![]() ![]() A couple of months ago, we reached out to dozens of critics and authors - well-established voices (Michiko Kakutani, Luc Sante), more radical thinkers (Eileen Myles), younger reviewers for outlets like n+1, and some of our best-read contributors, too. Its supposed permanence became the subject of more recent battles, back in the 20th century, between those who defended it as the foundation of Western civilization and those who attacked it as exclusive or even racist.īut what if you could start a canon from scratch? We thought it might be fun to speculate (very prematurely) on what a canon of the 21st century might look like right now. Born of the ancient battle over which stories belonged in the “canon” of the Bible, the modern literary canon took root in universities and became defined as the static product of consensus - a set of leather-bound volumes you could shoot into space to make a good first impression with the aliens. ![]() Okay, assessing a century’s literary legacy after only 18 and a half years is kind of a bizarre thing to do.Īctually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux. ![]()
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