Alternative Canons
Context
While not as ancient as the epic and poetry, it is not an exaggeration to say that the novel as a genre has truly come to its own. Its development over the centuries as a literary genre has expanded to accommodate functions other than pure mimesis of the day-to-day, and nowhere do we see such extraneous functions more clearly at work than in the dynamics of national canons in the realm of world literature. Novels contain not just textual meaning, but more interestingly, contextual import of a sociocultural and political nature in their reception and assimilation into existing knowledge. The genre of the novel has, in essence, acquired a metonymic function as representation of cultural identity.
We can say that the rise of world literature, and by extension the corresponding idea of national literatures, is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to the early 19th century. Specifically, Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur calls to mind the national insecurity that Germans had in relation to the predominance of English and French cultures during his time. It is this tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that Georg Brandes problematizes in his essay
In bringing to the fore this idea of national literatures as being defined and presented by belles-lettres, Brandes underscores two important and interconnected problems in world literature. First, that there exist parallel canons that are dichotomized between
These questions of canonicity, cultural capital, and linguistic primacy perhaps become even more palpable in the context of postcolonial literatures, which are defined by colonized people’s attempts to individuate an
It therefore makes sense to view national identity, especially that of postcolonial states, as both the by-product and field of contestation among opinions, values, and cultures whose multivocalities are not always necessarily harmonic. This pluralistic view of identity would thus run counter to the prevailing notion that the nation—and correspondingly, its representative literature—is monolithic and homogeneous, with the political and intellectual elite as its vanguard. As it stands, it is the elites’ view, propagated through the institutionalization of canon in curricula and discourse, which encompasses our view of the nation. This is evidenced concretely in the kinds of texts that fall under the categories of
This tension is usually framed in Comparative Literature within the institutional insecurities about national languages and literatures, which are typically represented by a few texts that have traveled across borders and have garnered cultural capital in their circulation. In a postcolonial context, national literatures are entrenched in
