Levi Hawes

4/17/17
The Literary Canon
In Platos Republic, Book II, we get our first glimpse into the philosophy
behind what is considered the canon of literary works. Socrates and Adeimantus
decide that in regards to education, the art of speech and poetry should be the first
thing that is taught. They recognize that a lot of what is taught to children are lies,
or stories, told for entertainment. He sees childhood as a very impressionable time
and states that they might want to be careful about the things children are taught.
He then suggests that they ought to regulate the stories that are told to children.
Socrates believes that these stories will lead children to attempt heroic acts such as
starting wars for no reason or turn against their fathers. Poets, he says, will be
instructed to write and perform stories that make virtue the appealing attribute.
Chinua Achebe critiques Joseph Conrads novel Heart of Darkness in his essay
An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. He believes Conrad to
be a racist and that his depictions of Africans in his novel dehumanize them.
According to Achebe, Conrad refuses to bestow human expression on Africans,
depriving them of language and other qualities that indicate human life. Africa itself
is used as a foil to Europe, insisting that it needs to be colonized and made to be
more like Europe. Achebes argument regarding the literary canon is that Heart of
Darkness continues to perpetuate damaging stereotypes of black peoples and that
by leaving it in the literary canon, we are reinforcing those ideas.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the Closet, attacks the
idea that modern Western culture is damaged in its central ideas and that it doesnt
incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. In Axiom 6 in
her book, Sedgwick confronts the literary canon and how gay studies has no voice
within it. She states that most of the conversation surrounding the canon is in
regards to the possibility of change, or rearrangement and reassignment of texts,
within one overarching master-canon of literature. Sedgwick believes that this
master canon should be exploded to create an infinite variety of mini-canons that
are specified by their themes, ideas, or authors. She provides the example of the
master-canon being challenged by alternative canons of womens literature that
challenges the master-canon and forces it, in this situation, to rename itself as a
canon of mastery; mens mastery over women. She then says that we should begin
a similar trend with alternative canons of lesbian and gay writing as minority
canons.