Critical theory and the literary canon 9780429501197, 9780813398136

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page vii)
Introduction (page 1)
Part One History, Politics, and Culture
1 Canons Ancient and Modern (page 11)
2 The Contemporary Canon Debate (page 25)
3 Cultural Reproduction (page 59)
Part Two Critical Aesthetic Theory
4 Critical Theory and Canonical Art (page 83)
5 Subverting the Canon: Sociology, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies (page 103)
6 The Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation (page 125)
Conclusion: A Canon of Art, a Politics of Ends (page 139)
Notes (page 145)
References (page 167)
Index (page 179)

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Critical Theory and the Literary Canon

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Critical Theory and the Literary Canon E. Dean Kolbas

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 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, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid’s Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ Visit us on the World Wide Web at www.westviewpress.com

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.

ONDEMAND 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

and Cultural Studies 103

5 Subverting the Canon: Sociology, New Historicism,

The Anti-Aesthetic Impulse of the Sociology of Art, 104 v

Ul 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

Notes 145 References 167 Index 179

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

Acknowledgments This book is the result of research done at Cambridge University that was originally submitted as a doctoral thesis. Although it has been substantially modified and rewritten to be more suitable for publication, its essential content remains the product of work that was done there. Even the most hermetic research is never a purely solitary endeavor, and I owe a great deal of thanks to friends, faculty, and administrators for their advice, encouragement, and patience. Above all, I am indebted to my supervisor, 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 Galt 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 RosenKaplan, 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. E. Dean Kolbas

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Philosophy that satisfies its own intention ... has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case. — Theodor Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy” (1962)

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Introduction

A “literary classic” is a work considered first-rate or excellent of its kind, and therefore 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 generated 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 cultural achievement in the West—once thought of as timeless and universal, is now being undermined by the combined forces of feminism, multiculturalism, 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 marginalized 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 way 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 therefore be changed, or preserved, by engineering the classroom syllabus accordingly. 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 historical understanding of canons that is confined neither to schools and universities nor to social representation but that stresses the material reproduction 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 necessarily involves qualitative judgment, because to be canonical also means to be exemplary. Sociological views of the literary canon that overemphasize the institutional processes of canon formation tend to discount or neglect the distinctive, aesthetic aspects of canonical works of art. In contrast to such views, this book will suggest that critical theory—and particularly the work of Theodor Adorno—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 show 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 relevance to this debate.! The purpose of bringing critical theory into the socalled 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 introduce 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 culpable 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 surrounding 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 dispute would remain unresolved. Whereas some of these critics denounce

Introduction 3 any attribution of value to canonical works as inherently biased or ideological, others reserve skepticism for the reputedly progressive effects of debunking them. When one critic speaks of the loss of standards of judgment, another reacts by emphasizing the exclusions that those standards have reinforced. Some have appealed to the democratic legacy and humanistic virtues of the Western tradition; others have invoked cultural difference and otherness against its hegemony. And whereas certain academics 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 social and historical context, to highlight their aporias and silences, or to reverse 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 political 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, 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 antiquity as a concept with various, and sometimes contradictory, meanings: from simple tools of measurement to sophisticated artistic models,

from standards of moral behavior to the legitimization of political authority. 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 elucidate 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 assumptions 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. In either case, ideological assumptions are taken for granted and the material constraints of canon formation 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.? Not only can doubts be cast on the accuracy of this assump-

tion, but its narrow historical and sociological vantage point circumscribes an understanding of the socioeconomic foundations of canons as much as the material basis of canonization as a process. In Chapter 3 I attempt 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 familiarity 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 familiar. 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 affect canon formation, including the publishing and entertainment industries, the mass media, and the commodification of culture in general. For all their advantages, however, sociological accounts of literary reproduction have tended to put aside the question of the aesthetic content or quality of canonical works, highlighting instead the social and ideological functions of art. Indeed, they sometimes go so far as to suggest 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 sociology 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 education, the members of the so-called Frankfurt School perceive the judgment 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 proposed 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.” To go beyond 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 Benjamin’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 therefore bankrupt. The autonomy of art, as Adorno understands it, is also applicable to the political assumptions of the current debate in general, because 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 political claims for art by both left- and right-wing critics (even though the latter would deny that their claims are political) contradict the very concept 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 theory of art, what is called the “truth content” of works is taken as historically objective and, in part, materialistically determined. If different elements 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 ideological 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 proposals and justifications for either revising or leaving intact the literary canon, 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 generally finds the evaluation of literature to be dependent on its social effects or reception, which suggests that the qualitative content of works 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 priorities 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 literature and other historical documents, even though its practitioners might pay lip service to the idea of artistic quality. This is largely due to the disregard of aesthetic autonomy in new historicism and its substitution of heteronomy as a more realistic or accurate category with which to understand 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 treatment that canonical works have routinely received. Critical theory, however, 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 content can be found in art. Nor does critical theory resort to an instrumental 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 advantages, however, the critical theory of art is itself open to criticism on several 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 outdated, modernist emphasis upon the category of “the work of art,”

Introduction 7 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 formation. Finally, I consider whether the apparent limitations of a critical theory of canonical art are in part due to the inherent tensions—or objective 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 dominated on the one hand by the rhetoric of liberal representation and the social utility of art and on the other by the irreproachability of Western cultural monuments, there will continue to be space for a perspective that is neither pragmatic nor idealistic, neither conventionally political nor politically aloof. Despite its own shortcomings, and the historical and material conditions working against it, critical theory provides such a perspective. If critical theory helps to move beyond the limited terms of the canon debate and the false opposition of its cultural politics, then explaining 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 beyond those specifically concerned with the study of literature—as witnessed by recent studies in political theory, sociology, U.S. history, and Western music®&—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 devoted to the literary canon. For these reasons, in this book I focus on arguments concerning canons of art and literature alone. The question as to whether the arguments made here can be extended to canons in other areas is therefore left open.

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PART ONE

History, Politics, and Culture

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Canons Ancient and Modern

For Polycletus taught us all the symmetries of the body in his treatise, and confirmed

his testimony when he sculpted a statue according to his own rules, and named the statue, as he had his treatise, the canon. —Galen, De placitis Hippocrates et Platonis (second century A.D.)

Poetry in general was a gift to the world and to nations, and not the private inheritance of a few refined, cultivated men. —The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832), vol. IL, book x

Before assessing the contemporary debate over the Western literary canon, it is necessary to understand the precise meanings of the word canon. Although new studies of specific incidents of literary canonization

have been appearing with increasing frequency, most of them concentrate on the fortunes and fate of individual authors, texts, movements, or genres; to date, few have attempted to trace the origins of the term itself and its subsequent transformations.! My purpose in this chapter, therefore, is to provide a brief historical overview of the changing definitions and connotations of the term canon, with particular emphasis on the variety of uses to which it has been put. This chapter begins by surveying the origins and evolution of the idea

of a canon from antiquity to the Middle Ages. I will show that the creation of vernacular literary canons came only after the institutionalization of the vernacular languages, the consolidation of modern nationstates, and the spread of nationalist ideologies. The eventual establishment of modern canons of literature depended on other economic and sociological factors, such as the rise of professional criticism, the growth of the publishing industry, and the commodification of culture in capitalistic societies, none of which, of course, has been exclusive to any single 11

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 occurred throughout its history, I consider suggestions as to what makes the present controversy different from those that have preceded it before

analyzing, in the following chapter, the specific arguments for and against diversifying the literary canon today.

Antiquity and the Middle Ages The definition of canon ultimately derives from the ancient Greek word kanna, which referred to useful types of reed, the straight stalk of marsh plants with firm stems. The related Greek term kanon metaphorically and metonymically extends that use to include straight rod, bar, or ruler, as well as rule, standard, and model. In architecture it acquired the meaning of the right measure and, in the arts, correct proportion. The latter sense was developed most explicitly in antiquity by the celebrated sculptor Polykleitos. It has been remarked that the fifth century B.c. was the prime period of classical sculpture, in which an artistic realism and universalism were 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 harmony of design... never before attained in Greek sculpture,” so much so that successive generations of artists took the figure as their model.> Indeed, representations of the Doryphoros appeared in reliefs, altar friezes, and other statues, as well as on coins and engraved gems, well into the first century B.c. and after. Although only copies of Polykleitos’s work now survive, literary and archaeological evidence has led one critic to surmise that the Romans admired it “almost fetishistically” and considered it “an ideal model for all sculptors to follow (words like lex, magister and exemplum are used of the Doryphoros).”4 In Book XXXIV of his Natural History (first century A.D.), Pliny the Elder refers to the Doryphoros as “the statue that artists call the Canon, since they draw their outlines from it as if from a sort of standard.” Thanks to this one work, he continues, Polykleitos “perfected the art of sculpture.” The statue is sometimes claimed to have been the sculptural illustra-

tion of Polykleitos’s only known book, now lost, entitled Kanon, in which he expounded the theoretical basis of his technique. A manual detailing the precise mathematical measurements and “ideal proportions” of the human figure, it is thought to have provided a “practical working

Canons Ancient and Modern 13 blueprint” and aesthetic standard for other sculptors to follow.> 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 contained in the Kanon, whereas the Doryphoros itself was meant physically to exemplify the artist’s conceptual ideal. Art historian Brunilde Ridgway alleges that the sculpture did not represent any particular individual but rather “the athlete or the Olympic victor par excellence,” and has described it as the epitome of idealization, since the body is seen as a sequence of interrelated measures that create the total harmony of the figure. ... As such, no human being could ever look like the Doryphoros, and the statue assumes the value of a Platonic idea, of which this world can only afford vague copies.®

Indeed, the concept of a canon may be interpreted as the very archetype of Plato’s conception of the Ideas or Forms, the perfect ideals that constitute true understanding and are to be followed as standards, even though they may only be imperfectly approximated. In the Protagoras, Plato explicitly invokes Polykleitos and implies that he is the exemplar of all sculptors, just as Homer is of poets (11.311c-e).? 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 ideologically 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), although the precise manner in which their appeal to truth would be justified was left unspecified. Many passages in the dialogues do imply that canonical artists and poets such as Homer are legitimate to the extent that

they convey the ideals of austerity, goodness, and truth—in short, the Platonic conception of knowledge—rather than being merely “delightful” or appealing to “the childish loves of the multitude” (Republic, books iii, 11.398a-b, and x, I1.608a-b).8

14 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 morality. Indeed, in the contemporary plays of Euripides, the term kanon is employed 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 man learns this lesson well, he knows what is base, measuring it by the standards [kanoni] of the honorable” (Hecuba, 11.601-602). Likewise, the Epicureans, who believed the highest

good to be personal happiness, also thought of a canon as a moral and conceptual ideal. In the century after Polykleitos’s Kanon and a generation after Plato, Epicurus wrote a treatise on natural philosophy called Of the Standard, a work entitled Canon. Although the work no longer survives, Diogenes Laertius described it as follows: Now in The Canon Epicurus affirms that our sensations and preconceptions and our feelings are the standards of truth; the Epicureans generally make perceptions of mental presentations to be also standards. ... By preconception they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion, or universal idea stored in the mind (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in Ten Books, book x, 11.30-34).

