlie Old
Curiosity Shop: A Lecture," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), pp. 171-177.
77. Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989), p. 85.
78. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 41, his emphasis.
79. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 1,1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and
Michael Jennings, eds. (1996), p. 235.
81. Adorno, "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry," in Notes to Literature:
Volume Two (1992), pp. 110 and 137.
82. Ibid., pp. 121-136.
83. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977), p. 34.
84. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 233. "Great artworks are unable to lie.
Even when their content is semblance, insofar as this content is necessary sem-
blance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify" (p. 130).
85. Theodor Adorno, "Stefan George," in Notes to Literature: Volume Tim (1992),
pp. 178-192.
87. Ibid., pp. 40-41
Chapter Five
l.Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction
1790-1860 (1985), p. 5. Recall her thesis that Nathaniel Hawthorne's interests
served those of a New England "dynastic cultural elite which came to identify it-
self with him" (p. 30). Compare also the argument that the class-based individu-
alism of Plath, Salinger, Bellow, and Updike helped to canonize them. Richard
Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975," in Robert von
Hallberg, ed., Canons, (1984), pp. 388-397.
2. Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992),
pp. 80-81.
3. Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms (1981), p. 30.
4. Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry," in Notes to
Literature: Volume Two (1992), p. 110. Cf. also: "[T]he substance of a work begins
precisely where the author's intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the
Notes 159
substance." Theodor Adorno, "Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann," in Notes to

Literature: Volume Two (1992), p. 13.
5. Theodor Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame/' in Notes to Literature:
Volume One (1991), p. 257.
6. E.g., John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: Tfie Making and Claiming
of "St. George" Orwell (1989). Rodden's is but one of many recent examples of this
kind of literary sociology or textual historiography. See also Michael Berube,
Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon
(1992); Gary Scharnhorst, Henry David Thoreau: A Case Study in Canonization
(1993); John Timberman Newcomb, Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons (1992);
Lawrence Schwartz, Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary
Criticism (1988); and Joan Acocella, "Cather and the Academy," The New Yorker
(November 27,1995) to name only a few.
7. Rodden (1989), p. 420, note 60, and p. 71.
8. Theodor Adorno, "Theses on the Sociology of Art," Working Papers in
Cultural Studies, no.2 (Spring 1972), p. 121.
9. Adorno, "Commitment," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), p. 92.
10. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 225.
11. Adorno, "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late Poetry," in Notes to Literature:
Volume Two (1992), p.112. Cf. also: "For a long time the sociology of art was pur-
sued in a somewhat primitive manner and confined itself to analyzing, say, the
social origins of the individual artists, their political and social views, or the
material content of their works. .. . This misses what is essential in a work of art,
what makes it into such a work: the shaping of the work [Gestaltung], the tension
between its content and its form." Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
"Sociology of Art and Music," in Aspects of Sociology (1973), p. 101.
13. Rodden (1989), pp. 7-8, my emphases.
14. Ibid., p. 6.
15. Ibid., pp. 400-401, his emphasis.
16. Scharnhorst (1993), p. 2.
17. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic
(1990), pp. 43-48 (quotation from p. 44).
18. Ibid., p. 255, note 29.
19. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
(1996), pp. 288-293.
20. Ibid., p. 225. On the "market of symbolic goods," see pp. 141-173.
21. John Guillory, "Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current
Debate," English Literary History, vol. 54 (Fall 1987), p. 494. Cf. Guillory, Cultural
Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), pp. 55-57.
23. Ibid., p. 8.
24. Bourdieu, "Postscript: Towards a 'Vulgar' Critique of 'Pure' Critiques," in
Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgement of Taste (1984), pp. 485-494 (quotation
from p. 485).
25. Adomo, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 6. "The ideological concern to keep cul-
ture pure obeys the wish that in the fetishized culture, and thus actually, every-
thing remains as it was" (p. 247).
760 Notes
26. Ibid., p. 237.

