Western canon

Based on Wikipedia: Western canon

The Fight Over What We Should Read

Here's a peculiar thing about Western civilization: we've spent centuries arguing about which books deserve to be called "great," and we still haven't settled the question. The Western canon—that collection of literature, philosophy, music, and art supposedly representing the pinnacle of Western achievement—doesn't actually exist as an official list. No committee has ever convened to stamp certain works as essential. No government body has issued a decree. The whole thing is an ongoing argument, and it's one of the most revealing arguments we have.

The debate touches something deep. When we argue about which books belong in the canon, we're really arguing about who we are, what we value, and whose voices matter.

How It All Started

The word "canon" comes from the ancient Greek kanṓn, meaning "measuring rod" or "standard." The Greeks were the first to rank their cultural works this way, creating lists of the best playwrights and poets. But the concept took on new urgency with the early Christian Church, which had a very practical problem: books were expensive.

Before the printing press, every book had to be copied by hand onto vellum (treated animal skin) or papyrus. This was painstaking, costly work. The Church couldn't preserve everything, so it had to choose. Which texts of the New Testament were authoritative? Which deserved the enormous investment of reproduction? The texts that made the cut became "canonical"—and the rest often disappeared entirely.

This reveals something important. Being in a canon has always been about survival. The works that get taught, copied, and discussed are the works that persist. Everything else fades into obscurity.

The scholars at the legendary Library of Alexandria understood this. They coined a Greek term—Hoi enkrithentes—meaning "the admitted" or "the included." Even then, people recognized that deciding what counted as great literature was an act of power.

The Romans Had a Word for It

In the second century, a Roman writer named Aulus Gellius produced a miscellany called Attic Nights—essentially a collection of interesting facts and observations. In it, he distinguished between writers who were "classicus" (distinguished, first-rate) and those who were "proletarius" (commonplace). This is where our word "classic" comes from.

Notice what Gellius was doing. He wasn't just describing quality—he was borrowing the language of Roman social class. A classicus was originally a citizen of the highest tax bracket. By applying this term to writers, Gellius was saying that some authors belonged to a kind of literary aristocracy.

This class connotation has never entirely left the concept. When people today talk about "high culture" versus "low culture," they're participating in the same sorting ritual the Romans practiced nearly two thousand years ago.

What Makes a Classic?

Writers have wrestled with this question for generations. Mark Twain offered his characteristically irreverent definition: "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." The Italian novelist Italo Calvino took a different approach, spending an entire essay exploring why we read the classics at all.

The poet T.S. Eliot tackled the question with characteristic seriousness. So did the French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the American book critic Michael Dirda, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Each reached different conclusions.

The truth is, there's no single answer. A "classic" might be a book that has remained influential across centuries, or one that captures something essential about human experience, or simply one that enough powerful institutions have decided to teach. Often it's all three, and sometimes it's none.

The Great Books Movement

In 1920s America, something remarkable happened. A professor at Columbia University named John Erskine became convinced that American higher education had gone wrong. Universities had become too specialized, he thought. Students learned narrow subjects deeply but never encountered the foundational works of Western thought.

Erskine's solution was radical: have students read the primary texts themselves. Not textbooks about the books—the actual books. Plato's Republic. Dante's Divine Comedy. Homer's Iliad. Students would read these works and then discuss them in small seminars, engaging directly with ideas that had shaped civilization.

This became known as the Great Books movement, and it attracted some of the most influential educators of the century. Robert Hutchins, who became president of the University of Chicago at the astonishing age of thirty, championed the approach. His collaborator Mortimer Adler helped develop reading lists and discussion methods that spread far beyond academia. Jacques Barzun, the cultural historian, lent his intellectual prestige. The movement eventually produced the Great Books of the Western World—a fifty-four-volume collection published in 1952 that attempted to gather the essential texts of Western civilization between two covers.

An earlier attempt had been made by Harvard's president Charles W. Eliot, who in 1909 assembled the Harvard Classics: fifty-one volumes he claimed could provide a liberal education to anyone who spent fifteen minutes a day reading them. Eliot was channeling the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who had declared in 1840 that "the true University of these days is a Collection of Books."

Today, over one hundred institutions offer some version of a Great Books program. The approach has its critics—we'll get to them—but it also has passionate defenders who argue that engaging with primary texts produces a kind of education no lecture course can match.

The Modern Library and the Bestseller Lists

While academics debated which books belonged in the curriculum, commercial publishers were creating their own canons. The Modern Library, founded in 1917, began publishing inexpensive editions of classic works. By the 1950s, their list had grown to over three hundred titles, ranging from Aristotle to Albert Camus.

