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“interrogators,” those who subvert the rules of art by violating them. He believes that in
conjunction, they “entail, in the artist’s self-understanding, a trumping of one rule with a
notionally higher rule or ‘law,’ thereby justifying the disregard for the rule by reference
to its inferiority to the other rule or law” (106-7). In sum, a work of art that transgresses
art’s established practices, whether by exploration or violation, innovation or
interrogation of perceived boundaries, serves to promote fresh, i.e. “new” styles, genres,
and techniques, and to contribute to the dynamic evolution of artistic expression. In
twentieth-century literature, a particularly good case in point is James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Joyce’s effective use of the innovative stream-of-consciousness technique not only paved
the way for ensuing generations of writers as mentioned in the first chapter, but it also
contributed to the definition of what would later be categorized as the postmodern novel.
Beyond the canon-augmenting potential of certain works, there is an accepted
view shared by many literary critics that literature has the power to subvert established
hierarchies not only in the canonical discourses of academia but also in socio-political
discourses. For example, Paul Lauter argues that “it would not be too much to say that
canonical criticism constitutes a part of a broader effort to reconstruct our society” (144-
5). Another common conception is that certain literary texts have promoted social and
political changes by influencing public opinion during specific periods in history:
In the 1960s and 1970s, the movements for social change
challenged artists to discover how they might themselves be agents
of change rather than, at best, choniclers of it. Writers have
addressed that challenge in many ways: Alice Walker’s Meridian,
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of
a Common Language are among other things, quite different
approaches to the problem of creating texts that are actors for
change. (Lauter 61)
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