27. Bourdieu (1996), p. 172. On the illusio as a collective belief in "the game" of
value production, see pp. 227 and 276.
29. Ibid., p. 17.
30. Compare "The Conquest of Autonomy: The Critical Phase in the
Emergence of the Field," in Bourdieu (1996), pp. 47-112, with "The Historical
Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic," in Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (1993),
pp. 254-266.
31. Bourdieu (1996), pp. 154-156. Recall from Chapter 3 that "the wearing out of
the effect of consecrated works . . . is primarily the result of the routinization of
production . . . , " which includes "the effect of familiarization" and "banaliza-
tion" (p. 253), his emphasis.
32. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms (1981), p. 24.
33. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1974), p. 44.
34. Adorno, "Veblen's Attack on Culture," in Prisms (1981), p. 91. As he writes
of Herbert Marcuse's work, "rabid criticism of culture is not radical. If affirma-
tion is indeed an aspect of art, this affirmation is no more totally false than cul-
ture—because it failed—is totally false. Culture checks barbarism, which is
worse." Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 252.
35. Bourdieu (1993), pp. 158-159.
36. Ibid., p. 145.
37. Ibid., pp. 156-160 (quotation from p. 158).
38. Ibid., p. 145.
39. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 258, my emphasis.
40. Ibid., pp. 18 and 227.
41. Bourdieu (1996), p. 271, his emphasis. Although the materialism of critical
theory would likewise prohibit any naive belief that "transcendence" is actually
realized via works of art, it certainly does not prevent it from being figuratively
manifest in them, as a promise that nevertheless remains broken.
42. Bourdieu (1996), p. 298.
43. Louis Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of
Culture," in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (1989), p. 25.
44. For example: "The historicity of texts and the textuality of history," as
Montrose calls it, combine in a such a way that the new historicism is character-
ized as "a shift from History to histories." Ibid., pp.23 and 20, respectively.
45. Herbert Linclenberger, The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions
(1990), p. 203.
46. H. Aram Veeser, ed.. The Neio Historicism (1989), p. xii.
47. Stephen Greenblatt, "Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne," in
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(1988), pp. 129-163.
48. Theodor Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in Prisms (1981), p. 177.
50. Ibid., pp. 182-183.
51. Theodor Adorno, "On Tradition," Telos, no.94 (Winter 1992-1993), p. 81.
52. Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion
(1991), p. 115.
Notes 161
53. Greenblatt (1988), p. 149,