Although otherwise opposed to Plato’s philosophy, the Epicureans clearly shared with him the notion of canon as a standard of truth and 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 factors also affected which specific works came to be considered canonical in antiquity. In addition to abstract artistic and moral standards, classical scholarship began to play a practical role in the preservation, reproduction, and potential canonization of works of literature, philosophy, and history. Scholars of the Library of Alexandria, for example, had been cataloguing, copying, and editing texts as early as the third century B.c. Zenodotus of Ephesus, librarian during the reign of Ptolemy II, was among the first editors of Homer, and the poet Callimachus produced a 120-volume critical catalogue—the Pinakes—of some of the library’s vast contents. These and other Alexandrian scholars devised lists of the most distinguished writers in various genres ranging from poetry and philoso-

Canons Ancient and Modern 15 phy to oratory and history, making qualitative distinctions and thereby either reconfirming or helping to shape, at least implicitly, the earliest literary canons of antiquity.®

In later centuries, the Romans appropriated the concept of canon by adapting Greek models for their own purposes. The word itself was transliterated—kanon became Latinized as canon. Just as they followed Polykleitos’s example of sculpture, so the Romans imitated, recreated, and transformed Greek poetry: The Aeneid combines thematic and stylistic elements of both The Iliad and The Odyssey; the 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 considered valuable enough to be worthy of imitation, so their reproduction came to be a mark of canonical distinction. The reproduction of wellknown works, however, also had ideological functions, because the ap-

peal to historical precedent often legitimized contemporary political power as much as literary practice. In The Aeneid, for example, the founding of Rome and its imperial dominion was glorified by association with the hallowed Homeric epics and justified by poetically inscribing the 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 between “ancient” and “modern,” classic and contemporary, major and minor, authors was beginning to be formulated, and the first explicit distinction of a whole literary canon, as a collected body of texts, was made. In the first century A.D., Quintilian already counted Cicero among the antigui, 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.!° Indeed, the roots of subsequent canon debates lie partly in such ancient versus modern distinctions, which have been subject to change according to the various uses to which literature has been put in different historical contexts. By the fourth century A.D., the canon was understood to be a comprehensive list of books for study, such as those of Christian literature. The long history of the formation of the authoritative biblical canon, not offi-

cially finalized until the sixteenth century, has been recounted elsewhere.!! Of more relevance here is the subtle shift in definition: Without abandoning the sense of artistic or moral exemplars, the early medieval

16 Canons Ancient and Modern canon became a list of works for pedagogical instruction in the liberal arts, and especially in grammar, the study of which involved literature as much as linguistic practice per se.!2 The authors studied in medieval schools included pagan and Christian writers, both of which were taken as authorities. Indeed, it was characteristic of the early Middle Ages that all auctores, or curriculum authors, were perceived as equally valuable, that each one was believed to be timeless. Lists of selected auctores were devised as examples to learn from and to follow, and although the lists differ in points of detail and were periodically challenged, a remarkable degree of consistency is also evident, as certain authors reappear on list after list across Europe from the fifth to the thirteenth century and beyond. In various combinations, those lists included Aesop, Homer, Plato, Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Statius, Cato,

Juvenal, and Boethius. As late as the fourteenth century, the esteem in which many of the same writers were held was confirmed in Dante’s Inferno (canto iv, l1.88-90) and Purgatorio (canto xxii, 11.97-108), as well as Chaucer’s The House of Fame (book iii, Il.1460-1519). Even into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Curtius shows, European cultures still followed a canon of authors that largely resembled the thirteenth-century list of Hugh of Trimberg.18

For the duration of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, then, the secular canonical auctores were used for a variety of pedagogical purposes. To scholars, they were authorities of general and scientific knowledge as well as sources of wisdom and general philosophy;

to students, they provided moral edification as much as grammatical models; and to artists, familiarity with them was virtually prescriptive for poetic composition. This remained the case during the initial flowering of vernacular literature, of which the Italian language developed the first European vernacular canon, which included the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and later Ariosto and Tasso. However, according to Curtius, to survive in a climate dominated by the study of ancient poetry, even vernacular poetry had to “legitimize itself through model

authors who could serve as a standard for Italian literary practice as Virgil did for Latin.”!4 Just as Virgil and others had appropriated Greek models, so Dante followed his Latin precursors. Indeed, Inferno is in many ways a poetic elaboration of Book VI of The Aeneid, while the Divina Commedia on the whole is infused with Virgilian motifs. In English, just as Shakespeare had absorbed Plutarch, Seneca, and Ovid, so Dryden and Pope self-consciously developed the pastoral style of Theocritus and Virgil; in French, Racine recreated the tragedies of Euripides, as Moliére 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

Canons Ancient and Modern 17 ancient classics, as Latin literature had done before with Greek literature: The poets of antiquity were emulated as authorities to legitimize contemporary literature and the values it was thought to embody. Thus, even canonical change, it seems, was 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 common was the practice throughout the Renaissance and the neoclassical revivals 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 canonization from the ancient and medieval periods. First, certain material and social conditions developed that changed the nature of literary production, 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 comparatively 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 selected 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 relationship of these developments and how they have influenced the history 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 privileged 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.”!5 But with the gradual expansion of literacy, the publishing industry, and the reading public throughout this period—as well as yet another conflict between the followers of the ancients and proponents of the moderns—devotion 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), revealed 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-

18 Canons Ancient and Modern dermining the authority of the old order and its long-established canon of antiquity.!¢

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.!” 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 formerly 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.!8 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.”19 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, expressed 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-consciously confirmed a canon of English literature by investing it with critical authority at a time when it was believed to be threatened by the growing 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.2° The enormous growth of literary criticism and the activity of formally editing literary texts, often with the scholarly apparatus of detailed annotation, further helped to bring modern, secular, vernacular literature into the canon. The market for new books and newly edited editions 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 property of their authors, legally protected as commodities for exchange little

Canons Ancient and Modern 19 different, in principle, from manufactured goods or other commercial products.?! 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 industrialism, 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 modern commercial 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 eighteenth 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., Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer), the consolidation of independent states and their respective nationalist ideologies, combined with the growth of publishing and professional criticism, ultimately began to fix multiple and distinct national canons. The French and English literary canons, for example, began to coalesce during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 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 nationalism helped to found a distinct canon of German literature. Indeed, celebrations of major literary figures such as the “Schillerfest” of 1859 were used explicitly to fuel nationalist sentiments of unification and constitutionalism.24 The role of nationalism in modern 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’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, the same site in the capital where the monarchy is invested with its authority. From Dryden (1700) to Milton (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 achievement. In Michael Dobson’s account, the formation of Shakespeare’s reputation 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

20 Canons Ancient and Modern image to appropriations of his work for a variety of purposes, culminating symbolically in David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee of 1769, Shakespeare was ultimately enshrined in Britain as “the transcendent personification 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 mideighteenth century, largely to help assuage resurgent Scottish nationalism and mitigate the Jacobite threat to restore the Stuarts. From the start, the academic study of English literature had clearly ideological intentions. 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 history of the language or as a means of “social improvement.” But not until the attempts to establish an Honours School in English Literature at Oxford—first in 1887 and then, successfully, in 1894—did the national canon find a place in English academia.?” Cambridge University followed suit at the close of the First World War, when “English Literature rode to power on the back of wartime nationalism.”2° Although it has been remarked 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 legitimacy of national origins.”29

In this regard, the United States furnishes perhaps the paradigmatic case of modern canon formation. Whereas in England the nationalist appropriation of literature largely preceded its eventual accommodation in the university, in the United States both nationalism and the formal academic 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 Europe, 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 American literature as an independent subject had appeared sporadically 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

Canons Ancient and Modern 21 “civic uplift.”39 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.3! 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 Review of Literature of October 15, 1927, Henry Canby ranked the Declaration of Independence 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 Classic?,” 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.*? 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 prescribed values and priorities of the state, where the inculcation of abstract 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

22 Canons Ancient and Modern concept appears to have continuously evolved and expanded to include a greater and greater diversity of literature, then it might be fairly accused of being far too linear or progressive. Indeed, canon formation has been fraught with episodes of ambiguity, unrest, and even radical contention 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 antigui and the comparative merits of contemporary literature had occurred as early as the first and second centuries A.D., when poets deemed classicus scriptor were implicitly taken to be superior to more recent ones. A certain tension is found in the very contrast between “modern,” with its suggestion of immediacy and originality, and “ancient,” with its implication

of historical influence and artistic imitation. The twelfth century witnessed the first great querelle in the universities between ancient and modern, 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 reaction 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 England. The foundation of courses for the study of modern vernacular literature at universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was yet another 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 society, as did F. R. Leavis, whose “Great Tradition” attempted to preserve critical judgment and reaffirm a specific literary heritage in an age of presumed cultural and spiritual decline.*3 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, there have been many moments in history at which prevailing values, literary conventions, and accepted classics of literature were, in varying degrees, disputed or undermined and to which the rhetoric of “crisis” has been applied, whether contemporaneously or retrospectively. And these are only the betterknown examples of when the boundaries of the canon were redrawn or its specific content scrutinized and revised, if not contested and condemned.

Canons Ancient and Modern 23 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 criticisms of a traditional canon, on whatever grounds, 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.4 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 signify 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 Literature (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 traditional 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 traditional 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 education in general. In “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation” (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 Cultural 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 populism just as diverse commodities flourish in new and open markets,

24 Canons Ancient and Modern markets in which the hierarchy of values that the canon represents has, supposedly, no place at all. To Harold Bloom, in The 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 ideological shifts, and specific socioeconomic tendencies—have all converged to undermine whatever confidence there once was in a singular and venerated literary heritage. Although the increasing political recognition of social diversity and the consequent revisions of the classroom syllabus are certainly involved, I argue in the following chapters that they are insufficient by themselves to have altered the literary canon or broken it up into a plurality of separate ones. Rather, such academic strategies may be better understood as symptoms of other, broader changes affecting modern capitalist societies. A materialist critique of the specific terms of the contemporary 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.

The Contemporary Canon Debate Cecil Graham: What ts a cynic?

Lord Darlington: A man who knows 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 mutually 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 aesthetic 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, patriarchy, and ethnocentrism, each of which is antithetical to the egalitarian ideals of democratic societies. They have also discredited the assertion 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 irreconcilable, what has not been recognized is how much they actually have in common.

Rather than adopting a middle course between the extremes or attempting 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 critique 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 sufficient recourse to the historical and material constraints of canon-formation, Or appropriate canonical literature for the purposes of political or pedagogical pragmatism. In this chapter I highlight the ideological proximity through an 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 canonical literature that neither liberal-pluralist nor conservative-humanist arguments 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 defending 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 attention 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 instills the virtues and “common culture” of Western civilization, its “lasting 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.!

Bennett’s understanding of the “great tradition” of “the Western mind” is such that the value of the canon resides in little more than cultural 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 institutional 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 ideological 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, arguing that truth—and beauty and excellence—are not timeless matters, but transitory notions, devices used by some groups to perpetuate ‘hegemony’ over others.” As an alternative, she advocates a sort of populist

28 The Contemporary Canon Debate 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 Cheney justifies the study of the canon by appealing to the idea of a singular, 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 confronting the “basic landmarks of history,” Cheney’s proposals for educational reform would replace historical analysis and critical reflection with an unthinking consensus.4 If the pedagogical recommendations and historical assumptions of officially 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, academics, and intellectuals, whose “liberal fascism” is reflected in the defunct 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 iconoclasm, have become “the establishment,” against which The New Criterion provides the voice of reason and sobriety.°

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 underpinning cultural studies, and the “baleful influence that the social sciences themselves continue to wield [on the humanities] with such devas-

tating results.” The arts, they maintain, “have become hostage to ideology.”® 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 formation has been a dynamic and political process throughout history, which makes the claim of rescuing the arts and humanities from politics and ideology misconceived, if not futile. It is by now a truism of literary theory that all texts arise within a political context and therefore inevitably harbor some political content—whether explicit or implicit—even despite the specific intentions of their authors. Nevertheless, James Tuttleton, an-

The Contemporary Canon Debate 29 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 Ellison—as if Henry V, Paradise Lost, The Waste Land, or Invisible Man were without political content!” 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 platitudes: “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 maintains the importance of aesthetic autonomy, albeit on totally different grounds and for completely different purposes (see Part 2). Yet the apparent 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 distinguishes their arguments, however, is whether those tendencies are described simply in terms of declining academic standards or as symptomatic of wider historical, institutional, and materialistic conditions of modern capitalist society. Apart from denying the political aspects of works of literature and literary evaluation, the arguments exemplified by Bennett, Cheney, and the contributors to The New 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

30 The Contemporary Canon Debate School of Resentment.” It offers an extended reflection upon Bloom’s personal canon, comprising twenty-six novelists and poets, with Shakespeare at its center (approximately 800 more writers also deemed canonical, or at least having the potential to become so, are listed in the appendices). Like Bennett or Kimball, Bloom promotes the cultural monuments of the Western tradition and condemns the reduction of aesthetics to ideology, against which he urges a “stubborn resistance” to preserve literature “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 measurement that is anything but political or moral.”? Here, however, Bloom differs markedly from the humanists insofar as he denies that the canon stands pragmatically as a moral exemplar or educational 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 defenders 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. However, 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.”’!2 In his account, competition is intrinsic to the arts, and the “intercanonical” influence between, or “ongoing contest” among, writers

The Contemporary Canon Debate 31 is the fundamental basis of all canonization. Indeed, there can be no “strong, canonical writing” without the process of literary influence.}5 The idea of literary “strength” enters Bloom’s formula of canonicity because 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 authors nor an illustration of innocent artistic borrowings: “Tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary 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 social 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 siécle aestheticism (l'art pour l’art) at least as far as nineteenth-century Romanticism and the “cult of genius” in the late eighteenth century. By adhering to an absolute “autonomy of the aesthetic” and deriding the “flight from or repression of the aesthetic” in current literary criticism, Bloom betrays his own aesthetic idealism, treating literary production in an historical and material vacuum. Consequently, he oversimplifies the theoretical contributions of new historicism and Marxism, as well as categories such as “cultural capital,” each of which has il-

luminated various factors involved in canon formation, including its socioeconomic conditions.}5

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, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness.”!6 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.”!” 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 keeping with his “agonistic” aesthetic theory and its unspoken political sup-

32 The Contemporary Canon Debate positions. The belief that the aesthetic is “an individual rather than a societal concern” simultaneously negates its social import and obscures the

institutional and material means by which the literary canon is reproduced. (Both ideas are taken up in the following chapters of this book.) The relentless use of expressions such as the “competition” and “conflict” between writers, the “struggle” and “survival” of texts, or the “individual 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, few 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 distances 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 confluence of judgments of “mere opinion,” but only when their esteem becomes institutionally validated as knowledge by academic professionals do they become canonical. Although he acknowledges the difficulty of sharply distinguishing knowledge from opinion, the important insight here is the recognition that works of art are subject to social and institutional 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 deconstructible; 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 and historical periods are distinct but interrelated tools with which the past is organized. They are needed for describing, understanding, and reconstructing history, literary or otherwise. Because “we haven’t enough memory to process everything,” he

The Contemporary Canon Debate 33 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 attention.”20 Unlike the humanist critics, Kermode does not naively presuppose 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 random or to serve some interests at the expense of others, or whether one supposes 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 history of literature and art without recourse to them. That is why the minorities 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.?!

