canon a(nd)cross-cultural boundaries

Canons A(nd)Cross-Cultural Boundaries (Or, Whose Canon are We Talking about?)Author(s): Walter D. MignoloSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 1-28Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772980Accessed: 15/03/2009 23:17

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Canons A(nd)Cross-Cultural Boundaries (Or, Whose Canon Are

We Talking About?)

Walter D. Mignolo Romance Languages and Literatures, Michigan

Introduction

My argument is built on two interrelated premises. According to the first, one of the main functions of canon formation (literary or non-

literary) is to insure the stability and adaptability of a given commu-

nity of believers. Thus, the community places itself in relation to a tradition, adapts itself to the present, and projects its own future. Ac-

cording to the second, when canon formation is related to disciplinary activities (artistic and/or cognitive, such as literary practice and liter-

ary studies), it is of the essence to distinguish between the vocational and epistemic (or disciplinary) aspects of canon formation. This article is written from the perspective of a Latin American and Latin Ameri- canist who is teaching in the United States. My personal (vocational) and academic (epistemic) situation vis-a-vis the argument is relevant to both the "object" (e.g., the canon of Latin American literature) and the "subject" of inquiry (e.g., who is doing research and teaching where and for whom). I have found in the dialogue between Jameson (1986) and Ahmad (1987) a reference point as well as an excellent example of each premise. The first is illustrated by the cultural traditions implied in both arguments; the second by the interrelations between cultural

My deep thanks go, this time, to Anne E. Wylie and to N6el Fallows for their close reading of these pages.

Poetics Today 12:1 (Spring 1991). Copyright ? 1991 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/91/$2.50.

2 Poetics Today 12:1

traditions and disciplinary principles. The following quotation from

Jameson's article is a clear example of the issues I would like to address and help to elucidate.

Many arguments can be made for the importance and interest of noncanonical forms of literature such as that of the third world, but one is peculiarly self-defeating because it borrows the weapons of the adversary: the strategy of trying to prove that these texts are as "great" as those of the canon itself. The object is then to show that, to take an example from another non-canonical form, Dashiell Hammett is really as great as Dostoy- evsky, and therefore can be admitted. ... Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to conclude that "they are still writing novels like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson." (Jameson 1986: 65 [italics mine])

The third-world idea has been created by a knowing subject which, in the very act of creating the notion, located itself in the first. There follows from this distinction a distribution of forms, types, and areas of knowledge that Pletsche (1981: 153) has summarized in the expression, "the apportionment of social scientific labor among the three worlds." As long, then, as the distinction is not "natural" but "created" in order to organize knowledge and forms of understanding, Jameson's picture does not necessarily impinge on what "they" (third- world people) do (Ahmad 1987), as much as what "they" do impinges on what "we" (first-world people) do and think (from "our own cultural development") "they" do. What makes Jameson's articulation

possible is the strong conviction that there is just one canon and that it coincides with "ours." The argument does not take into account the

possibility, on the one hand, of accepting the need human communities have for a canon (either as a set of values and criteria or as a set of narratives whose function is the communities' cohesion, either for keeping and maintaining power or for resisting it; see section III); and, on the other hand, the consequences of the colonization of lan-

guages and the imposition of Western literacy (after the constitution and massive expansion of Western civilization [Winter 1976]) for our current conceptualization of canon a(nd)cross-cultural boundaries.

My argument will be divided into four parts. In section I, the vocational and academic (or epistemic)I aspects of canon formation and transformation will be discussed.2 In II, I will explore some of the

1. I am assuming that canon formation and transformation are related to the preservation, recognition, or seizing of power, although I won't develop this aspect in my argument. 2. For practical reasons, I am borrowing the terminological distinction from Pos-

Mignolo * Whose Canon? 3

curricular and pedagogical aspects of the canon. Departing from the distinction drawn in I, section III will be devoted to explaining the connections between canon formation and cultural believing-communities, on the one hand, and between fields of study and scientific (or academic) believing-communities, on the other. Canon formation across cultural boundaries and the dilemma of "third-world" cultural production in teaching and scholarship will be the main topics of section IV.

