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The process of listmaking—defining the boundaries of the canon—is endless. One of the notable attempts in the English-speaking world was the Great Books of the Western World program. This program, developed in the middle third of the 20th century, grew out of the curriculum at the University of Chicago. University president Robert Hutchins and his collaborator Mortimer Adler developed a program that offered reading lists, books, and organizational strategies for reading clubs to the general public.
There has been an ongoing, intensely political debate over the nature and status of the canon since at least the 1960s. In the USA, in particular, it has been attacked as a compendium of books written mainly by "dead white European males", that thus do not represent the viewpoints of other people (i.e., most people in the world). Others, notably Allan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, have fought back vigorously. Authors such as YaleYale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third oldest American collegiate institution (or fourth, if St. John's College, Annapolis is included) and one of the most prestigious in the world. The Univer Professor of Humanities Harold BloomHarold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic, known as a defender of the 19th century Romantic poets at a time when their reputations were at a low ebb, the author of a controversial theory of poetic influence, and more recently as the have also spoken strongly in favor of the canon, and in general the canon remains as a represented idea in most institutions, though its implications continue to be debated heavily.
Even while ignoring the political issues, the selection of the canon betrays either a bias against or ignorance of non-Western traditions, in addition to ignorance of less publicized areas, intellectual and geographic, of Western literature.
One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authorityIn politics, authority generally refers to the ability to make laws, independent of the power to enforce them, or the ability to permit something. People obey authority out of respect, while they obey power out of fear. For example, the congress has the a—who should enjoy the power to determine what works are worth reading and teaching?
Works which are commonly included in the canon include works of fictionThree Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. Fiction is the term used to describe works of the imagination. This is in contrast to non-fiction, which such as epic poems, poetryPoetry is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its use, musicMusic often an art/ entertainment, is a total social fact whose definitions vary according to era and culture," according to Jean Molino. 1 It is often contrasted with noise. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez: "The border between music and no, dramaThis article refers to the art form. For the town, see Drama, Greece . Drama is a term generally used to refer to an art form involving performances by actors, either real or computer-generated. These performances can be in a variety of media: live perfor, novels, and other assorted forms of literature from the many, diverse Western (and more recently non-Western) cultures. Many non-fiction works are also listed, primarily from the areas of religion, science, philosophy, economics, politics, and history.
Works which directly address the canon (both for and against):