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 interpretation maintains the life of a work of art from one generation to another. 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.””4 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 interpretations: “all our interpretations depend in some measure on historical

interpretations; of these some survive and some do not... and communities maintain, with indefinite but quite powerful criteria, some [interpretations] and not others.”25 Nevertheless, Kermode finds that canonical

34 The Contemporary Canon Debate 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 interpreters the possibility of saying an incredibly wide range of things about it. He explains that the general shift in exegetical priorities, from the emphasis 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 different generations, “there must be new appraisals, and they will be possible only so long as new relations, new adjustments of centre and margin, 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.”2”

Unlike Bloom and others, therefore, Kermode recognizes that interpretation 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 interpretation. Kermode locates such authority and relative consensus specifically within the academic community, in universities, colleges, and other associations 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 criticism: “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 authority (Kermode cites as examples the influence of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault)—the institution is expected “to contain or control” them. To Kermode, this is easily done because such radical forms of criticism are “not, in the end, subversive at all” and because there is an “underlying 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

The Contemporary Canon Debate 35 canonical texts “another span of life,” adding another chapter to the history 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 Marxist theories have offered. He is not troubled by the “necessary conservatism” of learned institutions because, he believes, “it is by recognizing the tacit authority of the institution that we achieve the measure of liberty we have in interpreting. It is a price to pay, but it purchases an incalculable boon.”39 Elsewhere, he declares that “there must be institutional control of interpretation,” and that all institutions “are bound to be reactionary 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 and perfection of conscience are unlikely to be more available under that new dispensation than they are now.”?! 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 economic 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, “omnisignificance,” 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

36 The Contemporary Canon Debate 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 constant contemporaneity in Kermode’s account. As long as the interpretation of canonical works has been ratified by academic institutions (i.e., converted 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 justification 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 arguments for opening the canon to greater cultural diversity. To summarize the arguments so far, humanists such as Bennett, Cheney, 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, especially if the perceived threat from political ideologues and liberal pluralists 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 reviewed so far span from unhistorical humanism to aesthetic idealism to

The Contemporary Canon Debate 37 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 overreaction, especially in the early years of the contemporary debate, when theoretical 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 forum that explicitly made the canon an issue was not organized until 1982.°2 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 example, George McFadden claims that “the establishment of a privileged canon is repugnant in itself; it promotes elitism, ethnocentrism, and surrender 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 challenged.*3 It is believed that opening the canon will redress its imbalances and render it more democratic by making it more accurately representative of true social diversity. However, the proposed means by which this could or should be done are often insufficiently articulated and theoretically 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 humanist 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 certain socially and institutionally empowered groups that share those identifying characteristics. A sort of conspiracy theory arises as to how “the

Great Tradition” is created and maintained, which must now be demythologized 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 homogeneous, it has also been argued that the canon actively homogenizes so-

38 The Contemporary Canon Debate cial diversity by overlooking—if not erasing—the existence of disenfranchised 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 poststructuralism—the attempt to homogenize discursive space, to suppress discontinuity in favor of some stabilizing hierarchy, to assert some transcendental signified, some unexamined authority such as “order” or, as obvious alternatives, “experience,” or “human nature”? And is not, then, this type of authority easily used as some universalizing tool of obliteration, expropriation, and exclusion?*4

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 humanities 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 compounds these sins of omission and commission by employing methods of reading that remove favoured authors and texts from processes of struggle and conflict.35

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 correspondence between the interests of the author and the values of the social group he or she is thought to represent. A great number of studies presume such a relation and therefore attempt either to expose the complicity of specific canonical works with the status quo, to prescribe alternative texts to “counterbalance” the canon by appealing to distinct aes-

thetic criteria and cultural traditions, or both.56 For example, Bruce Franklin suggests that the study of literature has been “primarily a means for students to become acculturated into the class to which they aspire.” He therefore urges teachers and professors to resist using it for “subtly propagandizing” their own class interests.°” Similarly, in a brief analysis of modern literary canon formation, Richard Ohmann finds the ideology of bourgeois individualism operating in many of the most esteemed works of late twentieth-century American literature, such as the novels of Sylvia Plath, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow. The publishing industry, too, insofar as it is saturated with the values of the professionalmanagerial class, influences the reputation and esteem of chosen works.

The Contemporary Canon Debate 39 Periodicals like the New York Times Book Review, for instance, inadvertently reinforce the values that certain books are thought to represent by encouraging their success with favorable reviews.*® 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 insure 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 attention 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.°9

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. Arguing 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 preeminent position,” she takes Hawthorne and his books to represent the class interests of an American “dynastic cultural elite” that came to identify itself 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.”49 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 values 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 itself subject to criticism to the extent that it promotes a theory of canon formation based on interest group politics and the modern liberal ideology 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

40 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 institutions are likely to be freer of ideological liabilities because their political unorthodoxy is taken as the reason for their exclusion. In some degree, however, “the ideological burden of canon-formation,” as John Guillory has described it, may be inescapable, even if it is not obvious.*2 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 traditional 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 examples couple Jane Eyre with the contemporaneous Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and The Great Gatsby with Their Eyes Were Watching God.®

Paul Lauter likewise argues that “the best lens” for reading the traditional 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 studied, he believes, will provide a “more comprehensive view” of the cultural issues and circumstances of a given period.“ Toni Morrison also be-

lieves that extending the study of American literature into “a wider landscape”—one that includes racial questions as an essential component of canon-formation—will render that literature “a much more com-

plex and rewarding body of knowledge.” And, with particular attention 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.”* Rather than simply debunking the traditional canon, then, these proposals aim to nurture a critical sensibility responsive to cultural pluralism 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 selected on the basis of the identity of their authors, then certain additional

The Contemporary Canon Debate 41 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 insufficient 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 comprehensive” knowledge. Indeed, whether exposure to sheer literary variety alone—especially if confined to contemporaneous works—amounts to either greater comprehensiveness or critical understanding is debatable. 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 ideological 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 selections are often already regarded as estimable literature, that is, institutionally 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 valuable 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 account the broad historical development of social relations, institutional structures, and the material conditions of artistic production, such recommendations 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 opening 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 attention has been paid to popular culture 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 pluralistic version of literary history, he studies the influence of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—“perhaps the most famous book of the eighteenth century”—alongside Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), which was also “immensely popular” in its time, although it has only lately begun to attract serious critical attention.*” To demonstrate and help redress

the exclusion of female writers from the canon, Nina Baym likewise appeals to the criterion of popularity in the cases of Susannah Rowson and

42 The Contemporary Canon Debate E. D. E. N. Southworth, two of the most “widely read” American novelists of the nineteenth century.*® 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 customary 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 example 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 political aloofness need to be replaced by sentimentality, domesticity, popularity, 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, unrepresentative, and historically inaccurate. In contrast, he believes that

different thematic classifications like colonization/decolonization, urbanization, and what he calls “the color line” would make the canon and an understanding of American literature “inclusive and explanatory instead of narrowing and arbitrary.”5° 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 attempt simultaneously to delegitimize specific aesthetic qualities or canonical authors (e.g., modernist) and canonize others (e.g., female, minority, and/or popular) on different grounds (e.g., historical accuracy, social 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-

The Contemporary Canon Debate 43 ternative canon becomes equally subject to criticism.5! 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 qualities 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 possibility 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 excluded popular works 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 explaining 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 standards 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 canonization, equally common and no less problematic are explicitly utilitarian, 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 pollitical commitment, he believes, the testimonio fails to conform to the bourgeois, 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 I, 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 literature itself: Rigoberta Menchu uses the testimonio as a form of literature without subscribing to a humanist ideology of the literary, or ... without abandoning her identity and role as an Indian activist to become a professional writer.

44 The Contemporary Canon Debate ... The aversion or ambivalence of the testimonio toward literature suggests 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.°2

The implications for the literary canon are obvious: If active intervention

in contemporary politics were the primary grounds of literary evaluation, 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 testimonios. It is not even considered whether testimonios 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 critical analysis.) Ultimately, arguments like his construct a false dichotomy between politically effective, committed literature and that which is detached, “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 recognition, 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 pluralism 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 functions 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 addition, the presumption of self-definition is politically oblivious and mysti-

The Contemporary Canon Debate 45 fying, neglecting the variety of socioeconomic, historical, and institutional constraints on such autonomy. Attempts to revise the canon (or, at least, the syllabus) by appeal to the self-representation of social communities can 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 representation of their images, or hear the resonances of their cultural voices. The return of “the” canon, the high canon of Western masterpieces, represents 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.3

Rather than limit his argument to the idea of communal autonomy alone, Gates makes the further suggestion that the reflection of racial and gender 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 representation by giving them voice where they had none before, but it may also have inadvertent consequences as far as it leaves untouched the reproduction 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, multicultural character. Although they are made in the name of political justice, 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 instead 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 noticeably 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 pragmatic, means-over-ends rationality, and the global commodification of

46 The Contemporary Canon Debate culture—revising the canon in isolation amounts to little more than symbolic 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 neglected or marginalized works, any more than they necessarily effect significant social change. In fact, despite reactionary fears, modifications to the canon, or rather the syllabus, are usually minimal and easily assimilated within the educational establishment. For example, the controversial curriculum revisions at Stanford University in 1988, which intended to supplement the syllabus of standard classics with multicultural literature, resulted in only one of eight academic “tracks” differing markedly

from the earlier curricular requirements for courses in “Western culture.”54 Because it leaves intact the economic structures that help reproduce 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 sophisticated token amelioration.”°> 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 alternatives. Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, for instance, argue that the supposedly sweeping changes within university curricula are actually allied with the very norms and traditions they had intended to supersede—a gradual “reformism” that only “relegitimates the dominant ideology.” They believe that the liberal faculty majority at several prominent 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 subjects and willing servants of the status quo.”°© However, like the position of more moderate left-wing 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-

The Contemporary Canon Debate 47 tus quo in spite of themselves. By sacrificing the aesthetic import of literature 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 socioeconomic 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 represent, 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 applied to works of art, is more problematic than is usually admitted. The notion that a particular literary work actually “represents” a specific social 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 today, or Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1660) for women in general, 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 today 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.°” 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 postmodernity), 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

48 The Contemporary Canon Debate granted.°8 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 activism 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.”°? Regrettably, in her account the material conditions underlying 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 success of women to establish “their own” canon. One answer lies in the expansion of capitalism into wider and diverse markets, which demands an ever-increasing production of commodities, including cultural commodities. As Henry Louis Gates notes in the preface to The Norton Anthology 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 college 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 system (capitalism). But the terms of “representation” that have circumscribed the canon debate seem to imply that sheer force of numbers—in sales, literary prizes, or entries in anthologies and course syllabi—is tantamount 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

The Contemporary Canon Debate 49 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 maintain class privilege, they remain just as hierarchical and elitist as the singular 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 difference 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 recognized; 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 fostering of difference becomes simply nonsensical. For economic inequality is patterned not as a plurality of horizontal diversities, but according to a vertical scale of more and less. ... Respect for those on lower echelons is patronizing; 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.©

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 capitalism 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.” These arguments should be extended to the literary canon debate because 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

50 The Contemporary Canon Debate are, quite rightly, considered to be historically marginalized, then it logically 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. MoreOver, aS examined in Part 2, the division of labor that facilitates artistic

production and reproduction within any social group must be understood 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 problematic, 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 culture and its study, both the effects of opening the canon and the automatically 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 threatening, “it stimulates change.”® According to Jonathan Culler, the humanities ought to teach diversity because “a particular virtue of literature, of history, of anthropology is instruction in otherness: vivid, compelling evidence of differences in cultures, mores, assumptions, values.” To him,

the emphasis on plurality is “a major but difficult duty.” 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.” 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 than of a ‘piety’ just as intense” as that of the conservative humanism it would replace. 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 diversity 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

The Contemporary Canon Debate 51 trends, including the ubiquity of financial markets, mass communications and a host of other economic, institutional, and technological developments, 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 pluralism 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.© 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 unhistorical 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 current 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, [since 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 social 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 proponents to test limitations while exposing the contradictions and incapacities of competing groups.©

However, such a sharp distinction between a singular canon and a multiplicity 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 although 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

52 The Contemporary Canon Debate “directing our actions” and enables us “to satisfy our interests.” In other words, its primary function is to serve contemporary needs, particularly those of pragmatism and individualism. Altieri explicitly acknowledges the influence of Richard Rorty, whose

philosophical anti-foundationalism maintains that all truth-claims, including aesthetic judgments, are thoroughly contingent and freely open to a variety of applications. Rorty’s ideal of “ironic liberalism” puts faith in the ethical and educative potential of literature. Thus, he and his fellow “ironists” would use literary critics as “moral advisors” who are able to admire books which are prima facie antithetical [to each other] by performing 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.®

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 liberalism perceives the aim of a just and free society as letting its citizens be as privatistic [sic], “irrationalist,” and aestheticist [i.e., subjectivist] as they please so long as they do it on their own time—causing no harm to others and using no resources needed by those less advantaged. There are practical measures to be taken to accomplish this practical goal.”