I. Vocational and Epistemic Canons The fact that canon formation has awakened such an interest among literary scholars is, from the strictly disciplinary point of view, a para- dox. While discussions of canon formation in philosophy involve decisions on and evaluations of works produced by previous philosophers, discussions of the literary canon concern works by earlier literary writers rather than scholars.3 This seemingly paradoxical situation is due, I believe, to the tension between the vocational and epistemic natures of literary studies.4

Several aspects of literary canon formation and transformation can

ner (1988). I am following, however, my own conceptualization, as advanced in

Mignolo (1983). The thesis defended in this article could be aligned with the polysystem hypothesis developed by Even-Zohar (1978), more specifically with "The Polysystem Hypothesis Revisited" (ibid.: 28-38), in which paragraph four is devoted to canonized and non-canonized literature, as well as part three of the book (ibid.: 63-94), in which Russian, Hebrew, and Israeli literature are each concep- tualized in terms of the polysystem hypothesis. See also Even-Zohar (1990: 79-83, 121-30). 3. I am not saying that in order to teach Kant, we have to be philosophers of comparable stature. My statement is more modest: I am assuming that to teach philosophy at the university level requires a Ph.D. in philosophy. And I assume that scholars with a Ph.D. in philosophy believe they are philosophers, in the same way that a scholar with a Ph.D. in sociology thinks that he or she is a sociologist. A Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature (e.g., Spanish or French) is not necessarily, in my understanding, an artist or a writer. 4. Although I am restricting myself to literary studies, I am not claiming that this aspect is specific to this discipline. It is a larger and more complex issue, which has been raised also by Krishna in discussing the study of philosophy across cultural boundaries: "To adopt a well-known expression from Sartre, all nonwestern cultures have been reduced to the status of 'objects' by being observed and studied by western scholars in terms of western concepts and categories, which are treated not as culture bound but as universal in character. In a deep and radical sense, therefore, it is only the West that has arrogated to itself the status of subjecthood in the cognitive enterprise, reducing all others to the status of objects" (Krishna 1988: 77-78). I perceive an obvious connection here between pre-understanding through "western concepts and categories" and the vocational aspect. Thus, "world literature" is understood and constructed in terms of "western literature." So is the canon.


be explained on the basis of this distinction. In Latin America, for example, official canon formation depended on the language and values of the main colonizing cultures (Spanish and Portuguese) and took the

place of the silenced (but not suppressed) canon of the Amerindian cultures. As we shall see in sections III and IV, narratives such as that of Rigoberta Menchu (1984 [1983]) or the classical Maya-Quiche book of council (Popol Vuh) bear witness to canon formation in Amerindian communities, illustrate canon formation across cultural boundaries, and reveal the great divide between "central" cultures, which have

developed an academic discourse about the canon, and "peripheral" cultures, for whom the canon is an element of cohesion but not of

scholarly debate. We can find a more telling example of the great divide between "central" and "peripheral" canon formation by looking at a couple of exemplary cases of literary history. In 1953 Anderson Imbert wrote his classic History of Spanish-American Literature, in which he clearly stated that he was interested in the literature written in Castilian, in/and about Latin America. His only restriction was the

language, not the topic, of discourse. A novel taking place in Haiti or in Seville, as well as a history of Brazil or of the French Caribbean, if written in Castilian, would count as Hispanic American literature (Anderson Imbert 1953). One year later, in 1954, Father Angel Ma- ria Garibay wrote his classic History of Nihuatl Literature, in which he

purposely limited himself to the work written in Nahuatl. The conse-

quences of such a decision are numerous. In the first place, Garibay wrote the history of a spectrum of oral discursive practices, fixed in

alphabetical writing after the conquest and during the colonization. In the second place, he used (although he was aware of it) Western criteria to comment on, classify, and understand discursive practice across his own cultural boundaries. And, in the third place, his history was and still is a valuable tool for understanding the ethnohistory of Mexico, and yet it did not have any major influence on the formation and transformation of the official literary canon in Latin America

(Garibay 1954). I draw two conclusions from these examples: At the vocational level, we pre-understand Nahuatl literature as far as we can assimilate "their" discursive practices to "our" (Castilian-speaking Latin Americans') literary values. At the epistemic level, we should be able to describe and explain the canonical function of different texts in different cultures and not necessarily condescend by saying, for

example, that the Aztec's huehuetlahtolli (discourse of the elders or discourses by which the elders transmitted their wisdom to the younger generations) did not provide us with the satisfaction of a Ciceronian oratio.

Would a member of the Aztec community, trained to enjoy the discourse of the elder, have enjoyed a Ciceronian oratio? Pannikar (1988)


introduced the essential notion of "diatopical hermeneutic" to solve

problems presented by similar situations. Diatopical hermeneutics

is the required method of interpretation when the distance to overcome, needed for any understanding, is not just a distance within one single culture (morphological hermeneutics), or a temporal one (diachronic hermeneutics), but rather the distance between two (or more) cultures, which have independently developed in different spaces (topoi) their own methods of philosophizing [of telling stories; creating rhythmic verbal patterns and recording in picto-ideographic writing systems] and ways of reaching intel- ligibility along with their proper categories. (Pannikar 1988: 129 [italics and brackets mine])

A diatopical hermeneutic may allow us to dissociate the vocational from the epistemic subject and, by the same token, to understand that "our" vocational canon (as vocational subject) should not be taken for the measure of all (literary) canons, as, more often than not, literary histories invite us to believe.

