Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

canons representing the various identities of race, class, and gender and their respective
traditions. While some may revere the multicultural emphasis of newer university
curricula, others lament and criticize these changes on the grounds of being “separatist,”
of reinforcing “difference” rather than “equality,” and claim that the humanistic emphasis
of a unified canon cannot be effectively implemented in multiple, yet fragmentary,
canons.
Somewhere along the lines of the sharp polarity that characterizes High/Low
discourses of “universality” and “representation” between so-called “elitists” and
“populists,” there are a number of works that deliberately threaten established
hierarchies, regardless of predominant socio-cultural ideologies, for their purpose is
specifically to transgress such narrow boundaries. In this sense, so-called “transgressive”
texts are not merely counter-ideological but rather, “non-ideological,” for their subversive
temperament does not specifically aim to overturn established High/Low hierarchies. To
adopt current critical terminology, James Gardner considers transgressive texts to
represent a “radical otherness,” while according to Anthony Julius, their purpose is
precisely to shock and discomfort; sometimes to subvert established rules and
conventions (44-6), sometimes for pedagogical reasons (33), or even, as Georges Bataille
would put it, to achieve internal freedom by violating the taboos imposed by a society
dominated by concerns about productivity and order (qtd. in Julius 21-2).
Interestingly enough, what has become the canon includes works that were at first
shunned specifically because of their very transgressive nature. Regardless of whether
they were produced from either High or Low levels of production and, similarly aimed
for High/Low levels of consumption—or of which side of canonical debates they
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