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 “irrational” 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 individual and subjective taste. In 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”

The Contemporary Canon Debate 53 own.”! 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 “competing choices,” as if they were formed by the “invisible hand” of liberal economic theory.”3 It is therefore unsurprising that Altieri explicitly invokes 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.””4 Like Bloom’s, Altieri’s rhetoric of “us” and “we” primarily signifies individual authors and their bourgeois critics, without any recognition 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 reproduction. In short, it is thoroughly idealistic. Without regard to those deprived of the means of authorial “struggle,” the glorification of competition 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, Gerald 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.”75 Because his concern is the practice and politics of teaching literature, however, 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

54 The Contemporary Canon Debate 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. history and entail the equal treatment of canonical and non-canonical texts in the classroom. To Jay, teaching the conflicts and “institutionalizing the crises of representation” would serve as “a very useful device for addressing the public good”; it would encourage the discussion of “what the purposes of education in a democracy should be.”” (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 backgrounds 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.””? What is the ultimate goal of this pedagogical utilitarianism? Nothing more than “a comparative curriculum of connecting the differences, one in which the competing visions and rival representations can enter into dialogue with one another.”8° Doing nothing to challenge contemporary socioeconomic relations fundamentally, such pragmatism yields to political complacency. Whether or not the Western literary canon has ever been quite so “insulated” from challenges, Graff’s and Jay’s pedagogical program takes for granted and reinforces the liberal postulate of competitive group interests and the practical utility of literature. By systematically confusing the canon with the syllabus (“without a syllabus there is no canon”®?), their approach also repeats the narrow academic conceit that the university 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 embrace any and all contributions to the discourse of social conflict not only threatens to collapse under the strain of its own weight but also presumes itself to be aloof from any complicity with the status quo. Even with the best of intentions, there remains an inescapable ideological 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-

The Contemporary Canon Debate 55 dle, 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 neutrality of this proposal is actually false. It derives explicitly from the traditions of liberalism and utilitarianism, whose oppositional claims are a far cry from radical challenges to current social relations and the economic 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 antiquity, 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 aesthetic 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 liberalism, 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 modern cultural expressions of the commodification of “difference” and the actual standardization 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 educational institutions at large or canonical works individually, then, contemporary critical discourse—including the debate over the canon—should also be historicized so as to disclose its own 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 surprise that so many critics—whether ostensibly liberal or conservative— have yielded to the dominant ideology. But laying blame on literary critics

56 The Contemporary Canon Debate 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 university administrators, whose “marketplace ideology casts students into the role of ‘consumers’ of the ‘products’ offered in the grand store of the collegiate curriculum,”® they fall short of being truly critical—of radically challenging the status quo—as long as the extent of their critique is limited 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 rightwing critics about opening or preserving the Western canon have obscured 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 conservative humanism to which it is opposed. Equally, the implicit assumptions of the latter tend to betray a likeness to many of the common assumptions of the former. To summarize, at least five related points of intersection 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 embodying certain timeless and universal values that merit the deepest respect 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 heterogeneity 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 well as of critics, and the commodification 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-

The Contemporary Canon Debate 57 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 “prejudices” of modernism, for example, are believed to have favored a narrow and exclusive canon, then they must be overcome by the initiative of critics and teachers. Yet both arguments fall prey to idealism insofar as material circumstances, modern 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 interest 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 because 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 selfevidently 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 utility 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 increasingly 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 institutions 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-

58 The Contemporary Canon Debate nificance of canonical art in capitalist societies are neglected and the political 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 reference 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 protracted 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 objects, such that they end up serving the most trivial purposes. By contrast, 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.

Cultural Reproduction “But Shakespeare 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.” —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), vol. II, ch. iti

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, Don Juan (1821), 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 assumption that canons are created and preserved primarily by the authority 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 academics; but that need not confine an examination of the debate to a critique 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 assort59

60 Cultural Reproduction ment of factors and range of institutions necessary to its formation must be acknowledged. The question as to which factors in particular predominate 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 familiarization 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 reproduced 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 endorse a select body of works as canonical. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction posits that an educational “monopoly” of literary consecration 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-acknowledged in the contemporary debate, the authority of educational institutions certainly has not. In fact, that authority is precisely what has attracted 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 systematically developed. His alternative theory of the social significance of literary 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 continual social confirmation over time is necessary for any work to be canonized. 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 aesthetic idealism of the current debate, literary sociology fails to give adequate 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 consumption of literature, the social history of literacy, the political aspects of reading and writing, and the ideological role of schools and universities, literary sociology has done much to explain the determination of literary 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 nuances and broad institutional structures that make up what he calls, generally, 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 already situated within the general economy of social relations. The theoretical 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 shows 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 which produces 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 consecration 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 status quo.! In Bourdieu’s model, the field of cultural production is composed of the objective relations among a wide network of social agents and institutional components, each of which plays a role in the symbolic consecration 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 exhibition 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 appointments in relevant agencies and word of mouth among the literati. Of course, even forms of repudiation, such as negative reviews and censorship, also play a role in the success or failure of works of art and literature. 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 valorize or stigmatize certain writers and works. In short, a whole “market of symbolic goods” operates to canonize.? Taking into account so many variables alone should deflate the academic conceit that the canon is primarily 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 past . . . through categories derived from an art of the past that has become natural.” It is a process of “conscious or unconscious inculcation” that leads people generally to accept the established hierarchy of authors as “self-evident,” both before and after periods of intensive canoni-

cal revision.* 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

Cultural Reproduction 63 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 imagery and symbolic codes, and popular myths and traditional allegories, not only within individual cultures but also between different ones. For example, Shakespeare remains the most frequently quoted single 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 images 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.”> (Lest this account of cultural 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 accompaniment, 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, thousands 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.” 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 confirmation. According to André Lefevere, “the ‘intrinsic’ value of a work of literature 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.”” 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 single 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 variably influential institutions. The variety of ways in which certain authors are acclaimed and their works become familiar—both contemporaneously and over subsequent

64 Cultural Reproduction generations—is illustrated by the numerous studies of authorial reputa-

tion that have lately become fashionable.’ With little regard to other forms of reproduction and cultural transmission, conventional literary histories have often been written as narratives of canonical authors influencing their artistic peers and successors (“the old thin line of national heroes”), as if they worked in a social vacuum; but the sociology of reputation 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 depending on who is making them (whether socialists, liberals, or neo-conservatives), which suggests that the potential for canonization may also rely in part on an author’s or work’s flexibility to ideological appropriation. 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.? 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 reappraisal. 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 reviews, 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.”!° 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 accommodated in the university curriculum, where he remains to this day. In addition to academic attention and critical acclaim, therefore, intergenre and intermedia rewritings play a significant role in the familiarity with and esteem for canonized artists and works. As reviewed in Chapter 1, historical examples of canonical reproduction abound from antiquity 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. Likewise, the countless quotations, citations, interpretations, and adaptations

Cultural Reproduction 65 of Shakespeare’s works demonstrate not only his centrality to English and European literature since the eighteenth century but also his international dominance in theater, poetry, and professional criticism today. His plays are continually adapted for film, translated into dozens of languages, and published in hundreds of editions, prompting one critic to pronounce “Shakesperotics” an industry unto itself.1! Another illustrative 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 another, 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 England, 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 Milton’s poem had the status of a classic.!

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. Generations 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 explicit adaptations—has only strengthened its reputation as a literary classic. Indeed, one scholar describes Faust, along with Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe, as one of the dominant myths of modern society.!4 Today, the making and remaking of the novels of Scott, Austen, Dickens, and the Brontés 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 published literature. The collected works of canonical authors in elegant editions 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 together.”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 becomes familiar—in whatever form—are many and diffuse. Moreover, the consecration of a work in one medium will often excite or rekindle interest 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 proliferation or the extent of cultural dispersion alone. Contrary to those who be-

66 Cultural Reproduction lieve that “it is in mass and not high or official culture that the value of literary canon formation is preserved,”!6 the process of canonization depends no less on the relative authority of those groups with institutional influence on the evaluation and reproduction of selected works of literature. Populist optimism can be faulted for ignoring the hierarchical structure 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 established codes—including technical vocabulary and symbolic capital— necessary to participate in the appreciation (in both senses) of any work. Indeed, the struggle to establish a “monopoly of literary legitimacy” is itself 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.”!” Cultural familiarity may not be transparently universal—in the sense of being equally recognized across the spectrum of class, gender, and racial differences—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 institutional 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, dissemination, 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 disenfranchised groups—is therefore misleading to the extent that it underestimates the control of institutions upon which canonization depends. Canonicity requires an historical quality that is not so quickly obtained. 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 writers, for example, betray a misunderstanding of the historical depth con-

Cultural Reproduction 67 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.!§ The same could be said of the modern cliché “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 cultural 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 cumulativity.” In addition, “any interrogation [of the values of the field] arises from a tradition, from a practical or theoretical mastery of the heritage 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—including 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 conservation and celebration—historians of art and literature, exegetes, analysts, critics—is part of the conditions of entry into the field of production.”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. Therefore, successful challenges to the literary canon—whether to the authority 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 canonical change, in this model the very logic of the field keeps the canon relatively 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 outside 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 challenges require symbolic capital to succeed, to achieve some measure of legitimacy beyond a small circle of initiates. Liberal-pluralists who advocate separate but equal canons obviate the theory of the field of cultural production only if “their own” institutions of cultural production were to

68 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 increasingly 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 determine these variables and therefore do most to canonize individual works at any given time. Unlike others, Bourdieu is ambivalent about how fundamental formal education remains today. His own diagnosis of the increasing “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.2! 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 artistic 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 actually coincide. In fact, Bourdieu ultimately does attribute the highest power of consecration to educational institutions, writing that “it is impossible to understand the peculiar characteristics of restricted culture without appreciating its profound dependence on the educational system, the indispensable means of its reproduction and growth,” and that “the educational system plays a decisive role in the generalized imposition of the legitimate mode of consumption.”23 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.”4

However, in Bourdieu’s own account, the educational monopoly on consecration and canonization historically ended in the nineteenth century. In France, for example, the “monopoly holder of the legitimate definition of art and the artist” had been the Académie Francaise; but its power was broken, Bourdieu suggests, with the “institutionalization of

Cultural Reproduction 69 anomie which resulted from a field of institutions placed in a situation of

competition for artistic legitimacy.” The dispersal of consecrating authority allowed those informal institutions invested with enough symbolic capital, such as the more influential salons of the bourgeoisie, to begin 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 “habitués” before attracting public

and critical acclaim and eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature 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. 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.?” 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 academies 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.

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.”29 Indeed, so incohesive and vulnerable to competition is the literary field in particular that even characterizing 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 consensual 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

70 Cultural Reproduction 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 assertive. 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 disparate evaluations. If some concession is made for their collective influence and cultural impact, especially as they are falling under increasingly 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 explain 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 multinational conglomerates and cartels. Instead of seeing the academic monopoly 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 begun to fill the void. If that is the case,

then the consequences of leaving canonization in the hands of institutions 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 acquiring symbolic value, can also become devalued, “fossilized,” and eventually supplanted by the work of younger artists:

Cultural Reproduction 71 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.?!

