Why We Need a Literary Canon

The enduring value of preserving the best of human thought and expression

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

The process of creating an artistic canon is a natural method of connecting the present to the past. Successive generations decide a work is worth experiencing and understanding, so the work remains in the collective consciousness, even as trends and fashions change. Rejecting the idea of a canon, even in the name of noble-sounding sentiments of equality and social justice, fundamentally rejects the idea that certain works deserve to be remembered. At its extreme, this anti-canonical worldview reduces all distinctions between works to arbitrary judgments made by elitist, hierarchical structures of power. Of course, many brilliant writers and artists have historically suffered exclusion from artistic canons for reasons of race, sex, or class, but this does not mean that prejudice is the primary factor shaping artistic canons. Reading the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky or Virginia Woolf broadens the individual perspective in a way that reading Colleen Hoover and her ilk does not; it places the mind in contact with the beliefs and passions and anxieties of previous generations, expressed with unique skill and vividness.

The word canon, derived from the Greek word for rule (“κανών”), is a relatively new term to apply to this process—its use for this purpose dates from the early twentieth century. Canon originally referred to church law; as an extension of that meaning, it referred to the books of the Bible that a governing church body saw as legitimate, as opposed to those considered apocryphal. Early-twentieth-century academics applied the term to literary study. But the process of canonization far predates the term. The Greek plays that survive today, written by the likes of Sophocles and Aristophanes, are those that scholars of the past chose to copy and preserve, believing that these plays had value for future generations. The shallow or formulaic plays, of which there were many, were justly forgotten. Similarly, popular fairy tales and folk stories survive because their structures and plot points constantly brought delight, and countless generations kept these stories alive long enough for them to eventually be written down.

This impulse of choosing certain works to revisit and remember, from generation to generation, is a very widespread one because it is a useful one. Every era produces an overwhelming quantity of art, and the significant majority of this art simply regurgitates preexisting trends and platitudes. There was a lot of bad nineteenth-century art, just like there is a lot of bad twenty-first-century art, but no one remembers it. Certain names, like Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, endure, while others of the same era, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Marie Corelli, do not. Every age contains certain works made by particularly skilled artists—whether they be novelists, dramatists, painters, or filmmakers—that are particularly incisive or emotionally affecting in how they capture perennially relevant parts of human existence. Percy Shelley referred to poetry, by which he meant any form of enduring art, as something that “acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness,” and that is “reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure.” People thus keep returning to these canonical works, and they show these works to the next generation. There are canons of everything, from Cubist painting to electronic ambient music, but literature is old enough that it has a long and vibrant canon.

In the past, higher education has served as a facilitator of a literary canon, but modern academia has a relationship to canonicity that ranges from ambivalent to actively hostile. There are many reasons for this shift, from the ever-present critiques of canonical literature being too filled with “dead white guys” to a larger view of canon-building as an innately reactionary and hierarchical impulse, but the point at which they all converge is the reductive politicization of literature, meaning the belief that literature is valuable only to the extent that it reinforces a particular political worldview. For example, the MLA, the largest association of literature academics, has made “Visibility” the theme of its 2025 conference and offered the following justification:

To be sure, ableist representations of visibility as a titular term appear throughout scholarly discourses. I aim to resist such a failing here by invoking the rich, varied, and intersecting legacies of scholarship from Black studies to postcolonial studies to disability studies that remind us that prejudicial ways of “seeing,” knowing, and being are misinformed at least and dangerous at worst.

I have no desire to condemn this statement or convention in particular; rather, I simply wish to offer an example of the kind of politics-centric criticism that is omnipresent in academia. This kind of thinking inevitably filters to the undergraduate level. As an undergrad, I attended Columbia University, one of the few American universities that still at least endeavor to provide all students with an understanding of canonical literature. Though I greatly benefited from many of the literature classes I took there, I found the students largely unwilling to engage with works that diverged significantly from contemporary attitudes toward issues such as race, gender, and sexuality—in particular, the contemporary attitudes of the “social justice” left. Students often looked upon the older works they read with a smug sense of superiority. Many of them were clearly smart, at least in the sense that they had high SAT scores and could answer questions in complete sentences, but their attitude toward literature was rather reductive. They enjoyed declaring authors “problematic.” Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf were problematic for their views on race, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde were problematic for their views on gender, and Charles Dickens was problematic for his views on race and gender and empire. These writers were indeed deeply flawed and morally questionable, but this emphatic desire to view them in the most negative way possible kept students from considering why these writers were still worth reading and contemplating.