55. Fredric Jameson, "Marxism and Historicism," in The Ideologies of Theory,
Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History (1988), pp. 175-176. Although
his concern here is to criticize antiquarianism, existential historicism, structural
typology, and Nietzschean antihistoricism, Jameson's remarks, influenced by
Benjamin and Adorno, bear direct relevance to the "new" historicism as well. For
his specific views on the latter, see Postmodernism, or, Tlie Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991), pp. 181-217.
57. Veeser (1989), p. xi.
58. Lindenberger (1990), pp. 206 and 209. Montrose likewise characterizes new
historicism as a "refusal to observe strict and fixed boundaries between 'literary'
and other texts." Montrose (1989), p. 26.
59. See, for example, Martin Ryle, "Long Live Literature?: Englit, Radical
Criticism and Cultural Studies," Radical Philosophy, no.67 (Summer 1994), p. 25;
and Robert Ferguson, '"We Hold These Truths': Strategies of Control in the
Literature of the Founders," in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American
Literary History (1986), pp. 1-28.
60. Ferguson (1986), pp. 3 and 25.
61. Jonathan Arac, "The Struggle for the Cultural heritage," in Veeser (1989), p.
127; and Montrose (1989), p. 23.
62. Greenblatt (1988), pp. 12-19 (quotations from pp. 12 and 17).
63. Ibid., p. 147. Greenblatt's disclaimer that his intention is not "to strip away
and discard the enchanted impression of aesthetic autonomy but to inquire into
the objective conditions of this enchantment" is itself revealing: like Bourdieu, it
designates aesthetic autonomy as mere illusion from the start. Ibid., p.5.
64. Ibid., pp.3, 5, and 12.
65. For one account of the autonomization of literature in particular, see Adrian
Marino, The Biography of "The Idea of Literature": From Antiquity to the Baroque
(1996), especially pp. 8-9, 25-28,125-128, and 182-183.
66. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), p. 46, his emphasis. Although
Burger advances the thesis that the avant-garde actually intended "the elimina-
tion of autonomous art," so that it might "become practical once again" by "di-
rect[ingj itself to the very way art functions in society," the transition from fin de
siecle " Aestheticism" to avant-gardism still depended on the relative professional
and creative freedom of avant-garde artists from religious or political affiliations.
In other words, even their reaction against autonomy depended on a degree of
autonomy (pp.54 and 49).
68. Lindenberger (1990), p. 145.
69. Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture," in Veeser (1989), p.
12. It should come as no surprise that Greenblatt explicitly acknowledges
Bourdieu as an influence. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), p. 166,
note 14.
70. Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (1991), pp. 66 and 103. For
Easthope's comparative analysis of Heart of Darkness and Tarzan of tlve Apes, see
pp. 80-103.
762 Notes
71. Simon During, "Introduction," in The Cultural Studies Reader (1993), p. 22.
72. Martin Ryle, (1994), p. 21. Ryle prophesies that, with the rise of cultural
studies, "there mil be a reduction . . . in the size and scope of the canon," and that
"'literature' will tend to shrink insofar as it becomes a branch of cultural studies"
(p. 23, his emphasis).
73. Easthope (1991), pp. 5-6.
74. E.g., Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction—Second Edition (1996),
pp. 206-208.
75. Ian Hunter, "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies," in Lawrence Grossberg,
Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (1992), p. 356.
76. Andrew Milner, Literature, Culture and Society (1996), p. 5.
77. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
78. Hunter (1992), p. 356.
79. Easthope (1991), pp. 152-156; Milner (1996), pp. 131-187; and Fred Inglis,
Cultural Studies (1993), pp. 190-191.
80. Hunter (1992), pp. 354 and 348.
81. Adorno, "Valery's Deviations," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p.
143; and Adorno, "Theory of Pseudo-Culture," Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), p. 26.
83. Milner (1996), p. 178.
84. Ibid., pp. 11,17, and 25. For Bloom on "primal aesthetic value," see Bloom,
The Western Canon (1994), p. 65.
85. Terry Eagleton, Tlie Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), p. 374.
86. Ibid., p. 375.
87. Adorno and Horkheimer, "Sociology of Art and Music," in Aspects of
Sociology (1973), p. 107.
88. Adorno, "Culture and Administration," in The Culture Industry: Selected
Essays on Mass Culture (1991), p. 100.
89. Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 18 March 1936, in Theodor Adorno and
Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940 (1999), p. 130, my em-
phasis.
90. Adorno, "Theory of Pseudo-Culture," Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), p. 18.
p. 221.
94. On the "rational irrationality" of art, see ibid., pp. 19 and 228.
95. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
Chapter Six
1. The volume of commentary on critical theory and Adorno's aesthetics in
particular is growing each year. See, for example, Albrecht Wellmer, The
Persistence of Modernity (1991), pp. 1-35; Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art (1992), pp.
188-274; Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory (1997), pp. 238-280;
Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity (1997);
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Lite Work (1997); and Simon Jarvis,
Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), pp. 90-147.
Notes 163
2. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (1995), p. 89.