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 primarily the result of the routinization of production associated with the impact 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.”22 In other words, the very process of familiarization that contributes to the canonization of particular works of art and literature also leads to their neutralization, or “banalization.” When they become so familiar that they are reduced to simple clichés, memorized in disconnected segments in school, fetishized in lists of “greatest books,” or regarded merely as sources of pleasure and entertainment, literary classics risk losing whatever makes them distinctive and distinguished, including their aesthetic force or potential for critical knowledge. As far as it dehistoricizes selected texts by elevating them into a pantheon of canonical authors, traditional humanistic and formalistic 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” cultural 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 production that have become dated, Bourdieu writes, “when they lock themselves 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

72 Cultural Reproduction imitations of a literary classic can also dim its aesthetic power or distinctiveness. The stories of Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, now seem almost irretrievably old-fashioned and even tame in light of subsequent horror fiction, just as the film adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, and George Eliot have rendered them almost indistinguishable from soap opera kitsch. In effect, the emulation, proliferation, and increasing commodification into different media that historical canonization requires can also be its undoing. As far as it cripples artistic innovation, stifles original interpretation, or suppresses critical understanding—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 consider 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 therefore 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 constitutes not just literature of exceptional quality but literature and literacy per se, which in turn works to reproduce class distinctions.*> 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—derived 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 ‘representative’ 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

Cultural Reproduction 73 specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption. The “means” in question are provided by the school, which regulates and thus distributes cultural capital unequally ...by regulating access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.*

What distinguishes the current crisis of canonical legitimacy from others, Guillory believes, is an unprecedented transformation of specific so-

cial relations, namely, the emergence of a technically trained professional-managerial class for whom “literature” designates the cultural capital of “the old bourgeoisie.” Literature is a form of capital that is “increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system” because it is marginal to the interests of the new class itself.>” Far from indicating a “personal failure” on the part of individual teachers or the “degenerate influence” of relativistic literary theories in the universities, 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 assessment 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 response to social conditions.”%8 The literary canon, however, does more than simply represent, or fail to

represent, the interests of dominant or aspiring classes. In Guillory’s account, it actually helps to maintain and reproduce class differences by direct and indirect means. “{I]n its concrete form as a syllabus or a curriculum [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.”3? Fluency in

such knowledge is dependent on acquired familiarity with or evident mastery of the curriculum, and the institutional recognition thereof benefits 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 educational 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)... 4°

74 Cultural Reproduction As a sociological process, canon formation is “the institutional intervention by which the literary curriculum becomes the pedagogic vehicle for producing the distinction between credentialized and uncredentialized speech.”4! 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 unambiguous cultural identity, or a even buttress to nationalist ideologies. More discreetly, it functions as a regulator of access to literacy, the means of literary production and consumption 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 cultured from the philistine, those with cultural capital from those without. Guillory goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the historical definition 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 century. The New Critics’ revision of the canon redefined the cultural capital produced by literary study in the university to conform to their own values of aesthetic modernism. And the “canon of theory” that developed in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century for postgraduate education 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 but. . . 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 contexts.”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 official 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

Cultural Reproduction 75 sanctioned as such.* And although he otherwise adopts Bourdieu’s sociological 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 discussed 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.”46 Like Bourdieu

before him, in all cases it seems to Guillory that the formal literacy acquired in educational institutions necessarily precedes cultural production 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.”4” 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 particularly techniques of writing,*® 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 curriculum only one of its manifestations. Without offering an account of canonization that is more than just a function of formal education—that includes the processes of cultural, symbolic, and material reproduction at large—Guillory himself ultimately confuses the canon with the syllabus, in spite of his own claims to the contrary.’ Apart from these shortcomings, and unlike the case for social representation 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 exemplary works should “represent” which specific social constituencies.

76 Cultural Reproduction 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 literary 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 production per se, 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, Guillory 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.”5° Of course, an account of canon formation that confines 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 individual works—even though the latter is less tangible than the social uses to which canonical works are put—is to resort to dubious epistemological 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 conscious—that is, “learned”—intentions of authors. None of these factors, however, need be considered the only or even the most significant aspect 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 criticism: “[W]hen aesthetic artifacts are certified as ‘works of art’, they become the bearers of cultural capital, and as such are unequally distributed.” However, Guillory insists, “the aesthetic is not simply identical to the form of cultural capital embodied by works of art.”5! Herein lies the crux of Guillory’s argument. The problem of the literary canon is not really about which particular works it comprises, nor about their specific content, but about how the aesthetic as such is perceived and defined. Because

Cultural Reproduction 77 “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,” Guillory 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 internalized as the aesthetic disposition. It is easy enough to recognize here the largest effect of the discourse of canonicity: the illusion that aesthetic experience is really restricted to the experience of High Cultural works.°2

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 distinguished from specifically economic conceptions of value. The conflation of these two historically distinct notions of value today has led to the tendency 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 and historically contingent.53 In contrast, Guillory argues that “the ubiquity of aesthetic experience” 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 determined by objective social relations such as class, is “pervaded by innumerable and various aesthetic expressions, from the clothing he wears to the situation comedies which entertain him in the evenings.”4

So capacious an idea of aesthetics, however, is problematic when placed in the context of the canon debate. One consequence of discounting 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 concerned. Certainly, anything from clothing and food to physical stimulation and the natural world can be said to have aesthetic qualities, but in what sense could these things be thought of as “canonical” or constituting 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 measure of aesthetic value to it, regardless of its particular content or its historical impact on subsequent cultures: “[I]f it were possible to think of the

78 Cultural Reproduction aesthetic without also thinking of value, we would in effect have discarded 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 production. In his effort to clarify the social logic of distinction, therefore, Guillory 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.>¢ This concept of the aesthetic is

ultimately vacuous. If it were true, then canonical works that have permeated 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 carry an ideological burden and the latter, supposedly, do not. The material conditions of this situation are recognized by Guillory himself to be the increasing commodification of cultural production, particularly 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 exchange. The fact that “works of art continue to be exchanged in the marketplace as commodities which are commensurable with other commodities” has become—indeed has long been—“the inescapable horizon of social life,” perhaps especially in the United States, where the canon debate has been most pronounced.°*’ 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 monopoly of canonical consecration has indeed been broken, as Bourdieu believes, 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 incapacitated.

Cultural Reproduction 79 Whither Aesthetics? By understanding how artistic reproduction, cultural familiarity, historical 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 liberal-pluralist claims to alter the canon or spontaneously create alternative ones will also be understood to be idealistic insofar as they, too, neglect those constraints. Because canonization requires cultural dissemination and artistic reproduction, 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 canonization of authors and books that would otherwise have remained neglected, they have generally treated it as no more significant than other factors, such as their establishment within academia.°® 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 canonization 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 beyond purely academic discourse, they also reveal their own limitations regarding the specific content of individual works. In particular, sociological conceptions of the aesthetic find that to distinguish qualitatively between canonical and non-canonical works, or between art and aesthetic 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 possibility that the aesthetic can also have a distinctive, non-ideological, cognitive content, and that individual canonical works can thereby also have a unique critical potential, subverting the status quo by pointing beyond

80 Cultural Reproduction it. In Part 2, I 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 assumptions 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 pragmatic justifications. It also sets the stage for a further critique of sociological accounts of canon formation that leave out the aesthetic content of works of art and literature. Without succumbing to the limitations of conservative humanism, liberal pluralism, or sociological empiricism, critical 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 |

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Critical Theory and Canonical Art That the 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 situation regarding the literary canon and exposed certain key assumptions in the rhetoric within the contemporary debate. To move beyond the idealism 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, reveals 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 reduced 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 functions or immediate political interests.

The purpose of this chapter is to construct an argument for the aesthetic 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 pragmatism, Adorno makes the case that only the historical autonomy of art—free

from social, political, and practical obligations—is truly and substantively critical of current social relations, and that any explicit political content, or direct political application, of socially “committed” art actually ends up 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 strikingly pertinent to the canon debate today. Finally, to show that critical theory does not simply defend the established 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 reference 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 theory apart from other schools of interpretation, including those that appear 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 Modern advances in the industrial reproduction of culture are seen as wielding tremendous influence on consciousness and effectively accommodating opposition to the status quo. The critique, or “refusal,” of modern capitalistic industrial society is therefore taken as a form of resistance. Critical theory locates one avenue of potential resistance 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 antagonistic 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 autonomy as historically derived from art’s partial liberation from its earlier 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 imaginative, non-conformist perspective on the world that such independence affords; 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 efforts to force individual works into various political roles, whether conservative 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

86 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 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 perspective 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 qualitatively different ways. Because the work of art criticizes reality, it represents “negative knowledge of reality.”6 As a unique form of critical insight 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.”” In particular, 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 individuality 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 distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity.”® This theme is largely in keeping with the traditional Marxist opposition between use-value and exchange-value, wherein the latter comes to predominate especially under the socioeconomic conditions of bourgeois capitalism, although it would be inaccurate simply to equate critical theory 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.? 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 status quo.” Art is social by its “opposition to society,” but it occupies this position only as autonomous art; “it criticizes society by merely existing.”10 This critique becomes an indictment of what passes for “reality,” of the status quo mentality that naturalizes given circumstances, however unjust or inhumane: “Today the socially critical aspects of artworks

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 87 have become opposition to empirical reality as such because the latter has become its own self-duplicating ideology, the quintessence of domination.”!! 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.’ The motif of utopia in critical theory is as central as it is necessarily inexplicit. 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 possibility of the possible.”15 In the face of the empirical world, the very existence of art, of that which has no immediate use-value, is almost miraculous. 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 profound 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 appearances, 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. But... 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 affirmative 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 diminish 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 aesthetic promise must be broken, provoking an awareness of its social guilt, an injunction against itself. This insight bears on the current situation because to affirm canonical works as essentially objects of reverence or celebration, whether for the culturally hegemonic or marginalized, is to disregard art’s inherent burden, the injustices of history that are masked by hollow veneration.

88 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 oppression that lies beneath the surface of every cultural artifact, even the most esteemed works of art. To Benjamin, the “cultural treasures” of civilization, the “spoils” of history, cannot be appreciated without horror because “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 another,” 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.!” The division of labor that allows the artist the means of aesthetic production but only a tiny fraction of humanity to perceive the true social and historical import of art also prevents 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 censures 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.!8 But the social stratification to which the stature of canonical works points can itself lapse into uncritical affirmation if it is emphasized at the cost of their negative, critical content. Like certain vulgar Marxists, Benjamin could be accused of sentimentalizing the “struggling, oppressed class” as the true “depository of historical knowledge.”?9 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 inequality, the promise of artworks is forgotten and the existing antagonistic world is inadvertently validated, in spite of intentions to the contrary.

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 89 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.?° 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 division. Autonomy enables a critical perspective on the social totality, but it also relies on a notion of freedom derived from bourgeois individualism. Although art’s utopian content preserves the promise of social transformation, 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 ideology 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 aesthetically 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 l’art pour l'art, or sociology’s latter-day critique of the “pure gaze.” The actuality of a purely aesthetic understanding, like that of an ideologically untainted work, is precisely what the social debt and guilt of art necessarily refutes.?! The aesthetic thus occupies an extraordinarily delicate position: “If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the machinations of the status quo; if art remains strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integra-

tion as one harmless domain among others.”22 Whether social or autonomous, 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 complicity and elitism of the canon, they sacrifice the radically critical perspective 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 production of art itself, including that of women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities. Alternatively, when the Western canon is justified on the tra-

90 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 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 particular. 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 intentions.”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 “theoretical insight,” or the “good universality that does not leave the particular 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 obligated 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.”?7 In critical aesthetic theory, literature is limited neither to its overtly social subject

matter nor to the individual interests or conscious intentions of its authors. Instead, critical theory perceives that “the entirety of society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity,” is manifest in every work, in both its formal features and the social conditions of its production.?® 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 objective totality of social and historical mediation are realized “only in and

through particular situations in their finiteness and fallibility.”3° In short, every work must be interpreted individually rather than having preconceived, abstract theoretical schema or predetermined political applications 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.5! In this context, the claim that canonical works such as Shakespeare’s tragedies are simply “universal” is false to the extent that it glosses over peculiar elements

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 91 that contradict that claim, including the social caste of characters within them or the very language in which they are written. Imposing an artificial universality on canonical works of art ends up serving only the ideological interests of the claimants. The opposite extreme, however, is no better. “Particularity in the bad sense,” which emphasizes “the antagonistic 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 specific elements of artworks are emphasized at the expense of their universal 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, inadvertently 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.53 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.”*4 In distinctive ways that vary from work to work according to specific content, true art embodies the “remembrance of accumulated horror,” the historical memory of “accumulated suffering”—not of one or another individual social group, but of humanity as a fragmented whole. 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 capacity, is the basis of utopian promise.*6 Benjamin implicitly qualifies utopian aspirations that are without this sense of debt: “Like every generation 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 settled cheaply.”°”7 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 ... [E]ach respective present generation bears the responsibility not only for the fate of future generations but also for the innocently suffered fate of past generations.%8

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 qualitatively just, as opposed to formally equal, society. Ultimately, the debt to all

92 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 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.”°° 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.”4° However, although 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 memory.”4! 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 instrumental 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 historically 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 ideological itself, as explained below.

