When I was in college, I had a habit of disagreeing with my English professors. One point of disagreement was the importance of poets and writers traditionally considered part of the Western “canon.” The canon is the body of writers and works considered the best, most important, and obligatory subjects of study for any serious student of letters.
In recent years, literary scholars have taken a hatchet to the canon, shredding many time-honored names and works and replacing them with new ones. They argue that the canon’s writers aren’t relevant to a global population since most of them are European males. Their status, the critics argue, was achieved artificially, through mere convention, much of it founded on narrow-minded social norms.
