Western canon

The Western canon is the embodiment of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and art that are highly cherished across the Western world, such works having achieved the status of classics.
Recent discussions emphasise the need for greater cultural diversity within the canon that are more encompassing of wise and accomplished humans. The canons of music and visual arts have been broadened to encompass often overlooked periods, while cinema still grapples with a narrow perspective. These critiques have created more discussion, with some viewing recent efforts to be more diverse and inclusive as prioritising activism over aesthetic values, often associated with critical theory, as well as postmodernism. Another critique highlights a narrow interpretation within the West, the dominance of English-speaking British and American cultures, at least under contemporary circumstances, which foment demands for a more diverse canon across the western hemisphere, particularly from authors, artists, poets, musicians, mathematicians, and other creative beings whose primary language is something other than English.
There is no official list of works that a recognized panel of experts or scholars agreed upon that is "the Western Canon," nor has there ever been such. A corpus of great works is an idea that has been discussed for the past century.

Literary canon

Classic book

A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second-century Roman miscellany Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius". Such classification were initiated with the Greeks' ranking their cultural works, with the word canon. Similarly, early Christian Church Fathers declared as canon the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in a canon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics.
With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino, and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound.
The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection, presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur, or be the official reading list of a university. In The Western Canon Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as 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.

Great Books Program

A university or college Great Books Program is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s by John Erskine of Columbia University, which proposed to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.
The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's Republic, or Dante's Divine Comedy. Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.
Over 100 institutions of higher learning, mostly in the United States, offer some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students.
For much of the 20th century, the Modern Library provided a larger convenient list of the Western canon. The list numbered more than 300 items by the 1950s, by authors from Aristotle to Albert Camus, and has continued to grow. When in the 1990s the concept of the Western canon was vehemently condemned, just as earlier Modern Library lists had been criticized as "too American," Modern Library responded by preparing new lists of "100 Best Novels" and "100 Best Nonfiction" compiled by famous writers, and later compiled lists nominated by book purchasers and readers.

Debate

Some intellectuals have championed a "high conservative modernism" that insists that universal truths exist, and have opposed approaches that deny the existence of universal truths. Yale University Professor of Humanities and famous literary critic Harold Bloom also argued strongly in favor of the canon, in his 1994 book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in many institutions. Allan Bloom, in his highly influential The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, argues that moral degradation results from ignorance of the great classics that shaped Western culture. Bloom further comments: "But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied." His book was widely cited by some intellectuals for its argument that the classics contained universal truths and timeless values which were being ignored by cultural relativists.
Classicist Bernard Knox made direct reference to this topic when he delivered his 1992 Jefferson Lecture. Knox used the intentionally "provocative" title "The Oldest Dead White European Males" as the title of his lecture and his subsequent book of the same name, in both of which Knox defended the continuing relevance of classical culture to modern society.
Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that such criticisms are misguided and/or disingenuous. As John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, has written:
One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority: who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading?
Charles Altieri, of the University of California, Berkeley, states that canons are "an institutional form for exposing people to a range of idealized attitudes." It is according to this notion that work may be removed from the canon over time to reflect the contextual relevance and thoughts of society. American historian Todd M. Compton argues that canons are always communal in nature; that there are limited canons for, say a literature survey class, or an English department reading list, but there is no such thing as one absolute canon of literature. Instead, there are many conflicting canons. He regards Bloom's "Western Canon" as a personal canon only.
The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopher John Searle has said, "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." One of the notable attempts at compiling an authoritative canon for literature in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Maynard Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public. An earlier attempt had been made in 1909 by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, with the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature. Eliot's view was the same as that of Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books".

In the English-speaking world

British renaissance poetry

The canon of Renaissance English poetry of the 16th and early 17th century has always been in some form of flux and towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was criticised, especially by those who wished to expand it to include, for example, more women writers. However, the central figures of the British renaissance canon remain, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. Spenser, Donne, and Jonson were major influences on 17th-century poetry. However, poet John Dryden condemned aspects of the metaphysical poets in his criticism. In the 18th century Metaphysical poetry fell into further disrepute, while the interest in Elizabethan poetry was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed in the Victorian period with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury.
In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Yvor Winters were two literary critics who were especially concerned with revising the canon of renaissance English literature. Eliot, for example, championed poet Sir John Davies in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1926. During the course of the 1920s, Eliot did much to establish the importance of the metaphysical school, both through his critical writing and by applying their method in his own work. However, by 1961 A. Alvarez was commenting 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." Two decades later, a hostile view was expressed that emphasis on their importance had been an attempt by Eliot and his followers to impose a 'high Anglican and royalist literary history' on 17th-century English poetry.
The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939 an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry, which would exclude the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Winters claimed that the Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement had been undervalued and argued that George Gascoigne "deserves to be ranked among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher".
Towards the end of the 20th century the established canon was increasingly disputed.