The Dialectic of Aesthetics and Politics Because historical injustice is constitutive of true works of art, the plaintiffs 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 understood that the cognitive truth content of artworks, like the utopic figure of art, is manifest only indirectly and abstractly, an enigma that demands critical, philosophical interpretation to bring it to light.*° Critical theory attempts to preserve non-identity, or true particularity, in the face of empirical identity thinking that conforms to the practical needs of an

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 93 administered society and that simultaneously mystifies and legitimizes prevailing socioeconomic conditions. Art’s own critique of these conditions 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.”44 Indeed, this is the historical essence of aesthetic modernism and of any work that would remain critically 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.”* To appreciate the relevance of critical theory to the contemporary literary canon debate, it is imperative to understand the concept of modernity as a qualitative, not a chronological, category.*6 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 autonomous of its material and economic “base.” In Marx’s famous observation, “certain periods of the highest development of art stand in no direct connection to the general development of society, or to the material basis and skeleton structure of its organization.”4” In other words, the most modern or advanced works of art are those that transcend the routine modes and materials of production, whose aesthetic form is distinct from more common forms, either at the time of their inception or in periods thereafter. It is therefore not anachronistic to detect modern traits in pre-modern or classical art, just as modern works are likely to bear certain “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 separate 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 modern bourgeoisie out of the ancient canonical myth of Odysseus. Another example is Adorno’s assessment of Friedrich Holderlin’s poetry as prototypically modern, despite being written in the early nineteenth century.*” The interrelation of the modern and the ancient, the relevant and the outmoded, 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 Adorno’s aesthetic theory, “the art of the past can be understood only in the light of modern art.”°° Because they continue to be reproduced in different forms and rewritten into the present, canonical works are especially affected by the dialectic of history in which past

94 Critical Theory and Canonical Art and present converge. With the material transformations of artistic technique, the history of artistic forms has been irrevocably affected, as evidenced, for example, by the impact of atonal composition in Western music, 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” technology, institutions, economic systems, means of production, and forms

of rationality have not permeated the globe, colonizing in varying degrees even those cultures that had once been remote. In ways that are distinct in every case, the most resonant art necessarily 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 secularized, 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 commodified character of art, the last refuge of autonomy when culture itself has become thoroughly absorbed by a capitalism based less on a nominally “free market” than on global monopolization and the homogenizing 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 suppresses.”52 This is the basis of Adorno’s critique of committed, or explicitly political, art, a critique that hinges on the idea of art without immediate 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.”°3 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

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 95 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 presence, 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 social relations that involves much more than social identity and its representation.*4 Of course, like the inevitably partial character of aesthetic autonomy, 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 theory and practice, the ideal and the real, the universal and the particular, or the functional and the functionless. I have already shown that the aesthetic is thoroughly mediated by the totality of social relations, the division of labor, and the principle of economic 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 mediated 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.°6 Hence the appeal to formal negativity, abstractness, enigmatic meaning, dissonance, 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 naiveté” that could only give relief to the capitalists whom he opposes.°” As with crude conspiracy theories, concentrating on the failures or corruption of a few individuals tends to disguise the systematic irrationality of the whole socioeconomic order, mistaking the symptom for the disease. 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.’5®

96 Critical Theory and Canonical Art These arguments need to be extended to the arguments over the literary canon, not just because many of the works championed to challenge the orthodox canon are often (although admittedly not always) conspicuously political, but because—not unlike the rationale for socialist art in the 1920s—the blatantly political and utilitarian justifications for a multicultural 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 fundamental critique of society as a whole. Critical theory exposes the socioeconomic 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 practically 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 element 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.°?

This is why Adorno condemns literalness in art as barbaric. Of course, socially committed art, as much as direct interventions to justify it, need not have anything to do with conscious intentions to become 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.”®! By analogy, revising the literary canon for the sake of exposing 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 unwittingly self-defeating for diminishing the radical potential of the aesthetic before the established order it hoped to transcend. It is a “shortcut to praxis” that leads back to where it began.

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 97 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 Valéry, whose art criticism highlights the distinction be-

tween the apolitical content of art and its political implications. 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 l’art pour l'art, whose pretense to absolute autonomy is ideological for presupposing that art really could be “for itself.” Conversely, political works and applications 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 opposite, 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 functionless 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 antithetical demand for irresponsibility.” With this dialectic in mind, the critical theory of art should not be misunderstood 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 indignation 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.©

This is precisely why both conservative-humanist and liberal-pluralist critics end up on opposite sides of the same ideological coin. Because neither challenges the economic rationale of society or the division of labor,

98 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 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 qao—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 unaffected by it.” 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 commodities 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 disseminated is changed in many ways which are contrary to what one prides oneself on disseminating.”©” 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 canonized, the most critical aspects of their truth content—the critique of exchange, society, and the empirically existent—are traded in for the sake

of broad accessibility. When “a pantheon of best-sellers builds up,” 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.® To the extent that it has become “neutralized,” its critical capacity dulled, traditional culture has become worthless.©? The means by which artworks lose their critical content, however, is not solely via commodification, 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 conservative, facilitates the survival of many works by refusal to compromise.””° 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

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 99 artworks themselves, from the manner and materials of their construction to their explicit subject matter and implicit meanings.”! Indeed, even the apparent meaninglessness of certain works of art is historically mediated. Aesthetics is a form of knowledge distinct from the empirical sciences or mathematical logic precisely in that artistic truth “exists exclusively 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 timeless invariable, but rather, like people themselves, it has its life in a sociohistorical 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 irreversible developments that 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 environment, the idyllic innocence of nature poetry has become virtually “anachronistic”; its truth content “has vanished.”’3 Similarly, with the loosening of monogamy and other social mores, it is hardly possible today to be shocked by adultery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels.”4 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”: [D]isputing 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 guarantee the eternity of the class’s own existence.”5

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.”6 Analogously, the “dialectical truth” of Kierkegaard’s writing “could only be disclosed in the posthumous history of his work.””” 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

100 Critical Theory and Canonical Art level of modernity achieved in their own periods. ... But works can be actualized through historical development, through correspondence with later developments.””® Benjamin formulates this another way: “The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age.”79 In critical theory, the cognitive content of works is disclosed via immanent critique, the analysis of the formal qualities and historical determinations 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.’”® 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 manifested objectively in them.” Despite its age, Hdiderlin’s poetry remains vital today because of its “eminently modern” formal qualities, the realization of which allows “an incomparably broader understanding of Holderlin than was formerly possible.’”8! Modern characteristics are discernible in the content and form of the poems, whose words are “divested 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 symbolic 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 Hdlderlin’s poetry that has emerged as true insofar as modern society itself has become marked by these same characteristics.®? That Holderlin can thus be interpreted as powerfully revealing of the social 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 neglected works—of whatever social origins—could not, in principle, be or become canonical. A better criticism is one that is concerned with the instrumental grounds on which canonicity has been claimed for alternative works in the contemporary debate. As long as individual works of literature are sufficiently modern—even those whose significance is claimed to

be their social representativeness—and thereby inherently expose the

Critical Theory and Canonical Art 101 contradictions of capitalist society, they have the capacity for being true, for being truly critical and exemplary works of art. The judgment of aesthetic 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 determined 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 interpretation is the idea that the truth content of art and literature is disclosed in a configuration, or “constellation” of concepts. According to Benjamin, ideas are related to objects as constellations are to stars.3 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 tensions 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, socially 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.® 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 contradictory since its inception—combining practical and idealistic elements, aesthetic 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 configurations 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 canonization, the critical theory of art strives to realize what is worth preserving of the canon, without being nostalgic about what is not. Neither endorsing the Western canon nor banishing it as wholly ideological, neither confining it to immediate political interests nor acclaiming it as timeless and

102 Critical Theory and Canonical Art 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 humanity 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 itself 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.®”

It is in these terms that critical theory applies to the literary canon.

Subverting the Canon: Sociology, New Historicism, and Cultural Studies

Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience—that 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. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888), part III, section 1

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 formation. Unlike either conventional criticisms or justifications of the Western canon, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s aesthetic theories yield an understanding 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 current debate, critical theory in turn exposes the shortcomings of sociologies that would abandon the validity of qualitative aesthetic distinction. In particular, the sociology of art and authorial reputation, new historicism, and cultural studies all have serious implications for the literary canon. By stressing what they take to be the ideological fallacies of aesthetic distinction, they threaten to subvert the very idea of a canon. In 103

104 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 distinctions and the function of literacy, or theorizing the structure of the field in

which literature is reproduced and made familiar—the sociological approaches to the literary canon discussed in Chapter 3 have several important features in common. Among them are a method that prioritizes the social impact and reception of works of art, a suspicion of claims of artistic 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 social 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 excludes those aspects of the artwork’s truth content that now rest, under prevailing socioeconomic conditions, precisely in being indirectly 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 influential”1) rely on several unfounded assumptions. Besides uncritically accepting 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 unconscious 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 conjectural. 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 formalism 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 identity) 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 interest-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 themselves.”3 These interests are emphatically not those of one or another individual group, no matter how evident their immediate political influence. “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 irrelevant.”4 To reiterate an earlier point, the sociology of vested interests relies ona “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 social constituency is inextricably implicated.° The sociological critique of canon formation, however, does not necessarily 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 appropriated by numerous contending factions, including other artists, professional 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 statistics, school reading lists, film adaptations, and miscellaneous representations in the mass media to show by what diverse means and variety of local interests only some authors, and but few of their works, prevail over others in the institutional process of canonization.® In so doing, the sociology of authorial reputation conceives of a writer’s “impact” as “a wideranging cultural phenomenon” whose influence is “a matter of cultural effect, rather than merely literary effect.”” 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 aspects 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 itself only a moment in the totality of that relationship. To extract it and declare it the only worthy object of the sociology of art, which cannot be con-

106 Subverting the Canon tained in any pre-empting definition, would be replaced by a methodological 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 sector would endanger objective cognition.®

That is because any method by which the social impact of a work becomes the primary criterion of analysis or evaluation implies that the sociology of art must be guided by the status quo. It succumbs to the immediate 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’”—tnor, it could be added, because 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.””19

Although he recognizes that society as an abstract whole is indeed manifested in the work of art, Adorno adds that true aesthetic contemplation 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 socalled influences—with knowledge of the works themselves.”!! The aim of critical aesthetic theory is the truth content, whereby the formal properties 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 psychoanalytic theory of art likewise applies to the sociology of art: It “treats artworks as nothing but facts, yet it neglects their own objectivity, their inner consistency, their level of form, their critical impulse, their relation to nonphysical reality, and, finally, their idea of truth.”!2 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 reputation or the existence of an infinite variety of canons for any group that

Subverting the Canon 107 claims one is to forfeit the historically determined, objective content of aesthetic distinction, of works of literature as works of art, not nondescript 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 unable 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 somehow 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.”15 Without any detailed analysis of individual works in Orwell's oeuvre, however, Rodden only mystifies whatever cognitive content remains vital in them that would answer why they still “grip” us. If the sociology of repute leaves the determination of literary value simply to “the cacophony and the number of competing claims” on an author or work,!4 then it has ideological implications as well, obscuring which historical, 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 egalitarian pluralism ends up doing so by default. Thus, without any historical constraints, Orwell is said to endure “in the form of multiple new identities .. .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 naiveté that “posterity ... the ‘test of time’ is administered by us all. We [readers] decide” which authors will survive.}5 Even more explicitly, in his account of the making of Thoreau’s reputation, Gary Scharnhorst simply declares that “the process of canonization is market-driven.”16 These examples of the sociology of literary reputation 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 competitive “interest groups,” whose belief in a level playing field fosters an idealistic faith in a neutral marketplace. Yet the mystifications of the market 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

108 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 products.!” Although remarking in a brief note that, “Pierre Bourdieu renews this position in our own time,” Jameson fails to apply a dialectical critique to the kind of sociology practiced by Bourdieu and his protégés.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 interrelations 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 “repressed truth” of the “collective labour” behind every work of art, revealing the “entire set of social mechanisms” that produce the fetish of art and the ideology of the artist as creator.!9 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 according to the dictates of a “market of symbolic goods.” Recall, for example, how Bourdieu suggests “constructing a model of the process of canonization which leads to the establishment of writers . . . to observe the fluctuations in the stock of different authors.”2° 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 reproduce values.”2! 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 context considers itself superior to it and disposes over it. .. .Such endeavors

Subverting the Canon 109 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 function .. . ignores the dialectic of aesthetic quality and functional society.”

