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Canons are not natural collections of great works but products of institutional power, economic access, and historical contingency. What gets canonized depends on who controls publishing, education, and criticism. Understanding canonicity means examining which works, authors, and traditions get elevated to exemplary status and which remain marginal or invisible. Comparative literature challenges Western-centered canons by recovering non-Western traditions and questioning the criteria by which literary value is judged.
You've already studied how the Western literary canon formed historically — how certain works became touchstones through anthologization, university syllabi, critical tradition, and prize culture — and how that formation has been contested by scholars arguing for pluralism and the recovery of marginalized voices. Canonicity is the next analytical step: not just asking which texts made the canon, but examining the institutional mechanisms through which "greatness" gets assigned and stabilized as though it were self-evident.
The key move is to distinguish between aesthetic value and canonical status. A work may have extraordinary artistic complexity and still never enter the canon — not because it lacks quality but because its authors lacked access to the institutions that confer canonical status: major publishers, prestigious universities, the critical establishment, national literary prizes. Conversely, works of modest aesthetic achievement can remain canonical for decades through educational entrenchment. Once a text is on enough syllabi and in enough anthologies, it becomes self-sustaining — new critics are trained on it, new courses cite it, new readers encounter it first. Canonicity thus operates partly through institutional inertia.
Power enters canonicity at every level. The scholars who defined the Western canon were overwhelmingly white, male, and European; the criteria they formalized — irony, ambiguity, formal complexity, universality — happened to favor the texts they already valued. When those criteria were applied globally, non-Western literatures were either excluded (not "universal" enough, too culturally specific) or admitted selectively through texts that most resembled European forms. Postcolonial scholarship, which you've already encountered, showed that this selection process was not neutral aesthetics but a form of cultural imperialism: the canon defined the standard against which all other literatures were measured, and the standard was designed in advance to find them wanting.
In comparative literature, this analysis generates a methodological commitment: to approach every canon as a historical artifact to be explained rather than a natural collection to be received. When you encounter a "great works" list, the questions are not only "what do these texts do?" but "who made this list?", "in what institutional context?", "what did it exclude and why?", and "what reading practices does the list normalize?" These questions don't dissolve literary value — a text can be both canonically powerful and aesthetically rich — but they prevent aesthetic evaluation from being used to disguise what is, at bottom, a history of selection by particular groups for particular purposes.
The positive project that follows from this critique is recovery: identifying literary traditions that were systematically excluded from canonical status, reading them on their own terms rather than by imported criteria, and questioning whether the categories we use to discuss literature — "the novel," "lyric poetry," "the dramatic unities" — are truly universal or are Western forms that comparative literature has sometimes mistaken for human universals. This is not relativism about aesthetic value; it is rigor about how aesthetic categories themselves are historical.
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