If there is no question that literary histories are instrumental devices in canon formation, there are instead many questions about their epistemic status. Literary studies (of which literary history is one dimension) has acquired its disciplinary rank only quite recently. Curtius (1953 [1948]) referred to Elster (1972 [1897]) as one of the first to conceive of a literary "science," historically and philologically founded (Jones 1956; Toulmin 1971: 395-400). Foucault (1966) analyzed the coming into being of literary studies within the same context as the constitution of the human sciences, as we know them today. The institutionalization of literature during the eighteenth century (Viala 1985) brought together the autonomy and institutionalization of discursive practices until then subordinated to grammar and rhetoric (poetry became literature) and the study of those practices (poetics became literary studies) (Godzich and Spadaccini 1986, 1987). The "lettres humaines" were replaced by the "belles lettres" (Viala 1985); poetry and poetics were replaced by literature and literary studies (Eagleton 1983: 17-53). Yet this change never achieved such a clear- cut distinction as the one found in economics or linguistics, where economic and linguistic practices as a field of study have been clearly detached from economics and linguistics as disciplinary practices. On the contrary, even while becoming a field of study, literary practice managed to integrate a part of that practice (commentaries, judgments of literary works, normative statements about what literature is or should be, etc.) into literary studies. Indeed, the vocational component of the discipline is halfway between the field of study and the discipline studying it.

How does this situation impinge upon canon formation and transformation in "third-world" countries and of "minority" literature?


Although a detailed archeology of literary studies as a discipline would take us away from the main topic, it may be helpful to remember that philology and textual criticism were at the crossroads of a con- jectural method for interpreting the particular and the mathematical/ experimental method (familiar after Galileo) for explaining the general. The fixing of oral discourse in alphabetical writing and its serial

reproduction by the printing press made it possible to detach the text from the particular situation in which a discourse was delivered and

interpreted and to place it in a "lasting situation" where the "original" event is forever transcended. The transition from the uniqueness of the oral event to the fixation and repetition of the written text

gave rise to the notion that it was possible to integrate the scientific

patterns established by mathematics/experimentation with the physical nature of the written text, which seemed a welcome alternative to the method of conjecture and interpretation used to account for what can be neither repeated nor simulated (Timpanaro 1963; Ginzburg 1983). The colonization of languages in Latin America, from which I am drawing several examples (Mignolo 1989a), took place at a time when the values attributed to the written text (and to alphabetic writ-

ing in the Greco-Roman tradition) played a decisive role in the shaping of the "literary" canon during the colonial period. Not only were the written transcriptions of Amerindian discourses not printed, but also the only texts to be printed were the ones able to pass the ethic and aesthetic judgment of the Inquisition. Thus, the first written histories of

Hispanic-American literature were histories of the "visible" (Stephan Gonzalez 1985, 1987), that is, histories based on the texts which had been blessed by colonial institutional powers.

For all of the reasons above, I submit that discussions of canon formation should be carried on at the vocational and epistemic levels as well as across cultural boundaries. At the vocational level, a literary canon should be seen in a curricular context (What should be taught and why?). At the epistemic level, canon formation should be seen in the context of research programs, as a phenomenon to be described and explained (How are canons formed and transformed? Which social groups or classes are represented by the canon? What is the canon suppressing? etc.). Across cultural boundaries, a canon should be seen as community-relative and not in hierarchical relation to a master canon, nor within an evolutionary model in which the canonical examples become the heaven to which literature aspires and the

yardstick for hierarchical organization.

