Canon (W&H  73-5)

• What are some of the standard criteria for canonizing a work of literature?
• Authenticity
• trueness to general experience
• an author who is known and can be validated
• the author really felt something while s/he was writing the work
• Universality-represntative of human experience, throughout time
• Significant subject-matter
• Aesthetic criteria
• innovative, conplex use of language and form
• innovation is an improvisation on something already recognized as "great"
• artistic unity
• density of allusions
• proper aesthetic distance (seeming not to care, ironic tone)
• Lack of obvious political content
• What factors made people begin to question the universality of so-called "great" literature in the 70's?
• People recognized that the literary  canon was selcted by and mostly composed of works by white, European, upperclass, acadaemically educated hetereosexual men.
• Recognition that  women, people of color, lower class literature, non-academic literary genres are all excluded from the canon
• IMges of women criticism began to show that whata was in the canon was often violently misogynistic
• People start questionsing the "universality" of white male experience
• Validation of women's experiences in the women's movement validates women's anger at not seeing thier own experiences in the text.
• What are some of the mechanisms used for creating a literary canon?
• What books teachers/ professors choose to teach in classes
• What is the basis of academic curricula-- MA Exams, PhD Exams, DIssertations
• Whay gets published, and re-published, by what publishers..in what kinds of editions?
• Norton critical editions, cliff's Notes etc. can show what is being canonized
• editors, editorial committees
• scholarly journals.. accumulation of a body of scholarly criticism, published in notable journals
• Explain Russ's idea of "exclusion of difference/"  List some ways women's writing has been excluded from the canon.
• Anything too different gets excluded



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Kolodny, Dancing Through the Minefield (1980) 171-87

• What's the history of fem lit crit that Kolodny outlines in 1980? List the major successes she claims
• What is the basis of the attacks on Fem lit crit and the attempt to intro new writers into the canon?
• What are Kolodny's three crucial propositions that underlie fem lit crit's reassessment of the canon?
• Literary history is a fiction (and the historicity of literature) --
• The canon isn't absolute or fixed
• People make up history and then think the history they made up is facts
• There is no way to actually go back in time-- the "past"is always a matter of interpretation for the sake of the present.
• Reading engages not texts but paradigms
• Aesthetics are based on cultural values and shaped by (and shape) critical methods
• What does Kolodny see for the future of fem lit crit?

• "The Lofty Seat of Cannonized Bards"-- How is the Canon perpetruated?
• "The Presence of Canonized Forebearers" --
• "Such is All the World Hath Confirmed..." --
• "We Acknowledge it Canonlike but not Canonical"
• "Would Augustine... have Preferred Some to Others?" --
• "TO Canonize Your Own" --
• "Canonize Such a Multifarious Genealogie" --
• A Cheaper Way of Canon-Making in a Corner --
• Wsdome Under a Ragged Coate is Seldome Canonicall --