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PARTISAN REVIEW
courses , have been devised by departments and individual teachers.
But the texts have been selected from the general canon. And it
always has been assumed that the major works of the past - which
could be identified - constituted the intellectual achievements of
Western civilization . With a few exceptions here and there, these
works were known to every scholar and thinker. They were not put
together by the whims of a few "elitist" academics. But what has been
the actual process by which these works, from Plato to Proust-have
been chosen? There is a popular myth that works deemed great at
one time were forgotten in other periods, and vice versa. There have
been a very few cases of such reversals, but on the whole this myth
rests on an ignorance - or misreading - of literary history . There
have been different views of various works, based on changing per–
sonal and historical sensibilities , but geniuses have not been de–
moted into bumbling talents. Nor has the reverse taken place . There
is also, as I have suggested, the current fashionable notion that the
so-called canon has been chosen by white , male, Christian, Western
elitists , as though they constituted some kind of self-appointed com–
mittee throughout modern history.
4. What has happened to create the tradition is both simpler
and more complicated. The so-called canon has never been decided
by popular vote, or by academics, or by political pressure. Figures in
various fields have been perpetuated by later figures . Thus Plato
and Aristotle and Descartes, for example, have formed the basis of
subsequent developments in philosophy. So, too, writers like Ho–
mer, Shakespeare, John Donne, and George Eliot, and so on up to
the present, have been made part of the literary tradition by subse–
quent writers. Here and there the use of earlier writers by later ones
has shifted, as in the feeling by Pope and Dryden that Shakespeare
was not elegant enough for eighteenth-century tastes, or in the re–
evaluation of the metaphysical poets and Milton by T. S. Eliot. But
these were not put-downs: the changes marked a shift in the choice
of predecessors who were thought to make for a more important line
of influence .
In
essence, the formation of the tradition-or the
canon - is a creative process carried on by practitioners in philos–
ophy, fiction, poetry, art, literary criticism, social thought , and so
on .
It
may work positively, or negatively, as argued by Harold
Bloom.
5. The problem of the curriculum is complicated, however, by
the nature of the student body and its relation to teachers , to the
culture , and to the different philosophies of education. And here
