Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Canons after "Postcolonial Studies"

Canons after "Postcolonial Studies" Page 297 Salah D. Hassan Public controversies about the canon of English literature have now largely subsided, and the field of literary study accommodates for the time being works by women, U.S. minorities, non-Europeans, and gays and lesbians. The so-called culture wars of the 1980s left, however, an enduring trace on some texts that broke open the old canon. One of the paradoxical effects of the emergence of a new canon in English literature during the last two decades has been the unarticulated stigmatization of certain works that were at first privileged by attempts to create a more inclusive and egalitarian literary field. This stigmatization operates in a number of ways, but it is always associated with the history of political contestation that adheres to those “subversive” texts, which were used to redefine the parameters of the English literary canon. The most common feature of this stigmatization is the representative role that the previously excluded texts have continued to play after they achieved inclusion in the canon. What needs to be stressed is that especially representative countercanonical works whose early entry into the canon signaled the “multiculturalization” or “decolonization” of English studies exhibit the stigma of canonical disorder, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Duke University Press

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/canons-after-postcolonial-studies-u87MNh69t4

References (8)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1531-4200
eISSN
1533-6255
DOI
10.1215/15314200-1-2-297
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Page 297 Salah D. Hassan Public controversies about the canon of English literature have now largely subsided, and the field of literary study accommodates for the time being works by women, U.S. minorities, non-Europeans, and gays and lesbians. The so-called culture wars of the 1980s left, however, an enduring trace on some texts that broke open the old canon. One of the paradoxical effects of the emergence of a new canon in English literature during the last two decades has been the unarticulated stigmatization of certain works that were at first privileged by attempts to create a more inclusive and egalitarian literary field. This stigmatization operates in a number of ways, but it is always associated with the history of political contestation that adheres to those “subversive” texts, which were used to redefine the parameters of the English literary canon. The most common feature of this stigmatization is the representative role that the previously excluded texts have continued to play after they achieved inclusion in the canon. What needs to be stressed is that especially representative countercanonical works whose early entry into the canon signaled the “multiculturalization” or “decolonization” of English studies exhibit the stigma of canonical disorder,

Journal

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and CultureDuke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2001

There are no references for this article.