3. Theodor Adorno, "On the Classicism of Goethe's Iphigenie," in Nates to
Literature: Volume Two (1992), pp. 153-170; and Adorno, "In Memory of
Eichendorff," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), pp. 55-73.
4. Hohendahl (1995), pp.81-82.
5. Ibid., p. 79.
6. In fact, Adorno once composed an unfinished opera based on Tom Sawyer;
wrote a detailed piece on Aldous Huxley; and was hardly unfamiliar with the
works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Dostoevsky, to
name only a few. And Benjamin was thoroughly familiar with Russian literature.
On Adorno's abandoned opera, Der Schatz des Indianer-joe, see Susan Buck-Morss,
The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977), p. 281, note 14. On Huxley, see Adorno,
"Aldous Huxley and Utopia," in Prisms (1981), pp. 97-117. On Shakespeare,
Wilde, Dostoevsky, and others, see Aesthetic Theory (1997) and Notes to Literature:
Volume One and Volume Two (1991 andl992).
7. On Adorno's skepticism about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat
and, therefore, about the value of proletarian literature, see Buck-Morss (1977),
pp. 24-37. For Adorno's skepticism about a proletarian class consciousness in
general, see "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?" in Volker Meja, Dieter
Misgeld, and Nico Stehr, eds., Modern German Sociology (1987), pp. 232-247.
8. Hohendahl (1995), pp. 96-97 and 106.
9. Adorno, "Heine the Wound," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p. 83.
10. Hohendahl (1995), pp. 106 and 110-111.
11. Ibid., p. 115.
12. Adorno, "Heine the Wound," in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), pp.
81-82 (quotation from p. 81).
13. Hohendahl (1995), pp. 96 and 115.
15. Ibid., p. 85.
16. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucmtlt
Reader (1991), pp. 101-120.
17. Hohendahl (1995), p. 210.
19. Ibid., p. 180.
20. E.g., David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas
(1980), pp. 364-374; and Douglas Kellner, "Critical Theory and the Culture
Industries: A Reassessment," Telos, no.62 (Winter 1984-1985), pp. 196-206. Cf.
also Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion
(1991), pp. 19,21, and 86.
21. Hohendahl (1995), pp. 145 and 247. On the post-Fordist transition and its
cultural consequences, see, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodemity (1990), pp. 121-197.
22. Theodor Adorno, "Society," in Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner, eds.,
Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (1989), pp. 267-275. Cf. also Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964).
23. Moishe Gonzales, "Kellner's Critical Theory: A Reassessment," Telos, no.62
(Winter 1984-1985), p. 209, his emphasis. Cf. also Jay Bernstein, "Introduction,"
in Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (1991), p. 20.
164 Notes
24. For a concise account of the problems associated with the base-superstruc-
ture model, as well as of the Frankfurt School's use of mediation as an alternative
to it, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977), pp. 75-82 and 95-100.
25. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944;
English edition 1979), pp. 120-167. Cf. also Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in
Music and the Regression of Listening," "The Schema of Mass Culture," and
"Culture Industry Reconsidered," in The Culture Industry (1991), pp.26-92.
26. E.g., Adorno, "On Popular Music," in Antony Easthope and Kate
McGowan, eds., A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (1992), pp. 211-223; and
Adorno, "Perennial Fashion—jazz," in Prisms (1981), pp. 121-132. However, cf.
Adorno, "Is Art Lighthearted?" in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), pp.
247-253.
27. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (1980), p. 369. For Adorno's dis-
missive remarks explicitly about The Beatles' relation to the culture industry, see
his interview with Peter von Haselberg, "On the Historical Adequacy of
Consciousness," Telos, no. 56 (Summer 1983), pp. 100-101.
28. Zuidervaart (1991), pp. 232 and 234.
29. Ibid., p. 235.
30. Ironically, with this last remark Zuidervaart seems to have forgotten his
own (erroneous) criticism of Adorno just a few pages earlier: "The contrast be-
tween autonomous and heteronomous art is fluid, however, and it certainly is no
longer so firm as to support Adorno's strong preference for autonomous art."
Ibid., p. 231. Whether or not Adorno simply "prefers" autonomous art, he cer-
tainly realized that heteronomy and autonomy were intertwined in both serious
and "light" art, a fact that is itself largely an effect of the culture industry. See
Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), pp. 135-136. Cf. also Adorno, "Is Art
Lighthearted?", in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), pp. 247-253; and
Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 225-227.
31. Zuidervaart (1991), p, 235, my emphasis.
32. Adorno, "Transparencies on Film," in Tlie Culture Industry (1991), p. 160.
33. Ibid., pp. 154-161. For assessments of this essay's positive content, see
Hohendahl (1995), pp. 131-133; and Martin Jay, Adorno (1984), pp. 127-128.
34. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (1992).
35. Cf. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 34 and 36; Adorno, "On Tradition,"
Telos, no.94 (Winter 1992-1993), p.77; and Adorno, "Theory of Pseudo-Culture,"
Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), pp. 15-38.
36. Adorno, "Stefan George," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), p. 178;
and Adorno, "On the Classicism of Goethe's Iphigenie," in Notes to Literature:
Volume Two (1992), p. 155.
37. E.g., Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), pp. lii-liii; Hohendahl
(1995), pp. 171,194, and 199; and Zuidervaart (1991), pp. 220,223-224, and 229.
38. Adorno, "Notes on Kafka," in Prisms (1981), pp. 262-263, note 1.
40. Adorno, "In Memory of Eichendorff," in Notes to Literature: Volume One
(1991), pp. 73-79 (quotation from p. 73).
41. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1974), p. 147. On Dumas and Sue, see Adorno,
"How to Look at Television," in The Culture Industry (1991), p. 138. In the same
Notes 165
piece, Adorno also finds the novels of Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe to be
prototypes of the culture industry (pp. 137-139).
42. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 225 and 247-248.
43. Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 21 and 236.
44. Adorno, "Theory of Pseudo-Culture," Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), p. 24.
Conclusion
1. Theodor Adorno, "Theses on Need," quoted in Martin Jay, Adorno (1984), p.
100
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Index
Adorno, Theodor, 2, 5, 26, 83, 93,107, Utopian content of, 87, 91,112,
163(n6) 115
aesthetic theory of, 72, 80, 84-88, Austen, jane, 59, 65, 72
90-92, 94-100,102-106,108-112,
114,117,123-124 Bacon, Francis, 22
criticisms of, 126-130,133-138 Balzac, Honore de, 99
See also Critical theory Baudelaire, Charles, 135
Altieri, Charles, 51-53 Baym, Nina, 41
Arac, Jonathan, 116 Beatles, 133-134,135,164(n27)
Arnold, Matthew, 22 Becker, Helmut, 5
Art Beckett, Samuel, 95,127
aging of, 70-72, 98 See also Art, Behn, Aphra, 67
Neutralization of Benjamin, Walter, 5, 26, 84, 88, 91,
autonomy of, 5, 6, 29, 84-86, 89, 100,101,103,127,128,130,
94-97,106,109-110,116-117, 163(n6)
133-134,164(n30) Bennett, William, 26-27, 28,29, 32,
content of, 5, 6, 52, 76, 86-87, 36
90-91, 92-102,109,111-115,120, Beverley, John, 43-44
124,132,133,137 Birkerts, Sven, 23
fetish character of, 61, 85, 92,108, Bloom, Allan, 23
110,137 Bloom, Harold, 24, 29-32, 35, 36, 53,
and modernity, 93-94, 96,100, 137, 121,148(nl5)
142 Boccaccio, 16,19
neutralization of, 71-72, 89, 98, Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 60, 61-63, 66,
110-111,135 67-71, 75, 78, 79, 85,108-113,
politically committed, 2, 5, 43-44, 118,129
45,54,94-98,104,128 Bowie, Andrew, 145(n1)
popular, 41-42,119,126,133-135 Brecht, Bertolt, 84, 95
See also Canon formation, Bronte, Charlotte, 65, 72
popularity of works and Burger, Peter, 93,117, 161(n66)
pure, 89, 97,109-110 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 119
as radical critique, 86-89, 91-92, Butler, Marilyn, 40
95
and reconciliation, 92,102,115, Callimachus, 14
124, 142-143 Canhy, Henry, 21
and social guilt, 86, 88-89, 90, 91, Canon formation
102 academia and, 4,16, 20, 46, 59-60,
utility of, 7,42, 43-44, 54, 57, 84, 73-75
94-96 See also Canons, academic monopoly of, 4, 60,
instrumental justifications of 68-69, 78, 79,141'
179
180
in Antiquity, 3,11,12-15 Paradise Lost, 29, 65,120,121,136

