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Review Articles Loading the Canon 'LINDA HUTCHEON Jan Gorak. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis ofa Literary Idea Vision, Division anq Revision: Athlone Series on Canons. Athlone Press 1991. 309 Charles Altieri. Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force ofImaginative Ideals Northwestern University Press 1990.370. US $36.95; $14.95 paper Loading, not to say firing, the canon has become a major academic growth industry in the last decade: hardly a critic or theorist of note has failed to pronounce on the implications - positive or negative - of the nature of canons and the processes of canonization. At the risk of over-using the obvious pun, this industry has been fuelled by a variety of challenges to humanistic assumptions of the universality and timelessness of 'great art,' challenges launched by the rise of theory in general and of critiques based on gender, race, and class in particular. After a dozen years of discussion, perhaps the time has now come to assess both the terms of the debate itself and its multipIe consequences. The seeming innocence of the idea of the canon as a set of texts having the authority of 'perennial classics'1 has been challenged. If, instead, the canon is seen as a 'body of texts which best performs in the sphere of culture the work of legitimating the prevailing social order' and if entry to such a canon is determined by conformity (and I deliberately use a 'loaded' term here) to some dominant political ideology, the recent media coverage of the 'political correctness' debates raises the stakes of the debate considerably for us in the academy, faced as we are not only with challenges to the notion of canonicity but also with the formation of new canons reflecting new cultural dominants. The danger, as Edward Said has noted, is that new canons can (though need not) mean 'a new history and, less happily, a new parochialism.'2 In the continuing attempt to articulate 'a new history' for the discipline of literary studies, it is incumbent upon us all to avoid the rather too tempting trap of 'a new parochialism.' One of the ways of side-stepping such a trap would be to examine what the process of canonization entails - in alternative as well as mainstream canons - and to study the complexity ofboth the seemingly simultaneous need for and suspicion of canoniZing. Both books under review here do this, though in very different ways, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER2, WINTER 1993/4 370 LINDA HtITCHEON and both work with and out of the debates that have come to redefine the canon, in Robert von Hallberg's terms, as 'what other people, once powerful, have made and what should now be opened up, demystified, or eliminated altogether.'3 Yet canons are still being constructed - by women, blacks, natives, and others who have felt excluded from the European ones. There seems to be a need to do so, driven by a strong conviction of the cultural significance of certain marginalized works. It is this habit canons have of continuing to be constructed and even surviving by 'a combination of narrative suggestiveness and ineradicable cultural need' (7) that Jan Gorak's The Making of the Modern Canon helps us to understand by its careful and thorough historical analysis ofcanon formation through the ages. The extensive frame of reference (and bibliography) opens up new perspectives on important issues, not the least of which is that there actually seems to be no censuring, homogenizing, systematically exclusionary beast known as 'the' canon, but rather many competing and various canons and canonical discourses. Gorak's analysis shows how each is institutionally dependent and functional, how each enshrines values, though not at all in the same way. This 'complexifying' of the canon question is a most welcome addition to a debate that has often slipped into reductionism. Using the etymological root of 'canon' as a kind of organizing structure, Gorak examines a wide range of theories about and discourses around canonization. The Greek root means rod Dr reed, and so, for Gorak, this means the canon can potentially be anything from an instrument of coercion to an often flexible mode of...

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