Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

fiction is a mere “image” of that minority (7). Moreover, he condemns the “deluded
assumption” that the school is a reflection of national culture and thus that “equal
representation” in the canon of the school would eventually lead to social equality in the
nation as a whole:
What is transmitted by the school is, to be sure, a kind of culture;
but is the culture of the school. School culture does not unify the
nation culturally so much as it projects out of a curriculum of
artifact-based knowledge an imaginary cultural unity never
actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state. (38)
Quite to the contrary, he emphasizes that, if anything, contemporary discourse on canon-
formation can only influence academic circles, for the school—and especially, the
university—remains the primary if not the sole audience for canon debates. While it
could be argued that Guillory seems rather eager to dismiss the possible influence of
school culture on society—his observation could easily be refuted by pointing to the May
68 events in France for example—his comment regarding the exclusivity of the school as
a forum for canonical discussion is most accurate.
The previous discussion demonstrates that, like most contemporary disputes in
academia, the debate about the literary canon remains partly unresolved for both parties
fail to reach a consensus on what the past meant or what the future should valorize.
Nevertheless, Said’s point about shifting the emphasis from what is read to how merits
discussion because it has been simultaneously advocated and rejected by both parties and
remains at the forefront of Canon debate. The processes embedded in literary production
and canon-formation have always been interrelated with a major trend in literary criticism
(e.g. Neo-classicism and the Renaissance or New Criticism and Modernism), yet texts
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