Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary

Recent critical debates have tended to generate their own controversial vocabularies, by means of which the milieu of an entire debate can be evoked with great economy, in a word or two. Such a word is canon-the name of a debate. I would like to begin by observing the tacit historical displacement that permits the currency of this word: the displacement of the word classic by the word canon. The latter term does not now signify the same relatively uncritical regard for the great works of Western literature as its predecessor, but rather a critique of that very regard, a critique that has all but retired the word classic as the signifier of a precritical era of criticism itself. I foreground this simple historical observation by way of emphasizing the more important point that the word is not so much the name for a historically stable collection of texts as it is the sign of a particular crisis in the history of literary criticism within the university. For it is only within the university that the critique of the canon has currency, in the form of an ongoing debate about the syllabus, the curriculum. The critique of the canon has eventuated in many new curricular programs, from which I do not intend to dissent here. On the contrary, I would like to provide such programs with a different and better defense of their necessity. The business of this argument is not to question the necessity of curricular change but to interrogate some of the historical assumptions dictating the current program of canonical reform, and determining as well the terms by which the political effects of reform are typically represented. For the purpose of bringing the critique of the canon to a further stage of self-critique, I would summarize its program in two basic principles: (i) An analogy between the Bible and literature as forms of scripture, an analogy to which we owe the word canon, along with the supposition that canons of texts possess an inherent drive toward closure, completion. The tacit effects of the scriptural analogy are continually present