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 directly deducible from it.”25 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 “disinterestedness” leads him to dismiss all aesthetic philosophy that is not sociological 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 tradition 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 l‘art pour l'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 misperceived.25 Because art’s truth content relies simultaneously on its social dependence and its relative autonomy, a sociological account that sacrifices 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

110 Subverting the Canon 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 disinterestedness nor to purely sociological appraisals of art as a species of “cultural capital.” The sociology of the field of cultural production does not simply set all works of art, canonical or otherwise, within their immediate social milieu; 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.2” Adorno’s aesthetic theory likewise discerns the historical fetish of art to be an illusion, but it also recognizes that the ideological complicity of art need not be the limit of what it reveals: [E]ach 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 content of artworks, which is indeed their social truth, is predicated on their fetish character.?8

If aesthetic value is deemed nothing more than a fetish and determined solely by a “collective misrecognition” that conceals art’s role in the reproduction 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 ideological 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 withholds autonomy entirely from individual artworks, because granting any to the latter, Bourdieu claims, would be a deception.*° 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 present 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.”3! In this account,

Subverting the Canon 111 as reviewed in Chapter 3, to be canonical means to be aesthetically sterile, to have been made impotent by familiarity and the corrosive force of institutional accommodation. It is partly for this reason that Adorno disposes of conservative cultural criticism, writing that “only when neutralized 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 institutional process in collusion with the status quo and canonicity as the aesthetic judgment of a work’s cognitive content. This failure is made conspicuous 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 relation, to the other. As with art being simultaneously social and autonomous, political and apolitical, functional and functionless, the qualitative distinction of individual works coexists with, and in contradiction to, their potential for being 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 conservatism that it challenges. Where the latter entirely absolves what it perceives 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 failure.”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 “neutralized,” 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 content 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 literature: “It is doubtless the form, the literary form in which literary objectification takes place, which enables the most deeply buried and the most safely hidden truth to emerge.” However, in his account, only a sociologist of literature can disclose this, “for the sociologist lays bare a truth

112 Subverting the Canon 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 historical determinations of cultural production, particularly regarding the reproduction 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 itself.56 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 aspects of the social relations and objective functioning of the literary field in France in the nineteenth century.°” 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 sociological insight on Flaubert the man.”3* The content of literature is therefore 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 mediated.” Even so, contrary to the sociology of cultural production, “art's truth content transcends the knowledge of reality as what exists.”°9 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 demands 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.”4° 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.”*! 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 vision of a world beyond current social conditions; the memory of histori-

Subverting the Canon 113 cal injustice and human suffering, and the promise of redemption—are also integral components of art in a society that is mediated by capitalistic 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 characteristics. 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 appropriates 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 universality ... giving them back their necessity by tearing them out of the indeterminacy which stems from a false eternalization 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 certain material constraints on artworks and the conditions of their evaluation. By contrast, the proponents of new historicism emphasize the absolute 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 increasingly technocratic and commodified society,” the kind of history it would remember needs to be scrutinized, especially if it annuls the distinction between canonical literature and textuality in general.* Not unlike sociology, new historicism wishes to put historical considerations at the center of literary analysis, to substitute a particular conception of history and a flexible notion of context in place of the “empty formalism” of traditional aesthetics. History is taken as inextricably textual, and approaches to it—themselves textual—are necessarily mediated by other texts that aggregate continually to form and reform “History”

114 Subverting the Canon into a changing ensemble of local “histories.”44 These histories are composed 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 underlying rationale. According to Herbert Lindenberger, new historians are not inclined to justify their projects and insights with the word “objective.”45 In fact, they “eschew overarching hypothetical constructs in favor of surprising coincidences.”4¢ To this end, new historicists juxtapose a variety of texts, mingling historical documents with literary works, neither of which is granted any privileged ontological status. Aesthetic distinction 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.4” 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 Valéry, 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 precisely what does make certain works distinctive and valuable for purposes beyond either historical data or ideological functions. ‘To Adorno,

“the opposite of a genuine relation to the historical substance of artworks—their essential content—is their rash subsumption to history, their assignment to a historical moment.”*9 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, establishes their relation to knowledge. Precisely this makes them incommensurable with historicism, which, instead of following their own historical content, reduces them to their external history.

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 concentrated in the indispensable reflection on what is and what is no longer possible, on the clear insight into techniques and materials and how they

Subverting the Canon 115 fit together.”°! 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 consciousness thus imparted involves much more than the textual information 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 deprivation 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 distinction 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.5> 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 envision a future rid of injustice and inhumanity, a vision that cannot, however, 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.”5 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

116 Subverting the Canon 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 embodies—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.” 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 inseparably.”°” 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 qualitatively distinguishable from other documents and historical data. To Lindenberger, “literary texts need not be accorded any status differentiating 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.*8 So it is suggested that sermons, romances, and autobiographies; journalistic, medical, and legal texts; political tracts; and correspondence are all forms of literature no less deserving of critical attention than those traditionally regarded as such, some of which are even granted an aesthetic content comparable to works of art.5? Robert Ferguson, for example, appropriates aesthetic motifs for historical and political documents, referring to “a unified aesthetic” in the writings of the American “Founding

Founders,” who created “a consensual literature for a diverse and divided citizenry. They write [sic] to reconcile.” The suspension of aesthetic evaluation in new historicism, its reluctance to acknowledge what distinguishes artworks from other texts, is due to the denial of aesthetic autonomy. Jonathan Arac advocates “abandoning ‘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.”©! More ambivalently, Greenblatt simultaneously refuses the autonomy of individual works (e.g., “there can be no autonomous artifacts”), even though he implicitly 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.® In spite of consistently commending the

Subverting the Canon 117 quality of Shakespeare’s art, Greenblatt’s emphasis on “the social dimension of an aesthetic strategy and the aesthetic dimension of a social strategy” in Renaissance England actually situates Shakespeare’s works completely 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.® This is partly owing to Greenblatt’s narrow conception of aesthetic formalism, which he characterizes as solely concerned with “artistic completeness,” “untranslatable

essences,” and even aesthetic objects “uncontaminated by interpretation,” as if concentration on the formal aspects of a work were necessarily

so limited.

Apart from arguments already made—that the idea of autonomy need not resort to a reified concept of absolute purity, which would only reenact the obsolete and mystifying notion of l’art pour l'art—the new historicism 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 disregarded at the expense of truly historical reflection. That Western art has gradually been freed from the explicit religious and political iconography to which it had been bound, that it came to be liberated from a slavish imitation of nature, culminating in the abstract, non-representational forms of aesthetic modernism, are but two revolutionary episodes in the history of autonomization.© 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.”6 As Adorno puts it, “the artwork’s autonomy is, indeed, not a priori but the sedimentation of a historical process that constitutes its concept.”®” 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 addition although autonomy is certainly subject to changing social, material, and institutional conditions (it is always a relative autonomy), these dependencies 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 duplicate 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 aesthetic artifacts from other documents, literature from other texts, or truly

canonical works from those that have only been institutionalized as such.

118 Subverting the Canon If the content of literature as a distinctive form of art is thus discounted, then it is unsurprising that nothing is left to differentiate it from other objects. The new historicist can then conclude that canon formation, 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 compete 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.®&

Like liberal pluralism and the sociology of repute, new historicism takes aesthetic value to be determined by contending and immediate social interests. Not only are canonical works trivialized as filler for textbooks— commodities as expendable as any other—but canonicity is anachronistically reduced to being the product of modern 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 repertoire 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.”© 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 historicism imposes on the canon what is perhaps most inimical to aesthetic autonomy: the principle by which all difference, individuality, and particularity 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 society, willfully subjecting to exchange and commodification the artifacts that would best embody a critique of them.

Subverting the Canon 119 The Extorted Reconciliation of Cultural Studies If new historicism’s failure to perceive the historical development of aesthetic autonomy leads to the collapse of canonical distinction—sacrificing 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 often, with popular works past and present as all worthy of the same critical 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 arising 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.””° 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 ‘élite’ begins to fall away.”7! 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 excludes 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 “cultural 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.”4

Blurring the boundary between literature and other products of culture 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,

120 Subverting the Canon “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 between 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 valuejudgements 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 essential 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 determinate negation of the empirically existent, is simply discounted 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 intellectual procedures and operations.””” The relegation of aesthetics to the spheres of subjective value and opinion—and, therefore, the absolute relativity of all appraisals of cultural artifacts—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, literary or not.”8

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.” Such an all-embracing application of aesthetic value or content is perhaps 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.”®9 Whatever it means for individual

Subverting the Canon 121 subjects to “realize” themselves aesthetically, at this remove cultural studies betrays its own immanent tendency to lapse into a culturally specific form of individualism—the political analogue of its relativism—and an exaggerated subjectivity akin to the bad particularity of liberal pluralism, 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.”! Moreover, to grant aesthetic value indiscriminately to any individual or thing, no matter how distorted by commodification and unjust social relations, is also ideological for legitimizing the status quo: In a phase when the subject is capitulating before the alienated predominance of things, his readiness to discover value or beauty everywhere shows the resignation both of his critical faculties and of the interpreting imagination inseparable from them. Those who find everything beautiful are now in danger of finding nothing beautiful.®2

If everything under the sun is to be liberally granted “aesthetic” value, then in effect nothing is. Without qualitative distinctions between the critical 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, particularly when “it becomes impossible to believe in ‘primal aesthetic value’ somehow adhering strongly” to some of these works and not to others. 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,” tending towards “an often politically conservative cultural elitism.” Cultural studies, by contrast, “insists that there are more interesting ways to ap-

122 Subverting the Canon proach canonical ‘literary’ texts than through acts of quasi-religious worship.”84 Once again, the canon is taken as necessarily unhistorical and reactionary, as little more than a fetish, and the strict dichotomy between

neutralized, accommodated culture and marginalized, politically progressive 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 endorsed 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 sublime self-expansiveness, its levelling passion to exchange with another of its kind, it offers paradoxically to bring low the very finely nuanced superstructure—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.®

Indeed, “a transgression of the frontiers between high and low, esoteric and demotic, lies in the very nature of capitalism itself.”8¢ Cultural studies 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

Subverting the Canon 123 quo. To Adorno and Horkheimer, “that art may best serve human emancipation which detaches itself from the controlled and levelling interrelations of a consumption, the democratic nature of which now only serves as ideology.”®” Without sufficiently critical discrimination—which includes recognizing the historical and critical legitimacy of canonical distinction 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]ja protest against integration which always violently opposes that which is qualitatively different,” an objection “directed against the idea of levelling unification itself.”°8

Both products manufactured by the industries of culture and works historically considered canonical may well 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 proviso 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 cannot.” 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 alternatives, 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 bourgeois ideas of freedom. Just as the claims of socialist art (and Lukacs’s defense 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 society’s,’’?! 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 legitimized, 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 principles of instrumentality, economism, and exchange—is left thoroughly in-

124 Subverting the Canon tact, if not reinforced: “[S]ocial injustice continues after it has been officially declared to have been eliminated.”%

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.”%3 In the name of equality, these demands would abandon that which perhaps best stands as a measure of how far from true reconciliation 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 without 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 pragmatic, means-over-ends rationality, the “rational irrationality” of art remains valid, if only to contradict it.%4 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 society—though not society’s own untruth—more unobstructedly than do those who still remember what an artwork once was. They push for the deaestheticization [Entkunstung] of art... . The humiliating difference between art and the life people lead, and in which they do not want to be bothered because 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.”

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.

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 provoked 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 aesthetic 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 objections to critical theory have been made that have yet to be addressed, and several remaining ambiguities have so far not been explored. The purpose 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

126 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.! 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 individual 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 challenge 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 theory 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 industry. Adorno’s aesthetic theory makes room for the truth content of works that have been adapted or reproduced in other media. At the same time, however, he is hostile to cultural and artistic reproduction that he believes to be functions of the culture industry. Given that artistic reproduction 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 traditional 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 illustrates how Adorno reads classic German literature “against the 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 Tauris 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 disclosing its immanent truth content.

Although Hohendahl sympathetically appraises Adorno’s critical readings of the German canon, he also believes they are marred by certain 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.

Nor is he alone in his parochialism: “the literary horizon of Adorno is largely identical to that of Benjamin.”>

Apart from its overstatement or simple inaccuracy, Hohendahl’s criticism 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 reduces 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 today 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,

128 Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation the critical theory of art in modernity would still apply. Moreover, the “neglect” of proletarian” literature is not a case of simple methodological oversight or bias but rather a function of the critique of committed art and skepticism regarding the orthodox Marxist faith in the proletariat.’ Ultimately, the critique of their specific choice of literary subjects is a critique of Adorno and Benjamin as subjective individuals, foregrounding their personal idiosyncrasies rather than engaging objectively with critical theory as such. When the actual content of Adorno’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.”® Adorno believed 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 excessive mimetic zeal of the person who is excluded.” 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 recognize Heine’s modernity, his value as a modern writer; only “grudgingly” does he admit him into the canon.!° 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 founded in part on the false essentialism of an “authentic” Jewish character: Anti-semitism, Adorno rightly argues, has little to do with Jews; its mechanisms 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 presupposes 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-

Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 129 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.!2 It is not Adorno but Hohendahl who clings to rigid categories, taking Heine unproblematically to be a “German-Jewish liberal” or “Jewish-German writer,”!3 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 fulfilled literally, however, the homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words.”15 The truth content of Heine’s poetry lies in his experience becoming subsumed, via his art, under a more universal concept of alienation. Although Hohendahl is rightly skeptical of the notion of an authentic 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 inconsistency or methodological failure on the part of the individual critic than to the dominant ideology of liberalism he adopts, whose contemporary emphasis on authorial identity has already been shown to be highly problematic, 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 attributes 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 heteronomous character. Michel Foucault, for instance, questions the concepts of both “author” and “work” as unified or closed entities and like-

wise finds them to be functions of discourse and open-ended.!6 By contrast, according to Hohendahl, “Adorno clearly gives priority to the

130 Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 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.” 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; critical 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 remarks that “the thesis of the monadological character of artworks is as

true as it is problematic.” Even though aesthetics “irrevocably ... presupposes immersion in the particular work,” the notion of a determinate or fully coherent work is as thoroughly mediated by abstract conceptualization as the idea of art is by history and society, because any such concepts 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 compatible 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 modern society is closed and monolithic, many critics have countered that critical theory overestimates the cohesion of advanced capitalism and exaggerates its powers of social control.?° In historical terms, its characterization of society is thought at best to be more applicable to the period of monopoly 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.2! 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 nonWestern 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

Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 131 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 oligopolies 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 already suggested in Chapter 2, the imperative of cultural diversity in the current canon debate is itself in large part owing 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 consciousness, society, and the economy—from the ideology of the “free market” to the predominance of instrumental rationality, from the content of the mass media down to the psychology of individuals.?2 The popular conviction that there is no longer any real alternative to capitalism bears witness to totalizing thought and says even more about its effects 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 content. 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.

