2 research outputs found
Concept of canon in literary studies : critical debates 1970-2000.
The present thesis focuses on the critical dialogues on the literary canon developed
between 1970 and 2000 in the United States as a crucial juncture for the consolidation
of the notion of canon as a scholarly subject matter within the field of literary studies.
By taking stock of the abundance of scholarly contributions on the literary canon
produced at this time, this thesis pursues two aims: first, it initiates a process of
systematisation of the scholarly material on the canon produced during the last thirty
years of the twentieth century; second, it focuses on a selection of particularly
influential works that have furthered the understanding of specific aspects of the notion
of canon.
Two introductory chapters outline respectively the historical and the theoretical
background of this research. Chapter One explores the historical framework within
which the canon started to receive increasing critical attention inside and outside U.S.
academia. In particular, it observes how the historical and cultural phenomenon known
as the Culture Wars came to bear upon the way in which the notion of canon was
perceived and treated by critics and scholars. Early and later examples of canonical
criticism are juxtaposed so as to argue that the absorption of debates about the definition
of national cultural heritage within U.S. academia influenced the terms in which the
canon was being discussed, privileging oppositional rhetorical strategies over the more
moderate tones of early theoretical approaches. Chapter Two draws on Jan Gorak’s
work in The Making of The Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea
(1991) to explore the history of the concept of canon and of its associations with the
diverging attitudes adopted by critics in relation to the canon in the period in exam.
The second part of this thesis constitutes of three case studies that illustrate the
significance for our understanding of the concepts of canon, canonicity and canon
formation, of three texts published in the 1990s by Harold Bloom, John Guillory and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Each chapter observes how these studies contributed to clarify
the relationship between the idea of canon and that of tradition, between canon and
ideology and, finally, between the canon and the anthology, respectively.
Chapter Three locates Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of Ages
(1994) in relation to his earlier theory of the anxiety of influence and argues that
Bloom’s account of canon formation relies on his definition of tradition as the agonistic
struggle between poets and their predecessors. Chapter Four is a close reading of John
Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) and
explores the political ideology underlying its selective use of the work of Pierre
Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci and T.S.Eliot. Finally, Chapter Five engages with Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.’s attempt to establish a canon of African American Literature through
his role as editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996)
'All that associates, saves': Hawthorne biography and twentieth-century American cultural criticism
This study gives an account of the roles that biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a nineteenth-century American writer, have come to play within the twentieth-century discourses concerned with American literature as a national literature and as a field of academic inquiry. While attempting to outline the general development of Hawthorne biography in this context, it concentrates mainly on three Hawthorne biographies and on the historical, intellectual and political contexts within which they were produced: Newton Arvin's Hawthorne, published in 1929, Randall Stewart's Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (1948), and Walter Herbert's Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-class Family (1993). Each of these lives has been a benchmark in Hawthorne biography; they have introduced new theories and methods and have been embraced by some contemporary critics but contested by others. The first chapter of this thesis outlines debates about biographical practice in a specifically American context. Chapter 2 reads the Hawthorne biographies of the 1920s in the context of Van Wyck Brooks's call to 'create a usable past'. Chapter 3 examines the Hawthorne biographies of the late 1940s, paying particular attention to the ways in which politically conservative or liberal values are inscribed in them and situating them in relation to the attitudes towards biography on the part of practitioners of the New Criticism on one hand and of historical scholarship on the other. Chapter 4 explores new developments in Hawthorne biography since the early 1980s and specifically analyses Herbert's 'new historicist' study of the nuclear Hawthorne family in the light of David Reynolds's notion of 'cultural biography'. The thesis ends with a conclusion which considers the forms in which Hawthorne biography might continue in the twenty-first century