Western canon

The Great Books of the Western World is an attempt to present the western canon in a single package of 61 volumes

The Western canon is a term used to denote a of books, and, more widely, music and art, that has been the most influential in shaping Western culture. It asserts a compendium of the greatest Work of art of artistic merit. Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the development of high culture. Although previously held in high regard, it has been the subject of increasing contention through the latter half of the 20th century. In practice, debates, and attempts to actually define the Canon in lists, are essentially restricted to books of various sorts: Literature, including Poetry, Fiction and Drama, autobiographical writings and Letters, Philosophy and History. A few accessible books on the Sciences are usually included.

Examples

Examples of shorter canonical lists include (in which the selectors have attempted to list only the most important ones):

University reading lists are also good indicators of what is considered to be in the Western canon:

St. John's College reading list
Columbia College Core Curriculum
Yale College Directed Studies curriculum

Longer lists (in which the selectors have attempted to be more comprehensive):

Loeb Classical Library (Greek and Latin authors)
I Tatti Renaissance Library (Renaissance authors)
Everyman's Library (Modern works)
Penguin Classics

Origins

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.

An earlier attempt, the Harvard Classics (1909) was promulgated by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, whose thesis was the same as Carlyle's:

... The greatest university of all is a collection of books. - Thomas Carlyle

Debate

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 many others in contemporary societies around the world. Others, notably Allan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, have disagreed strongly. Authors such as Yale Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom (no relation) 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.

Defenders maintain that those who undermine the canon do so out of primarily political interests, and that the measure of quality represented by the works of the canon is of an aesthetic rather than political nature. Thus, any political objections aimed at the canon are ultimately irrelevant.

One of the main objections to a canon of literature is the question of authority—who should have the power to determine what works are worth reading and teaching?

Works

Works which are commonly included in the canon include works of fiction such as some epic poems, poetry, music, drama, 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, mythology, science, philosophy, economics, politics, and history.

Works which directly address the canon (both for and against):

by Harold Bloom (ISBN 978-1573225144)
by Harold Bloom (ISBN 978-1573227513)
The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme (ISBN 978-0374529253)
The History of Western Literature by Otto Maria Carpeaux (eight volumes, only available in Portuguese)
by Lee Morrissey (ISBN 978-1403968203)

External links

Western literature refers to the literature of the Indo-European languages, as well as several languages geographically or historically related to the Indo-European languages (Basque, Hungarian, and so forth).
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Classical music is a broad term that usually refers to music produced in, or rooted in the traditions of, Western art, ecclesiastical and concert music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 9th century to the 21st century.
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Western art is the art of Europe, and those parts of the world that have come to follow predominantly European cultural traditions such as North America.

Written histories of Western art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient
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Much of the recent sociological debate on power revolves around the issue of the constraining and/or enabling nature of power. The most comprehensive account of power can be found in Steven Lukes where he discusses the three dimensions of power.
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Western culture or Western civilization is a term used to generally refer to most of the cultures of European origin and most of their descendants. It comprises the broad, geographically based, heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs (such as religious
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Greatness is a concept that is heavily dependent on a person's perspective and biases. The term can be used to emphasize perceived superiority of a person or thing. In Europe the most lauded rulers were given the attribute "the Great" (e.g.
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Artistic merit is an English language term that is used in relation to cultural products when referring to the judgment of their perceived quality or value as works of art.

Artistic merit is a crucial term, as pertains to visual art.
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Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Since details of fact change constantly, these cannot be the most important.
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High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the Arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture, or denoting the culture of ruling social groups.
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Literature literally "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter) as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary, or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry.
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Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible
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Fiction is the telling of stories which are not entirely based upon facts. More specifically, fiction is an imaginative form of narrative, one of the four basic rhetorical modes.
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Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance.^[1] It is derived from a Greek word meaning "action" (Classical Greek δράμα), derived from "to do" (Classical Greek
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Philosophy is the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).
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Science (from the Latin scientia, 'knowledge'), in the broadest sense, refers to any systematic knowledge or practice.^[1] Examples of the broader use included political science and computer science, which are not incorrectly named, but rather named according to
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For the software company, see .

Canonical is an adjective derived from . Canon comes from the Greek word kanon "rule" (perhaps originally from kanna "reed", cognate to cane) is used in various meanings.
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The Harvard Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot that was first published in 1909.

Dr.
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Great Books refers to a curriculum and a book list. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:

the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;

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Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in an attempt to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volumes.
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Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, Literary Critic
Born:
New York City
Occupation: literary and cultural critic
Literary movement: Romanticism, Deconstructionism, Aestheticism
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Core Curriculum was originally developed as the main curriculum used by Columbia University's Columbia College. It began in 1919 with "Contemporary Civilization," about the origins of western civilization.
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Yale, see Yale (disambiguation).

Yale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. Now it is the undergraduate section of Yale and consists of 12 residential colleges.
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Directed Studies at Yale University is a selective humanities study program for freshmen, popularly known as "DS" or even "Directed Suicide" or "Death Sentence" for a workload that includes reading up to 1,500 pages and writing a paper every week.
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Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by the Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or
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The I Tatti Renaissance Library is a book series published by the Harvard University Press, which aims to present important works of Renaissance Latin Literature to a modern audience by printing the original Latin text on each left-hand leaf, and an English translation on
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Everyman's Library is a series of reprinted classic literature currently published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (a division of Random House) in the United States, and Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the United Kingdom. The series began publishing in 1906.
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The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection is a full set of all the books published in the current edition of Penguin Classics, a division of British publisher Penguin Books.
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English}}}
Writing system: Latin (English variant)
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng
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twentieth century of the Common Era began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000, according to the Gregorian calendar. Some historians consider the era from about 1914 to 1991 to be the Short Twentieth Century.
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