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

132 Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 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 different or non-capitalist society is excluded in favor of accurately representing social diversity, then the concept of “difference” on which the critique of totality relies is not radically critical, but merely empirical. Like the liberal-pluralistic arguments for opening the canon, without addressing 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 cultural diversity of artistic production. In other words, the concept of totality 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 socioeconomic “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 distinguishing 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 tendency 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 systems and, by extension, of a static or closed literary canon. Yet, paradoxically, 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 traditions 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 commodification of culture. Nonetheless, given critical theory’s own emphasis 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

Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 133 wholly to the dominant ones and that are therefore potentially more autonomous than those that do. In Chapter 4, I explained that the critical theory of art does not automatically 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 distinctions that can be made among popular forms of art, which are notoriously lacking in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, have not yet been examined. In the following section I show how this absence, along with Adorno’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 content of popular works of art and literature. Because the production and reproduction of these works is standardized for the purpose of wide dissemination, they are taken to be products of the culture industry, which, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account, has inherently pernicious effects

on both individual consciousness and the quality of the works themselves 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 accused of insufficiently addressing the issue of the qualitative aesthetic distinctions that can be made even within the culture industry. Many critics have taken up this point, two of whom will be examined more closely. In David Held’s survey of critical theory, Adorno’s view of popular music barely considers the technical innovations that had begun to develop in the realm of recorded music by the 1960s. Held points to the music of The Beatles as an example of formal innovation within a popular mode.?” 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, sometimes in ways that are more effective than those available to autonomous works. ... Adorno’s aesthetics [is] inadequate with respect to popular art.

134 Boundanies of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 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 autonomous art than critical theory itself does.3° As argued toward the end of Chapter 5, the commodification 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 particular work, he actually suggests that the quality of popular art is to be determined according to its popularity: “[E]ven when popular art measures up 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 unpopular has less merit as a product of popular art.”3! 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-manipulable, 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 consciousness of the audience. ... The consumers are made to remain what they are: consumers.”2 Instead of referring to the dubious “popularity” of popular art to determine its merit, whether of film or of rock and roll music, a critical theory of art would subject each particular work to immanent 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

Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 135 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 commentators have argued, Adorno’s own late essay on film seems to grant some critical potential to motion pictures, at least provisionally.*3 But even here there is no sustained critique of any one film that would disclose its specific 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 mentioned, the fact that The Beatles’ music has influenced and been subsequently 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 contenf—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 pictures, 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 demonstrates with reference to The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Diva, and The Shining.34 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 canonicity as a concept. His specific use of the term usually has negative conno-

136 Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation tations, as when he writes of a “canon of prohibitions” [Kanon der Verbote] 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 artworks.%6 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.>” To extend that criticism, his theory pays insufficient attention 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 consequences), Adorno essentially condemns it. In his mind, to be institutionalized is to be accommodated, commodified, and ultimately neutralized, nothing more. As much as institutionalization is a central 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 discourse—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 obscuring the aesthetic content of literature by overemphasizing the institutional 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 Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses, and—as we have seen—lIphigenie 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 distinctions that can be made between different forms or incidents of adaptation. To imitate is not identical to being imitative.

Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 137 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 culture industry. On the other, he maintains that the truth content of certain works is sometimes 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.* 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 innocent of its effects, since nascent tendencies of the culture industry are detectable in the contemporaneous works of Alexandre Dumas, Eugéne 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.”4! Indeed, Don Quixote de la Mancha already implies that literary production was be-

coming standardized as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Cervantes’s parody of the stultifying formulas of the chivalric romance is one aspect of Don Quixote’s continuing truth content, precisely for embodying a critique of the proto-culture industry.*”? Critical theory, however, cannot simply resolve this contradiction, not because its concept 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-via-reproduction and truth content-versus-reproduction is an inherent source of tension. Canons of art and literature essentially involve both qualitative judgment of the critical-aesthetic content of individual works and some manner of reproduction and cultural familiarity, each of which may function at the expense of the other. If the critical theory of art is limited for concentrating in any given instance on only one of these aspects, then 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 aesthetic ideals, as pedagogical tools for education in the humanities and as ideological devices in the service of nationalism, as apolitical and time-

138 Boundaries of a Critical Theory of Canon Formation 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 theory. That works of art have critical, cognitive value and are also in some sense an “absolute commodity” is recognized in Adorno’s aesthetic theory as one of the essential paradoxes of art in modernity.43 When artworks 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.”44 Nonetheless, insofar as he emphasizes the negative aspects of canonization, 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 critical 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 reproduction over time. Conversely, it would also have to judge at what point, and in what configurations, the truth content of canonical adaptations, even in popular forms, may outweigh their commodification and distortion by the culture industry. In any case, until an emancipated society 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 culture 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 law, which the people know by heart. 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 disingenuous to draw any transparent conclusions that would deny the true complexity 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 ideological 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 nationalism, invented traditions, and exclusive cultural identity, but they have also endured beyond specific historical contexts, affected cultures beyond that of their own origin, and transcended the immediate political interests in whose name they have been used. As much as canonical distinction relies necessarily on the division of labor and the reproduction of social relations, the notion of a canon of exemplary works is also an aesthetic 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 aes139

140 Conclusion thetic quality can also be the judgment of a work’s radically critical potential, one which is as subversive of the status quo as it is of its own institutional 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 artificial 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 heteronomous, politically populist or elitist, representative of society or removed 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 pragmatic 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 historical prejudice that can be overcome with a substitution of texts in the classroom. In neither case are objective historical and material determinations 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 analysis 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 production 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 141 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 consecration 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 reactions 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 consciousness and critical thought. Of course, recognizing this does not imply endorsing the simple marketplace 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 exchange. 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 societies. Insofar as canon formation is dictated by the logic of the culture industry 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-

142 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 promoting 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 reflection of society as it is or as it is believed to have been. Yet reducing the social 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 abstract, 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 limits 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 prescriptive 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 remembrance of the past, and an abstract glimpse of a world free from domination: When classless society promises the end of art, because it overcomes the tension 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.!

Such promise may be incomprehensible to those 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.

BLANK PAGE

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 ‘multiculturalism,’ ethnicity and American cultural identity rather than any more universal issues. .. . It is difficult to see how this debate could be of deep interest to anyone 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 reforms 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 music, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (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 One 1. One notable exception is Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (1991), especially pp. 9-88. I am indebted to his work for the first part of this chapter. 2. John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The 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 reconstruction of the details of Polykleitos’s rules for sculpture, deduced from the evidence 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 theory 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 litteratura had signified grammar in general and all manner 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 PostStructuralism (1984), pp. 29-43. 21. On the dependence of the modern sense of professional “author” on copyright 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 nationalistic, literary program.” Dejean, p. 36. 24. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 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 Theory: 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 edition, 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 Other 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 unjust 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 neglected. 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 publishers 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), pp. 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 academic 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. 491ff. 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 Berman, ed., Debating P.C.: The 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 Hein, “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 ‘difference’ 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), London 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 written by women and minorities is perhaps indicative of the liberal inability to sustain 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: The 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-

152 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. Ibid., 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 Rules 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. André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting 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 Bérubé, 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 Thoreau: A Case Study in Canonization (1993); John Xiros Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of

Four Quartets (1995), especially chapter 4; and Joan Acocella, “Cather 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., The 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 “worldwide 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, according 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 regards 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 contributes 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 inverted 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 admittedly 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. “[U]topia 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. 13. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 132. 14. Ibid., p. 18. 15. Ibid., p. 311.

16. Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), p. 140. “There is no art that is entirely devoid 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

156 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 Iluminations (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. 27. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), pp. 223-229 (quotation from p. 223). 28. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), pp. 38-39. 29. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 200.

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 humanness [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 I]]uminations (1969), p. 257. 35. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 324 and 261.

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, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 194. 40. Adorno, “Valéry’s Deviations,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p. 173.

41. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 33 and 234.

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 Hélderlin’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 Theory (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 “demonstrations,” 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, Aesthetic 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. 60. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 61. 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. 64. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 39.

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. Adorno, “On Tradition,” Telos, no. 94 (Winter 1992-1993), p. 79, my emphasis. 71. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), pp. 129 and 133.

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, “Valéry’s Deviations,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), pp. 156-157. 74. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 4. 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 Two (1992), p. 36; and Theodor Adorno, “On Dickens’s The 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. 80. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 299.

81. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hélderlin’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 semblance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify” (p. 130). 85. Theodor Adorno, “Stefan George,” in Notes to Literature: Volume Two (1992), pp. 178-192. 86. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 15. 87. Ibid., pp. 40-41

Chapter Five 1. 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 itself with him” (p. 30). Compare also the argument that the class-based individualism 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 Hdlderlin’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: The 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 Bérubé, 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. 12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 9. 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. 22. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 250. 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. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 6. “The ideological concern to keep cul-

ture pure obeys the wish that in the fetishized culture, and thus actually, everything remains as it was” (p. 247).

160 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. 28. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 227. 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 “banalization” (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 culture—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 characterized as “a shift from History to histories.” Ibid., pp.23 and 20, respectively. 45. Herbert Lindenberger, The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (1990), p. 203. 46. H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New 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, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms (1981), p. 177. 49. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 194. 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. 54. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 261. 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, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), pp. 181-217. 56. Adorno, Minima Moralta (1974), p. 247. 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 elimination of autonomous art,” so that it might “become practical once again” by “direct[ing] itself to the very way art functions in society,” the transition from fin de siécle “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). 67. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 17. 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 the Apes, see pp- 80-103.

162 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 will 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. Tan 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. \bid., 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, “Valéry’s Deviations,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p. 143; and Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), p. 26. 82. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1974), p. 77. 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, The 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 emphasis. 90. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” Telos, no.95 (Spring 1993), p. 18. 91. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 254. 92. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p. 221. 93. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 247. 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, Late 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 Notes 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 and1992).

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. 14. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p. 80. 15. Ibid., p. 85. 16. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (1991), pp. 101-120. 17. Hohendahl (1995), p. 210. 18. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1997), p. 1. 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 Postmodernity (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-superstructure 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 dismissive 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 between 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 certainly 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 The 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 Birger, 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. 39. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One (1991), p. 83. 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. 45. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1974), p. 44.

Conclusion 1. Theodor Adorno, “Theses on Need,” quoted in Martin Jay, Adorno (1984), p. 100

BLANK PAGE

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Index

163(n6) 115

Adorno, Theodor, 2, 5, 26, 83, 93, 107, utopian content of, 87, 91, 112, 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(n15)

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 Canby, 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 Index 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 A Tale of a Tub, 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 Land, 29

in the Middle Ages, 3, 15-17 Canons

modern, 17-21 biblical, 15, 146(n11) 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, The Aeneid, 15, 16, 136 54, 75, 88, 89, 104, 141-142

Crime and Punishment, 29 vernacular, 11, 17, 19, 146(n14) 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,

Iphigenie 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, Jurgen, 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, Seren, 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, André, 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(n11)

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 Morton, Donald, 46 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 42

Morrison, Toni, 40 Stendhal, 87

oo, Sue, Eugene, 137

New historicism, 6, 31, 41, 103, Swift, Jonathan, 17 113-118, 124

Nees he, Friedrich, 103 Thoreau, ussbaum, Martha, 54 vasHenry David, 107 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 Valéry, 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

rr Wordsworth, William, 52-53

Quintilian, 15

Robinson, Lillian, 37 Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud, 46 Rodden, John, 64, 107 Zenodotus of Ephesus, 14 Rorty, Richard, 52 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 115, 133-134,

Ryle, Martin, 119 164(n30)