Christopher M. Kuipers, University of California, Irvine
As a basic literary concept, "canon" is typically taken to be entirely relative to a given culture--an always ultimately arbitrary conglomeration of texts and other putative "monuments" of what that culture might prefer to have sent as its calling card to the future. However, the fact that lists of accepted authors and works have been gathered in so many different times and places suggests that it is the content, rather than the concept, of the canon that has been subject to variation. Based in part on my forthcoming article in College Literature (spring 2003), this paper explores how the process of canonization, and particularly the embodiment of the process in the literary form of anthologies, can be regarded as a literary universal.A literary universal, as Patrick Colm Hogan posits it, is a factor that can generatively combine with other literary universals to produce the local differences that we mark as the distinguishing features of various national and historical literatures. I would argue that the vastly divergent "canons" seen throughout history and among nations are the products of two universal cognitive forces of literary collection--one which I call "anthology" and the other "corpus." Inspired by the topological fields of force of the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, I intend these two designations not only to suggest their often imperfect physical embodiments of literary anthologies and literary corpuses, but also to imply two interrelated cognitive styles: the anthological desire to "select out," and the corpuscular desire to "gather all." I will focus in particular on the dynamics of the latter force of anthologization, illustrated by three cases from different periods and nations: the Greek Anthology; the Japanese imperial anthology The Kokinshu; and The Classic Hundred, a contemporary statistical collection of the most often anthologized English poems.
The upshot is a connection between, on the one hand, Robert Alter's recent argument for a reconception of the canon as creative rather than repressive, and, on the other, Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive theory of conceptual embodiment. The dynamical consistency of "canon" conceived in this way also helps to explain a number of recent changes in popular college literature anthologies. More generally, there also seems to be a need for universal concepts in literature, like the concept of "canon" I propose, that are conceived as much more generatively dynamic than as generically static. [C.K.]