Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle
Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle
Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
the literary canon, and critics and teachers were recognized as authorities whose role<br />
determined what should be read and how, as well as defending the importance of the<br />
canon itself. Still, the forum for all levels of canonical discourse and readership remained<br />
chiefly that of the academic institution. As Ross suggests, canonical literature became a<br />
sign of “good breeding,” which made the instructed consumption of literature as<br />
important as its production:<br />
This deepening of the social significance of the reading activity<br />
altered the nature of critical discourse, whose varied functions<br />
shifted from aiding the production to regulating the transmission of<br />
canonical works, from prescribing how works ought to be<br />
composed to supervising how they ought to be read and judged,<br />
and from promoting the general symbolic value of writing to<br />
ensuring the legitimacy of an autonomous cultural field. (210)<br />
There is a now common view amongst critics that literary texts contain “social<br />
power,” or “social energy,” which is unleashed and disseminated by the continuous<br />
readings and interpretations of critics and scholars through a series of cultural<br />
negotiations and exchanges (Greenblatt Shakespearean 1-7, Ross 213). According to<br />
Ross, an example of the role played by critics is Addison's annotated version of Milton’s<br />
Paradise Lost published in The Spectator, which presupposes that the text—and its<br />
“social energy”—can only be explained by a critic (218) and soon, it became necessary to<br />
have one canon for consumption and a different one to serve as a model of production<br />
(221). Literary criticism becomes an indispensable tool for the reading and interpretation<br />
of works of literature, as well as conducting scholarly research, thus instituting the<br />
perpetual relationship--and/or collaboration–between trends in criticism and literary<br />
movements.<br />
36