Value and Canonicity : The Making of World Literature

The author argues that literary canon formation depends on value judgement, considering that a canon embodies and transmits values that are basic for any particular cultural tradition and is hence significant for a particular community. This can be traced in the Chinese heritage, which would be unthinkable without the concept of wen 文 (letters or the written language) that has been a strong cohesive force for a sense of Chinese cultural identity. Basic cultural values constitute the source of the resilience and tenacity of the canonical. The postmodernist West with its critique of all hierarchies and power relationships, metaphysical and otherwise, sometimes appears as a society in which everyone “knows the price of everything but the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde). Fredric Jameson rightly diagnoses a postmodernist weakening of historicity as a consequence. But to argue for the irrelevance of value judgement easily amounts to presenting another value with a political position as superior to other positions, which only proves that no argument can be valueless. The rise of world literature studies provides an opportunity to rethink the importance of canonicity, and to reassess works of non-Western literatures and also of “minor” European traditions which have remained too little known, and thus bringing those yet-unknown works to a global audience in an intercultural framework constitutes the making of world literature.