and artistic reproduction, 4,12-13, Purgatorio, 16
15,16, 63-65,126,135, 136-137, Robinson Crusoe, 41, 65
141 Romeo and Juliet, 136
belated, 68, 99,137,153(n24) A Season in Hell, 29
contradictions of, 7,14, 67,101, Sentimental Education, 111-112
137-138,139-140 ATaleofaTub, 17
critical theory of, 84, 93, 98-102, The Tempest, 114,115
125-126 To the Lighthouse, 65
and cultural crises, 22-24 Tom Jones, 47
and cultural familiarization, Troilus and Cressida, 136
62-66,71,79,98,122,135 Ulysses, 65,136
as historical process, 63, 66-67, 79, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 42
93-94, 98-101,136,137,140 The Waste bind, 29
in the Middle Ages, 3,15-17 Canons
modern, 17-21 biblical, 15, 146(nl1)
and nationalism, 3,11,17,19-21, instrumental justifications of, 33,
98,147(n23) 36, 43-44, 51-52, 54, 80, 84, 96,
popularity of works and, 41-42, 100,141
63, 66,135 pedagogical functions of, 40-41,
spontaneous, 66-67 50,140
Canonical works social representation in, 42, 45-50,
TfieAeneid, 15,16,136 54,75,88,89,104,141-142
Crime and Punishment, 29 vernacular, 11,17,19,146(nl4)
David Copperfield, 47 Capitalism, 29, 48-49, 55, 58, 86, 94,
Doctor Faustus, 65,136 101,113,122,130-132,140-141
Don Juan, 59, 65 Carnochan, W.B., 23
Don Quixote de la Mancha, 65,137 Cervantes, Miguel de, 137
Doryphoros, 12-13,146(n5) Chaucer, Geoffrey, 16, 19
Georgics, 12 Cheney, Lynne, 27-28, 29, 36
The Great Gatsby, 40 Cicero, 15,16
Hamlet, 34, 35, 43 Civil Rights movement, 23, 37
Heart of Darkness, 119 Commodification, 55, 72, 78, 79,118,
Henry V, 29 122,131,141
The House of Fame, 16 of art, 79, 94, 98,137
The Iliad, 12 of culture, 4,11, 48, 56, 67, 70,
In the Penal Colony, 29 78-79, 85,124,134,137,141
Inferno, 16, 63 Conrad, Joseph, 119
Intruder in the Dust, 64 Conservative humanism, 3, 25-29,
Invisible Man, 29 56-58, 73, 79, 80, 83, 89-90,
Jphigenie in Tauris, 127,136 97-98,124
jane Eyre, 40 Coole, Diana, 49
Mansfield Park, 59 Cooper, James Fenimore, 137
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Critical theory, 2, 3-4, 6, 29, 80,
Douglass, 47 83-102,122,125
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 63 concept of universal and
The Odyssey, 12 particular in, 90-91, 105
Index 181
and the culture industry, 126,137 Gorak, Jan, 38

