The Period of Literature

Abstract

On the occasion of the millennium it seems appropriate to reflect yet once more on the subject of the canon, if only to set the canon debate of the 1980s in relation to the longue durée of Western writing. There is a lesson in the fact that the turn of the millennium evoked a pervasive sense of anticlimax. History follows another and more elusive rhythm than the cycles of the calendar or the expectations of short-lived human beings. In retrospect, the debates of the 1980s greatly overestimated the stakes and possible consequences of “opening the canon,” not because there were no stakes or consequences, but because the concept of the canon belonged to the order of a mythical time, the order of millennial expectations. If it was never true that the canon was irrevocably closed to the revision and reordering of its supposed monuments, this is not to say that the tendency of verbal artifacts to solidify into monuments does not need to be resisted and that the struggle to prevent the schools from becoming the agents of this monumentalization must sometimes take the form of mythical antagonism.