Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

doubt as to her standing in the canon. The work of Edgar Allan Poe is granted canonical
recognition for establishing the genre of the American Gothic while Ralph Ellison’s The
Invisible Man would stand out as a representative work of class and race struggle. The
same can be said for more ancient and/or historical works, which in themselves mark the
beginning of various traditions and their respective canons. While Beowulf is widely
recognized as the first literary work of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, The Iliad stands as the
first text of the Western Tradition.
The evaluative process which assesses the difference between canonical and non-
canonical texts brings to mind the polarity between “High” and “Low” culture as it
occurs at various level of production, distribution, and consumption. High/Low
discourses represent a tradition of socio-cultural distinction which first appeared in the
early middle ages, peaked at the dawn of the twentieth century, and gradually eroded as a
result of what John Guillory and Terry Eagleton call the “Culture Wars,” a period which
closely paralleled the most recent revisions of the academic canon in the late twentieth
century. In European Literature and the Middle Ages Ernst Robert Curtius notes that the
idea of “the Classic author” stemmed from the Roman Empire where citizens belonging
to a higher tax bracket were called “Classici” (Curtius in Stallybras et al. I)
Subsequently, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out, this categorization led to
classifying authors and their works: “[this system of hierarchy] separated out a distinct
elite set (the classici) from the commonality (the proletarius) and used this model for
literary discriminations” (I). The ramifications of separating authors and works according
to a High/Low distinction by labeling them either “classics” and “popular” remained
throughout the ages and while the classist overtone was dropped, there is a strong belief
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