and immanent critique, 100,102, Graff, Gerald, 53-54
106,114,133,134,135,136 Greenblatt, Stephen, 114-115,116-118,
limitations of, 135-138 161(n63)
See also Canon formation, critical Guillory, John, 23, 40,42, 60, 72-79,
theory of 108,110, 111, 121,129,154(n56)
Culler, Jonathan, 50
Cultural Studies, 6,103,119-124,135, Habermas, Jiirgen, 91
154(n56) Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 39, 42
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 15-16 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 109
Hein, Hilde, 48
Dante, 16, 19, 30, 63 Heine, Heinrich, 99,126,128-129,137
Davidson, James, 50 Held, David, 133
Dickens, Charles, 65, 99,127 Hobsbawm, Eric, 51
Dickstein, Morris, 41, 42 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 126-129
Diogenes, 14 Holderlin, Friedrich, 93,100
Dobson, Michael, 19 Homer, 13,14,16, 27, 30, 64
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 90 Horkheimer, Max, 93,123,133
Dryden, John, 16,19, 65 Hunter, Ian, 119,120
Dumas, Alexandre, 137
During, Simon, 119 Jameson, Fredric, 23,107-108,115,
135,161(n55)
Eagleton, Terry, 54, 122 Jarvis, Simon, 93
Easthope, Antony, 119 Jay, Gregory, 23, 54
Eichendorff, Joseph, 126-127,137 Johnson, Samuel, 18,19
Eliot, George, 72 Joyce, James, 47, 52-53
Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 21, 22, 29, 88
Ellis, John, 23 Kafka, Franz, 135,136
Ellison, Ralph, 29 Kant, Immanuel, 89, 94,109
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20, 21 Kermode, Frank, 32-36, 39, 43, 51,
Epicurus, 14 149(n30)
Euripides, 14 Kernan, Alvin, 18, 23
Kierkegaard, Soren, 99
Faulkner, William, 27, 64 Kimball, Roger, 23, 28-29, 30, 36
Feminism, 1, 23,47-48, 66, 88 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 46,150(n55)
Ferguson, Robert, 116 Knox, Bernard, 50
Flaubert, Gustave, 111-112 Kramer, Hilton, 23, 28-29, 30, 32, 36
Foucault, Michel, 34,129
France, Anatole, 69
Frankfurt School, 2, 5, 29, 83,109 Lauter, Paul, 37, 40, 42, 50, 56,
Franklin, Bruce, 38, 39, 46 151(n64)
Lawrence, David Herbert, 88
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 45, 48 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 22
Gellius, Aulus, 15 Lefevere, Andre, 63
George, Stefan, 101,136 Lessing, Doris, 150(n48)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11, 65, Levine, Joseph, 17
126-127,135 Liberal pluralism, 3, 25-26, 46, 72, 79,
Gombrich, E.H., 63 80, 83, 97-98, 118
182 Index
and interest-group politics, 51-54, Sanders, Andrew, 19

