Questions: Contesting the Canon: Plurality and Alternative Values

Question 1

A prestigious university revises its English literature curriculum to include Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, and several Latin American novelists alongside Shakespeare and Milton. Which of the following most accurately describes what this revision accomplishes and what it leaves unchanged?

• A. It fully addresses canon contestation by making the curriculum representative of global literary traditions
• B. It performs pluralist expansion — adding works by marginalized authors — but leaves the underlying criteria of 'universal literary value' intact
• C. It represents a polycentric approach because it incorporates multiple cultural traditions
• D. It is insufficient because only the complete removal of all canonical texts constitutes genuine contestation

Answer: (B)

Pluralist expansion — the addition of previously excluded works — is the most common institutional response to canon critique, but critics argue it leaves the logic of canonicity untouched. The same criteria (aesthetic transcendence, universal human significance) that previously excluded these authors are now applied to them; they are admitted insofar as they meet standards set by the tradition that excluded them. Genuine canon contestation goes further, questioning whether those criteria are themselves neutral or whether they encode particular cultural values.

Question 2

Feminist scholar Nina Baym argued that the criteria of 'aesthetic greatness' in American literary history were gendered. What is the deeper implication of this argument for canon contestation?

• A. Female authors should be evaluated by different standards than male authors to account for historical disadvantage
• B. The standards of literary value themselves reflect cultural biases, so changing the list of canonical texts without changing the criteria is insufficient
• C. Literary quality is entirely subjective and no standards can be applied cross-culturally
• D. Women's writing is inherently more valuable than the canon acknowledges and deserves proportional representation

Answer: (B)

Baym's argument — and this is the key insight of deep canon contestation — is not merely that women were excluded from a neutral competition, but that the competition's rules were written to favor certain modes of writing (individualism, isolation, epic struggle) over others (domestic, relational, collaborative). If the criteria are biased, then applying those same criteria to newly admitted authors doesn't solve the problem; it requires evaluating the criteria themselves. This is what distinguishes pluralist expansion from genuine contestation of the canon's logic.

Question 3

A polycentric approach to literary study treats multiple literary traditions as independent centers, each with their own internal histories and evaluative criteria, rather than as satellites of a Western center.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. Polycentric literary study is the most radical version of canon contestation: it refuses the metaphor of center and periphery altogether. Rather than having a Western canon and its 'global margins,' it treats Arabic, Chinese, Indian, African, and Latin American traditions as independently constituted with their own canons, debates, and criteria. The practical challenge is that it requires genuine multilingual and multicultural competency, not merely a commitment to diversity in principle.

Question 4

Simply adding works by previously excluded authors to a literary curriculum is sufficient to address the critique that postcolonial and feminist scholars have made of the Western canon.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

False. This is the key distinction between pluralist expansion and deeper canon contestation. Adding Toni Morrison or Ngugi wa Thiong'o to a syllabus leaves the underlying question — what makes a text canonically valuable? — answered by the same tradition that excluded them. The deeper critique, articulated by scholars like Ngugi and Baym, is that the very criteria of literary value (universality, transcendence, the masterwork tradition) were shaped by the exclusions and reflect particular cultural assumptions. Addressing this requires not just a different list but different questions about how literary value is determined.

Question 5

Why do some scholars argue that simply expanding the canon with previously excluded works leaves the most fundamental problem of canon contestation unresolved?

Model answer: Because pluralist expansion accepts the existing criteria of literary value and simply applies them to new candidates. The deeper critique is that those criteria — aesthetic transcendence, universal significance, the 'masterwork' tradition — were themselves formed in a context of exclusion and may encode cultural biases. If the standards by which texts are judged as 'worthy' were shaped by the tradition that excluded women and non-Western writers, then admitting new authors by those same standards doesn't contest the logic; it ratifies it.

This is the distinction between a reform that changes who is included versus one that changes how inclusion is determined. Canon contestation at its deepest level is an epistemological challenge: it asks not 'which texts are great?' but 'who gets to define greatness, by what criteria, and who benefits from those definitions?' Pluralist expansion is a reform within the system; polycentric and feminist approaches question the system itself.