Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

In the late twentieth century, with the drastic changes occurring in society and the
coming of age of the civil rights movement, various groups have criticized the academic
canon as consecutively erected by the likes of Johnson, Arnold, Eliot, and Brooks, for
being biased and only containing writers representative of the dominating and affluent
faction of society, namely “white, western-European men” (Guillory “The Canon” 233).
Hence, many feminist and ethnic minority groups believed that certain writers were
thought to have been deliberately “excluded” in regard to a discriminatory ideology that
aimed to suppress the diffusion of these authors’ thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. The
revision that aimed to include many women and ethnic minority writers in the “Canon”
was correlated with two consecutive events, the democratization of higher education that
occurred after World War II, and the increasing enrollment of minorities and women as a
direct consequence of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As a result, it was decreed
that the canon—which, by then, was the authoritative list of books taught in academic
institutions, positioning the university as the exclusive setting for the diffusion and
distribution of such cultural capital—should reflect the current trends of a pluralistic
society and thus, be representative of the multicultural population attending schools
nationwide. As a result of the ensuing “culture wars” chronicled by the likes of John
Guillory and Terry Eagleton between “traditionalists,” defenders of the academic literary
canon, and “challengers,” between “high” art and “low” popular culture, each advocating
their own sets of standards, the canon has been officially “opened” and includes work by
women and ethnic minority authors. The debate still rages, however, and certain issues
have yet to be resolved.
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