91, 105, 107 Sartre, Jean Paul, 104
and opening the canon, 25-26, 30, Scharnhorst, Gary, 107
36-44, 49-51, 66-67, 89, 92, 119, Schumann, Robert, 137
123,132, 141 Schwartz, Lawrence, 64
Liberalism, 44, 48, 50, 52-53,55, 91,129 Scott, Ridley, 120
Lindenberger, Herbert, 114,116,118 Scott, Walter, 65
Lukacs, Georg, 84,123 Schiller, Friedrich, 109
Searle, John, 23
Mahler, Gustav, 137 Shakespeare, William, 16, 19-20, 29,
Marcuse, Herbert, 85,160(n34) 30, 34, 59, 63, 65,90,114, 117
Marsh, Daniel, 21 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 154(n53)
Marx, Karl, 93, 99 Sociology
Marxism, 31, 35, 84, 86, 88,128,132 of art and literature, 6, 60, 61-63,
McFadden, George, 37 68, 83, 89,103,104-113,124,136,
Melville, Herman, 42 159(nll)
Menchu, Rigoberta, 43 of literary reputation, 4, 64, 103,
Milner, Andrew, 120, 121 105-107, 118
Milton, John, 19, 29,65, 88,120 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 63
Montrose, Louis, 116 Steiner, George, 23
Morrison, Toni, 40 Stendhal, 87
Morton, Donald, 46 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 42
Sue, Eugene, 137
New historicism, 6, 31, 41,103, Swift, Jonathan, 17
113-118,124
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 103
Thoreau, Henry David, 107
Nussbaum, Martha, 54
Titian, 120
Ohmann, Richard, 38-39, 46,149(n38) Tolstoy, Leo, 30
Orwell, George, 63, 64,107 Tompkins, Jane, 39, 42, 43
Tuttleton, James, 28
Perloff, Marjorie, 50 Twain, Mark, 27
Pierce-Baker, Charlotte, 40
Plato, 13-14,16,27, 52-53 Valery, Paul, 97, 114
Pliny the Elder, 12 Veeser, H. Aram, 116
Poe, Edgar Allan, 72 Virgil, 15, 16, 21
Polykleitos, 11,12-13,146(n5)
Pope, Alexander, 16,18 Walker, Alice, 67,150(n48)
Pragmatism, 7, 33, 36, 37, 51-55, 58, Watson, Ben, 135
87, 92, 95,112,124,142 Weimann, Robert, 38
Proust, Marcel, 90 West, Cornell, 23
Pynchon, Thomas, 47 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 49
Wordsworth, William, 52-53
Quintilian, 15
Robinson, Lillian, 37 Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud, 46