Professors were not intentionally attempting to brainwash or indoctrinate their students, but they were rather uniform politically. They ranged from mainstream Obama Democrats to outright socialists and anarchists. They spoke highly of “activist” fields of study like postcolonial studies and critical race theory. In the chaos of 2020, a few openly contemplated abolishing the police. They are, of course, entitled to their beliefs, and most of them had some affection for literature, but even the ones who taught a relatively “canonical” syllabus did not discuss why a canon exists or why it is worthwhile. I asked several of them why they thought English literature was worth studying, and their answers largely focused either on political reasons like becoming more socially conscious or on utilitarian reasons like acquiring useful skills to succeed in the workplace. The reason that once undergirded humanistic study—the broadening of the mind through learning from vastly different perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews—was not mentioned.

In freshman year at Columbia, all students take “Literature Humanities,” a year-long class in which they read canonical works across thousands of years, from Homer’s Iliad to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In sophomore year, students take a year-long class titled “Contemporary Civilization,” a philosophy course that gradually takes students from Plato and Aristotle to Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. I deeply enjoyed the breadth of these courses, which awakened me from a kind of insularity into which I had unthinkingly stumbled and led me to understand the contemplations, joys, and anxieties of people from different times and cultures, even when I deeply disagreed with their beliefs. Sadly, my enjoyment was not widely shared among my peers. That they were not enthused by a required class is understandable; that they seemed to only appreciate works that echoed their own beliefs is more troubling.

They disliked Virgil’s Aeneid for its blood-soaked imperialism; conversely, they liked Song of Solomon because of its empathetic depiction of the plight of Black Americans. There is nothing wrong, I believe, with preferring Morrison to Virgil, as they are both profound and meaningful writers. The problem is that students in both cases largely ignored the aesthetic qualities of the work and responded merely according to whether the work reaffirmed their political worldviews. Similarly, they viewed the syllabus as discriminatory because, despite the concerted efforts of the Columbia administration, it still contained a large percentage of male authors. Never did they consider the famous Linda Nochlin argument that because there were significantly fewer opportunities for women in the past, there were necessarily fewer great artistic works made by women. What I saw too often was a distinctly consumerist way of thinking, where students believed the works they read should have pleased their own preferences and ideals. The central ethos of a literary canon is the exact opposite: it involves temporarily setting aside one’s own values and understanding layered books written by men and women who lived in worlds very different from the twenty-first century and thus held very different beliefs.

Such a process can be a challenging struggle. Very few people read the Aeneid because they fully agree with its ideas of Roman imperial glory; that is not the point of reading Virgil. The point of a broad-based humanistic tradition is that works become more, not less, powerful if they present ideas and sensations that are strange and even unsettling to the sensibilities of a modern reader. Yet the impulse to reshape literary canons to make them conform to the worldviews of the students and professors of elite universities is present, even at Columbia. The university has dropped Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and John Milton’s Paradise Lost from Literature Humanities since I took the class, and Contemporary Civilization now includes year-ending units on “Race, Gender, and Sexuality” and “Climate and Futures,” the latter of which discusses the intersection of climate change and the oppression of indigenous peoples. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is undoubtedly correct when he writes that to “engage with the contemporary world,” Columbia students “read texts that are important to understanding only the perspective of the contemporary left.” Douthat’s conservatism likely informs his disappointment, but the true problem with these kinds of changes is not that they reflect a particular kind of morose professional-class leftism. It is that they reflect one ideology instead of many. A hobbled canon that simply tells people what they already believe is hardly a canon at all.

Shelley declares that great art is moral, but in a deeper sense than that in which “morality” is usually meant: overtly moralistic artists, he writes, “are diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us” to agree with their beliefs, while true art makes the mind “the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.” Literature, for Shelley, is a kind of discovery, a vivid expanding of the mind to grasp beliefs and ideals different from one’s own. Matthew Arnold, the most eloquent defender of humanistic study, somewhat famously declared that everyone should endeavor to study “the best which has been thought and said,” but perhaps even more incisively, he asserted that this study should turn “a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.” Like Shelley, he asserts that reading great literature serves to challenge an individual’s beliefs and values, instead of just confirming them.

Thus, a literary canon is not about arrogantly upholding hierarchies, but about the exact opposite: it is about humility. It is about understanding the literary works that people of the past, of different cultures, found particularly valuable, even if those works conflict with our most deeply held beliefs about freedom, equality, and discrimination. This is true of whatever kind of literary canon is being discussed, whether it is the archetypal Western canon or a canon of American literature, British literature, East Asian literature, etc. Such a notion is not innately conservative. Shelley, for instance, was a radical, and the deeply anti-nationalist and anti-commercialist Arnold always viewed himself as a liberal. A literary canon is actively beneficial for individuals of all cultures and political ideologies. It allows the mind to escape the narrow orbit of modern platitudes and instead contemplate the thoughts and feelings elegantly illuminated by writers of the past. These illuminations include some fascinating insights into the issues and crises of their eras, and many more insights into the facets and tensions of the overall human condition, insights that will always remain timely.