Canon and Countercanon: What to Read and Why

What is the Literary Canon

The canon is a list of texts acknowledged as “great”, “required”, “classic”. In the Western tradition, this is roughly: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce. The “Great Books” are an American program of humanities education based on the belief that these texts contain “eternal wisdom”.

Harold Bloom (“The Western Canon”, 1994) passionately defended the canon: great texts are great not because authority imposed them, but because they possess aesthetic power—they astonish, transform the reader, “expand” them. Shakespeare is great because he is Shakespeare—not because he is a white European man.

Criticism of the Canon

Feminist, postcolonial, and cultural criticism raised the question: who decides what is “great”? Canonization is a cultural process dominated by those who have power in academia, publishing, media. Women writers were systematically excluded (Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen received recognition late and only partially). Authors from “peripheral” cultures—even later.

Inclusion in the canon is a question of power. The traditional canon is not a neutral collection of the “best literature”, but the history of a particular cultural group that passed off its particular as universal.

“Culture Wars” and Their Consequences

1980s–90s in the USA: “culture wars”—debates about what should be studied at universities. Traditionalists (Bloom, Allan Bloom “The Closing of the American Mind”, 1987) vs. multiculturalists. Stanford replaced the course “Western Culture” with the course “Cultures, Ideas, Values”—with the inclusion of non-European texts.

The compromise of most modern academic programs: to study both the Western canon and non-Western texts, and to understand how both groups work in their contexts. Not to “cancel” Homer—but to add Chinua Achebe and Mao Dun.

What to Read—A Practical Advice

Harold Bloom advised: read what astonishes you. If a text does not “astonish you”—perhaps it isn’t your time for it. The choice of reading is a personal story. There is no single right order.

A few principles for meaningful reading: (1) Read the primary sources, not just about them. (2) Read the text in its historical context—and at the same time, ask it your own questions. (3) Read different cultures—your own “obviousness” becomes visible only through comparison. (4) Re-read great texts at different periods of life—they change, because you change.

Reading is a conversation across time. When you read Tolstoy, you enter into a dialogue with a person who died in 1910, who understood something about human nature that retains value. This is a particular kind of immortality—and a particular kind of learning.

Question for reflection: If you were to compile a “required reading canon” for a manager in your industry—which 5 books would you include and why? Would you include only “business literature” or also fiction?