Roddenjohn, 64,107 Zenodotus of Ephesus, 14
Rorty, Richard, 52 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 115,133-134,
Ryle, Martin, 119 164(n30)

E. Dean Kolbas - Critical Theory and The Literary Canon (2001)

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Critical Theory and

the Literary Canon

Copyright © 2001 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Visit us on the World Wide Web at www.westviewpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

PN81 .K595 2001

Part One History, Politics, and Culture

1 Canons Ancient and Modern 11

2 The Contemporary Canon Debate 25

Part Two Critical Aesthetic Theory

4 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 83

5 Subverting the Canon: Sociology, New Historicism,

New Historicism and Aesthetic Heteronomy, 113

6 The Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 125

Conclusion: A Canon of Art, a Politics of Ends 139

Americans, and even Western culture as a whole. In contrast to these and

any attribution of value to canonical works as inherently biased or ideo-

canon as it stands or for "opening it up" to be more culturally diverse

ical theory, particularly the literary criticism and aesthetic theory of

Although Chapter 4 is in part a critical response to the ideological pro-

which is believed to make Adorno's aesthetic theory less applicable to

History, Politics, and Culture

Before assessing the contemporary debate over the Western literary

nation-state. Bringing this historical account up to the contemporary

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

blueprint" and aesthetic standard for other sculptors to follow. 5 The

the epitome of idealization, since the body is seen as a sequence of interre-

Indeed, the concept of a canon may be interpreted as the very arche-

As codified by Plato, excellence, beauty, justice, and goodness were

Although otherwise opposed to Plato's philosophy, the Epicureans

phy to oratory and history, making qualitative distinctions and thereby

canon became a list of works for pedagogical instruction in the liberal

Modern Literary Canonizing

different, in principle, from manufactured goods or other commercial

image to appropriations of his work for a variety of purposes, culminat-

"civic uplift." 30 However, just as in Europe, canon formation in the

Canonical and Cultural Crises

concept appears to have continuously evolved and expanded to include

Given the number and variety of precedents, then, it should be clear

Cecil Graham.- What is a cynic?

positions is familiar, and their opposing arguments might appear to be ir-

Justifying the Western Canon

humanism, arguing that "what gives [the humanities] their abiding

School of Resentment." It offers an extended reflection upon Bloom's

Such hermetic aloofness, however, is itself indicative of Bloom's own pe-

is the fundamental basis of all canonization. Indeed, there can be no

Kermode, however, avoids resignation, adding that "canonicity still

And whether one thinks of canons as objectionable because formed at ran-

distinction is to be determined. How exactly is the richness of canonical

Opening the Canon

pedagogical pragmatism, the range of liberal arguments for opening the

cial diversity by overlooking—if not erasing—the existence of disenfran-

What else is the projection of a canon, if not—in the language of poststrue-

Although doubtless true of some reactionary arguments used to justify a

Like Kermode, then, Ohmann ultimately turns to academia as the final

some aspects of particular works might not immediately or evidently

criteria—such as aesthetic criteria—have to be employed at some point to

E. D. E, N. Southworth, two of the most "widely read" American novel-

tentative canon becomes equally subject to criticism.51 Such strategies are