This was democratizing in one sense—suddenly anyone could afford the great books—but it also meant that publishers were now helping to define what counted as great. The Modern Library's choices reflected certain assumptions about which works mattered. Critics complained the list was "too American," too focused on certain traditions at the expense of others.

In the 1990s, when debates about the canon reached a fever pitch, Modern Library responded by creating new lists: the "100 Best Novels" and "100 Best Nonfiction," compiled first by panels of famous writers and later by reader votes. This acknowledged something important: there was no longer one authority that could definitively say which books mattered most.

Harold Bloom's Defiant Stand

In 1994, the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom published a book with a deliberately provocative title: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Bloom was drawing a line in the sand.

Against those who argued that the canon was merely a tool of cultural domination, Bloom insisted that some works really were better than others—more original, more alive, more worthy of attention. His list of "major Western writers" included Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.

Notice what Bloom was claiming. He wasn't saying these writers were important because they represented their cultures or their times. He was saying they were important because they were geniuses—because they had achieved something extraordinary in language that transcended their historical circumstances.

A few years earlier, another Bloom—Allan Bloom, no relation—had made a similar argument in The Closing of the American Mind (1987). This book became an unexpected bestseller, resonating with readers who worried that universities were abandoning traditional learning. Allan Bloom argued that ignorance of the great classics was producing moral degradation. Without the Western tradition, students had no foundation for critical thinking.

Both Blooms had their critics, but they also had passionate supporters who felt that something valuable was being lost in the rush to diversify the curriculum.

The Case Against the Canon

But who decides what's "great"? This question lies at the heart of the canonical debate.

Charles Altieri, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, offered a revealing definition: canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." In other words, the canon isn't just a list of good books—it's a set of values that we want to transmit to the next generation.

This makes the canon inherently political. When we teach certain books and not others, we're making choices about whose perspectives matter, whose experiences are universal, and whose voices deserve amplification.

Critics of the traditional canon point out that it has been overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly European. Where are the women? Where are writers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America? Where are the working-class voices, the queer voices, the perspectives of colonized peoples?

Susan Hardy Aiken has argued that the Western canon maintained itself by systematically excluding and marginalizing women while idealizing the works of men. Even when women's writing was included, it was often treated as a special category rather than being judged by the same standards applied to men's work.

The American historian Todd M. Compton makes a different point: there is no single canonical authority, and there never has been. What exists instead are many competing canons—the reading list for a survey course, the requirements for an English major, the preferences of individual critics like Harold Bloom. To speak of "the Western canon" as if it were a fixed entity is to mistake a plural, contested tradition for a monolithic one.

The Irony of Criticism

One of the most interesting defenses of the canon comes from John Searle, a philosopher at Berkeley. He points out something that critics of the canon might not want to hear.

The very tradition they're attacking, Searle notes, is the tradition that gave them the tools to attack it. The critical methods used to "unmask" the canon—to reveal its political biases and exclusions—come from within that same Western intellectual tradition. Marx, whose ideas inform much critical theory, is himself a canonical figure. So is Nietzsche. So are the Enlightenment thinkers who first articulated ideals of equality and rights.

There is a certain irony in this, in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties.

The texts that were once tools of liberation, Searle observes, are now being treated as instruments of oppression. What changed wasn't the texts themselves—it was the context in which they were being read.

Dead White European Males

In 1992, the classicist Bernard Knox delivered the Jefferson Lecture—the highest honor the United States federal government bestows for achievement in the humanities. He chose a deliberately provocative title: "The Oldest Dead White European Males."

Knox was defending the ancient Greeks and Romans against those who dismissed classical culture as irrelevant. His argument was subtle. He wasn't claiming that the ancients had all the answers, or that their works should be read uncritically. He was arguing that these texts still had something to teach modern readers—that engaging with them could illuminate our own assumptions and blind spots.

The phrase "dead white European males" had become a shorthand critique of the traditional canon. Knox was reclaiming it, acknowledging the demographic reality while insisting that the works themselves transcended their authors' identities.

The English Renaissance: A Case Study

To understand how canons actually work, it helps to look at a specific example. Consider the canon of English Renaissance poetry—the verse written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

For centuries, certain figures have dominated this canon: Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. But their reputations have fluctuated more than you might expect.

Take the Metaphysical poets—Donne and his followers, known for their intellectual wit and complex imagery. The poet John Dryden criticized them in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, they had fallen into disrepute entirely. Then came T.S. Eliot.

In the 1920s, Eliot launched a campaign to rehabilitate the Metaphysicals. Through critical essays and his own poetry, which drew on their techniques, Eliot argued that Donne and his circle represented a kind of poetry that had been unjustly neglected. For decades, this view prevailed. The Metaphysicals became required reading.

