Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

elonged to—these works were at once banned or put to trial, or more subtly, ignored, or
even ghetto-ized. Both the literary establishment and popular opinion have effective
ways of dealing with material they regard to threaten their respective ideologies and
break their prescribed guidelines of moral conduct and social behavior. The case of the
Marquis de Sade is perhaps the most infamous, but more recently, James Joyce’s Ulysses
and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were put to trial for obscenity, while the (homo-) sexually
explicit novels of Dennis Cooper and the writings of Kathy Acker with their perpetual
mix-match of genres, discourses, and cross-references are ignored and under-exposed
regardless of their “literary” merit and “value.” Yet the fact is that in the case of now
classic works like Ulysses and Lolita, these texts have found a cherished place in the
newer curricula of universities while Acker and Cooper remain in the margins. This
prompts the following question: what are the underlying processes of academic canon-
formation as it pertains to transgression if some texts happen to be gradually assimilated
while others are continuously disregarded? More particularly, what then is to be done of
works that clearly transgress the boundaries of the permissible within the norms of
society, especially, when one is drawn to the fact that there is an entire tradition of
canonical works that were at one point in time considered to be equally shocking and
subversive?
This brief discussion outlines some of the major aspects of transgression and
canon-formation, as well as their possible interconnections. Nevertheless, to come to an
accurate assessment of how High/Low categorizations and ideological discourses have
shaped the processes of canonization up to twenty-first century academia, it is necessary
to review briefly the ways in which such processes were established as well as their
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