The Anthology/Corpus Dynamic: A Field Theory of the Canon

Anthologies will always be with us. ¹ But whatever the syllabi of foundational literary survey courses may tacitly proclaim, an anthology is not the same thing as "the canon." Like anthologies, the canon has inevitably to do with pedagogy (Levin 1981). But unlike anthologies, the canon is not necessarily transient and quickly dated. Nor is the literary canon able to be historically triangulated, I would argue, from all the literary anthologies that are in print at a given moment--a finer point to which I will return. The anthology is a literary storage and communication form: a textbook, (now) a digital archive, (once) a commonplace book, (perhaps still) the poems one has memorized for pleasure. The canon, on the other hand, is not a form, but a literary-disciplinary dynamic: it is a field of force that is never exclusively realized by any physical form, just as metal filings align with but do not constitute a magnetic field. Grasping this dynamic entails a process of concept-formation that both clarifies and complicates our current understanding of such basic but slippery concepts as "canon." Thus far, the formal definitions of the term "canon" number six (Fowler 1979) or even ten (Harris 1991): this multiplicity could use some conceptual simplification. Yet "the canon" is also something that all literary scholars and students tend to live with tacitly, fish in water: for conscious beings, such a life-supporting medium should appear at times opaque, rather than continuously transparent. What I offer here at the fork of conceptual simplicity and complexity is the addition of a third term, "corpus," to designate the other focus that works in summation with "anthology" in the field of "canon." I should emphasize at the start that I am not offering a structuralist binary opposition. What I am offering is the formation of a dynamic concept of the canon, that is, as a dynamically changing field of force, whereas structuralist concepts remain distinctly static. Now, the invocation of the scientific field of force as a way to form literary concepts is not new (Hayles 1984), ² but I mean it here specifically in a sense perhaps less well known, that of the topological and field psychology of Kurt Lewin. I will outline Lewin's theory of scientific concept-formation here as the high road to forming the concept of canon as an anthology/corpus dynamic.

Lewinian Dynamic Concepts

It may not be going too far to say that Kurt Lewin has had a greater impact on contemporary psychology than both Freud and Jung. Though less remembered today than these contemporaries, Lewin (1890-1947) is a key founder of social and organizational psychology, and he originated such influential ideas as group dynamics and "cognitive dissonance." ³ Like the latter term, and like many of Freud's concepts, the keywords of Lewin's thought and experimental research have penetrated thoroughly into the contemporary mind. Some of these Lewinian ideas and their applications include "sensitivity training," leadership and parenting styles (autocratic; democratic; laissez-faire), "groupthink" and group decision, training groups ("T-groups"), "quality circles" and "total quality management," and the "social climate" and psychological "tension." Lewin's name is rarely associated with such concepts in large part because Lewin himself as an academic colleague was democratic to a fault, and allowed his students and associates to share his ideas and receive credit for them.

It may also be true that much of Lewin's theory is too difficult for general consumption--Lewin is certainly not half the writer that Freud was. In developing his influential but demanding field theory of psychology (1951; Mey 1972), Lewin employed geometrical topology, the mathematics of areas (1936; Leeper 1943). The result was an abstruse psychological system: with his complicated diagrams of vectors and Venn-like ovals, Lewin mapped the dynamics of given psychological situations as sets of interposed forces. Above all, Lewin emphasized the need for dynamic concept-formation...