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amongst so-called “minorities” that the Western literary canon typically reflected writers
whose ideals mirrored those of the established ruling class.
High/Low categorizations not only designate the level of production, distribution,
and consumption of respective works, but also indicate a distinct style and genre as the
social ideas and moral values these texts promote, whereas High texts, i.e. the “classics,”
typically aspire to depict “the best that is thought and known in the world” as Matthew
Arnold points out. Critics and writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and
Harold Bloom believe that the canon should only endorse works from the High end of
cultural production, and are therefore considered to be “elitists” by those challenging this
position. For this reason, this latter group, at times called “populists,” consider that the
process of selection for including texts in the canon closely mirrors the ideologies of the
dominant social classes, i.e. white western European males (Guillory “The Canon” 233),
and in the midst of the political upheaval and social reforms of the post-war era, they
advocated a complete revision of the academic canon to include works from all levels of
cultural production, regardless of class, race, and gender. Even though Guillory
emphasizes the fact that canon-formation is a historical process of selection rather than an
ideological process of exclusion (Cultural Capital 16), the presence of a certain
subversive socio-ideological element is inevitable even within the historical process
Guillory privileges. Regardless, if one considers the state of the canon as it is represented
in academic curricula, it appears that the canon has been revised, or more accurately,
fragmented. Much to the lament of the likes of Allan Bloom (232), in lieu of presenting
one unified tradition, the university is now offering reading lists representing several
diverse cultural traditions. In other words, the canon has divided itself into multiple
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