07.04.2013 Views

Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

doubt as to her standing in the canon. The work of Edgar Allan Poe is granted canonical<br />

recognition for establishing the genre of the American Gothic while Ralph Ellison’s The<br />

Invisible Man would stand out as a representative work of class and race struggle. The<br />

same can be said for more ancient and/or historical works, which in themselves mark the<br />

beginning of various traditions and their respective canons. While Beowulf is widely<br />

recognized as the first literary work of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, The Iliad stands as the<br />

first text of the Western Tradition.<br />

The evaluative process which assesses the difference between canonical and non-<br />

canonical texts brings to mind the polarity between “High” and “Low” culture as it<br />

occurs at various level of production, distribution, and consumption. High/Low<br />

discourses represent a tradition of socio-cultural distinction which first appeared in the<br />

early middle ages, peaked at the dawn of the twentieth century, and gradually eroded as a<br />

result of what John Guillory and Terry Eagleton call the “Culture Wars,” a period which<br />

closely paralleled the most recent revisions of the academic canon in the late twentieth<br />

century. In European Literature and the Middle Ages Ernst Robert Curtius notes that the<br />

idea of “the Classic author” stemmed from the Roman Empire where citizens belonging<br />

to a higher tax bracket were called “Classici” (Curtius in Stallybras et al. I)<br />

Subsequently, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out, this categorization led to<br />

classifying authors and their works: “[this system of hierarchy] separated out a distinct<br />

elite set (the classici) from the commonality (the proletarius) and used this model for<br />

literary discriminations” (I). The ramifications of separating authors and works according<br />

to a High/Low distinction by labeling them either “classics” and “popular” remained<br />

throughout the ages and while the classist overtone was dropped, there is a strong belief<br />

20

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!