But by 1961, the critic A. Alvarez could write that "it may perhaps be a little late in the day to be writing about the Metaphysicals. The great vogue for Donne passed with the passing of the Anglo-American experimental movement in modern poetry." What had seemed like a permanent reassessment turned out to be another fashion.

Some critics went further, arguing that Eliot's championing of the Metaphysicals was itself a political act—an attempt to impose "a high Anglican and royalist literary history" on English poetry. The canon, it turned out, was never stable. It was always being contested, revised, and renegotiated.

The American Critic Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters proposed something even more radical in 1939. He suggested that the entire Petrarchan tradition—the style of love poetry exemplified by Sidney and Spenser—had been overrated. The real treasure, Winters argued, was the "Native or Plain Style," an anti-Petrarchan movement that emphasized directness over elaborate conceits.

Winters championed George Gascoigne, a poet born in 1525, arguing that Gascoigne "deserves to be ranked among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher." Almost no one had heard of Gascoigne before Winters made his case. Few have heard of him since. Winters' alternative canon never took hold—but his attempt shows how dramatically different the landscape of "great literature" might look if different critics had prevailed.

Women and the Canon

One of the most significant changes to the Western canon in recent decades has been the inclusion of women writers who were previously overlooked or dismissed.

This isn't to say that women were entirely absent from literary history. In Britain and America, women achieved major literary success from the late eighteenth century onward. The nineteenth century produced Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—all of whom are now considered canonical. There were also significant female poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson.

The twentieth century brought Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Marianne Moore. In France, there were Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, and Françoise Sagan.

So what changed? The feminist movement of the late twentieth century prompted scholars to look harder—to recover texts that had been forgotten, to reassess writers who had been dismissed, and to ask why certain works had been excluded in the first place.

Virago Press, founded in 1973, began republishing out-of-print works by women, bringing forgotten authors back into circulation. Scholars combed archives for letters, journals, and manuscripts that had never been considered "literary" but that revealed rich traditions of women's writing.

The effect was to expand what counted as literature in the first place. Journals, letters, travel writing, children's books—genres that had been dismissed as minor—became subjects of serious scholarly attention. The boundaries of the canon didn't just shift; they became more porous.

Going Global

Perhaps the most dramatic expansion of the Western canon has been its movement beyond the West itself.

Since the late 1960s, writers from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Booker Prize, once focused primarily on British and Commonwealth writers, has been won by authors from around the world. The "Western" literary canon now routinely includes writers from China, Egypt, Peru, Colombia, Turkey, Japan, and beyond.

This raises an interesting question: if the Western canon includes non-Western writers, is it still "Western"? Or has it become something else—a global canon, a world literature tradition that transcends geographic boundaries?

The answer may be that the very concept of "Western" culture is more complicated than it first appears. The Greek classics that form the foundation of the Western tradition were themselves influenced by Egyptian, Persian, and Mesopotamian cultures. The "West" has always been porous, absorbing and transforming ideas from elsewhere.

The Philosopher's Perspective

John Searle, reflecting on the canon debates, made an observation that might offer a path forward:

In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed 'canon'; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised.

This is both reassuring and destabilizing. It suggests that the canon was never as monolithic as either its defenders or its critics sometimes claim. It has always been contested, always in flux, always subject to the tastes and interests of each generation.

But it also suggests that judgments of quality matter. There's a difference between saying "this canon is too narrow and should be expanded" and saying "there's no such thing as quality and all judgments are merely political." The first claim invites revision and growth. The second makes conversation impossible.

Why Any of This Matters

You might reasonably ask: who cares? Does it really matter which books appear on which reading lists?

The answer, I think, is yes—but not for the reasons typically given.

It matters because the books we encounter shape how we think. They give us vocabularies, frameworks, and examples that we carry through life. A person who has read Plato thinks differently about justice than someone who hasn't. A person who has read Toni Morrison thinks differently about American history than someone who hasn't. Neither is necessarily better—but they're different.

It matters because canons create conversations across time. When a new writer references Shakespeare or subverts Homer, they're participating in a dialogue that spans centuries. The more widely shared the canon, the richer these conversations can be.

And it matters because deciding what to teach is an act of hope. We choose certain books because we believe they will help the next generation understand their world, face their challenges, and live meaningful lives. We might be wrong about which books will prove most useful. But the act of choosing—the act of saying "this matters"—is itself an expression of faith in education, in culture, and in the future.

The Western canon isn't a fortress to be defended or a prison to be escaped. It's a conversation—one that's been going on for millennia and shows no signs of ending. The only question is who gets to participate, and what they bring to the table.