Untitled - witz cultural

Reconceiving Canonand CurriculumThe same factors-connectivity, virhral presence, and shiftingof the balance between writer and reader-that promprmajor, perhaps radical, shifts in teaching, learning, and theorganization ofboth activities inevitably have the potential toaffect the related notions of canon and curriculum. For a work to enter the literarycanon-or, more properly, to be entered into the canon-gains it certainobvious privileges. That the passive grammatical construction moreaccurately describes the manner in which books, paintings, and other culturaltexts receive that not-so-mysterious stamp of cultural approval remindsus that those in positions of power decide what enters this select inner circle.The gatekeepers ofthe fortress ofhigh culture include influentiar critics,museum directors and their boards of trustees, and a far more lowly combineof scholars and teachers. one of the chief institutions of the literary canon isthe middlebrow anthology, that hanger-on of high culture that in the victorianperiod took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Tieasury and todayexists principally in the form of major college anthologies. In America, to bein the Norton or the oxford anthology is to have achieved, not greatness, butwhat is more important, certainly-status. And that is why, of course, it mattersthat so few women have managed to gain entrance to such anthologies.The notion ofa literary canon descends from that ofthe biblical one,in which, as Gerald L. Bruns explains, canonization functions as ,,a categoryofpower":what is important is not only the formation, collection, and fixing of the sacredtexts, but also their application to particular situations. A text, after all, is canonicar,not in virtue ofbeing final and correct and part ofan official library, but because itbecomes binding upon a group of people. The whole point of canonization is to underwritethe authority of a text, not merely with respect to its origin as against competitorsin the field . .. but with respect to the present and future in which it will reignorgovernasabindingtext...Fromahermeneuticstandpoint...thethemeofcaonization is power. (8.l , 67)one sees the kind of privileges and power belonging to canonization in theconception that something is a work of art; the classification of some objector event as a work ofart enters it into a form ofthe canon. such categorizationmeans that the work receives certain values, meanings, and modes ofbeing perceived. A work of art, as some modern aestheticians have pointedout, is functionally what someone somewhere takes to be a work of art. Sayingit's so makes it so. If one says the found object is a work of art, then it is;and having become such (however temporarily), it gains a certain status, the