CANON

From Philosopedia

CANON For theists, a canon is an ecclesiastical law or code of laws which a church council has established. Included in a canon are, for example, the books of the Bible which are officially accepted as Holy scripture. In addition, the canon is that part of the Mass which ends just before the Lord’s Prayer. Also, a canon is a clergyman who belongs to the chapter or the staff of a cathedral or collegiate church. For non-theists in the humanities, the canon is that body of Western thought and art that is considered to be at the core of our education. But who is to determine which works are to be included? Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, The Books and School of the Ages (1994) concentrated upon twenty-six major authors and included dozens of others he considered central to the canon. Shakespeare is ordinarily considered pre-eminent, and Bloom included Molière, Ibsen, and Beckett. But by not including Racine, Lope de Vega, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, or Pirandello, he was criticized heavily. Similarly, he included Tolstoy and Proust, but no Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert, Balzac, or Stendhal. In the humanities, no agreement is to be found as to what works are definitely part of the canon.