Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Henry Louis Gates Jr. It is only by attempting to transcend these boundaries of race,
class, and gender that peoples of the world will learn to live harmoniously and thus reach
genuine “equality”: “Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried
in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the
benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender (198).”
Nevertheless, one needs to be careful in employing Said’s criterion, for his approach
never vouches for the inclusion of one text over the exclusion of another, but rather, “[it]
was always a matter of opening and participating in a central strand of intellectual and
cultural effort and of showing what had always been, though indiscernibly, a part of it…
(195).” Hence, it appears that the true question of Canon-formation revolves around the
issue of critical reading and interpretation—of how we read—and takes root precisely in
the underlying multiplicity of meanings enclosed in the literary text.
John Guillory insists that the omission of minority and women writers from the
canon was not a deliberate act of exclusion—quite on the contrary he emphasizes the
process of selection in canon-formation, as outlined in the example of Plato above—and a
reflection of sexist and racist ideologies but rather, they were not included because of
historical and social reasons; these groups did not have access to literacy and thus, wrote
proportionally less than their white male counterparts: “the social conditions governing
access to literacy before the emergence of the middle-class educational system
determined that the greater number of writers, canonical or non-canonical, were men
(Cultural Capital 16).” In addition, Guillory rejects the arguments set forth by the
challengers on two grounds. For one, it is impossible for one author or literary work
actually to “stand for” an entire minority, for all it could actually “represent” in a work of
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