In order to avoid the temptation of projecting "first-world" values into "third-world" literature, as well as that of diminishing "third-world" standards by comparing them with "first-world" ones, we need epistemic descriptions of literature which can be detached from vocational


definitions. Let's reflect upon this distinction by describing literature as a self-organizing mechanism (Lotman 1976; Mignolo 1978); or as a self-organizing system of interactions (Schmidt 1982 [1980], 1983). Such descriptions should help us to conceive of literature as a regional discursive practice and of canon formation and transformation as a subsystem within the system. Why? What are the connections between the description of literature as a self-organizing system and the conclusion stated in the previous sentence?-Because this distinction makes it possible to describe persons and communities who have in- ternalized the concept of literature vocationally as participating in a

system of interactions they themselves accept as literary, while persons and communities who have been academically trained would be described as those who participate in a system of interactions they conceive of as literary scholarship or literary studies. The fact that those who are academically trained and who play the epistemic game are, at the same time, playing the vocational one doesn't need further explanation since it cannot be otherwise. This is precisely why the distinction between the vocational and epistemic perspectives is, more often than not, ignored. The end result is the tendency to argue at the

epistemic level for canon (trans)formation at the vocational one. Kru-

pat (1983), whose cause I enthusiastically endorse, argues in favor of

including Native American literature in the American literary canon, with the conviction that one result of such a move "would [be] to question those Eurocentric texts of the canon that seem especially fixed, distant, and aloof; it would [be] to question also the authority of the text in general and, thus, to propose a revision not only of the literary but of the social order" (ibid.: 146). The ideological argument at the vocational level is then transformed into an epistemic one in which the question is no longer the canonical status of Amerindian texts but, rather, the need to study them "scientifically": "Meanwhile, it must be said that only in the past thirty years or so has philological and, in particular, structural analysis of Indian literatures begun to establish their formal principles on anything like a sound, scientific basis" (ibid.: 147 [italics mine]). By conducting his argument at both the vocational and epistemic levels, however, Krupat fails to reach the goals his own cause requires: that American Indian literature could be conceived in terms of its own canonical status and not necessarily in the context of the "official" American literary canon; and that the canonical status of Amerindian literature should not be insured, necessarily, by studying it "scientifically."

II. Teaching and the Canon, "Here" and "There" How does this situation impinge upon the teaching of "third-world" literatures and cultures in "first-world" universities? Who is teaching whose canon? Are departments of English language and literature


literary-canon coordinators? Or should we listen to what scholars in departments of foreign languages and literatures have to say about literary canons and curricular organization? Or should we, even better, encourage a discussion in which one's vocational preferences would be detached from one's disciplinary commitments? "First-" and "third- world" expressions become, obviously, terms relating to the colonization process in which the former refers to the colonizer, the latter to the colonized. Colonization of territory implies, also, colonization of

language. The clash between social conditions supporting the canon in colonizing countries and social conditions demanding transformations in colonized countries could be a possible schema within which to understand social conditions that are transforming the canon in Latin America, as well as the ways in which "third-world" intellectuals account for such transformations.

Rinc6n (1978) has analyzed the changes in the concept of literature which took place during the late fifties and mid-sixties in Latin America, in conjunction with the sociological, economical, and tech-

nological factors motivating such a transformation. A decision about what counts as literature and what doesn't is, obviously, the first step toward a decision-making process which will end in canon formation and transformation at both ends of the spectrum, reading and

writing. These shifts have taken literary practice as well as literary studies closer to the social sciences than to linguistic-aesthetic analysis. While, on the one hand, contemporary Latin American literature has benefited from the "boom" of the novel, increasing its international recognition and accumulating several Nobel Prizes, it has also witnessed, on the other hand, the emergence of discursive practices, such as testimonial narratives (Jara and Vidal 1986), which suggest a shift in the concept of literature and a twist in canon formation. The tension between the sociological impact of such changes and the academic resistance to incorporating them into the curriculum illustrates, once again, the tensions between the vocational and epistemic levels in

literary studies. As a consequence, minority literary scholars, as well as those with an inclination toward noncanonical discursive practices and expressions, find themselves in a paradoxical situation where, by promoting noncanonical texts to canonical rank, they run the risk of

unwillingly making a colonizer's move. It would be worthwhile to at-

tempt, instead, a decentralizing move in order to create a niche of

equal weight for testimonial, Amerindian, or Chicano discursive ex-

pressions, while recognizing, at the same time, the variety of canonical forms beyond the surface uniformity of the standard language and culture. The acknowledgment that we, human beings, live in a world

populated by different traditions may offer a healthy alternative to the idea that the only possible move will be the integration of the periph-


ery to the center instead of underlining the fact that the periphery is also a center in its own right.5

We can thus understand why the most striking evidence we have today of the vocational and epistemic aspects of literary studies emerges in the teaching of literature. In fact, what do we teach when we teach literature, the discipline or the field of study? At first glance, this situation is as paradoxical as the case would be if an anthropologist were to teach one how to become an Asante instead of how to become an anthropologist. While in most human sciences teaching means, basically, teaching the epistemic canon, in literary studies (as well as in art history) the vocational canon is taught. The example of philosophy, to which I referred earlier, might be helpful in clarifying this point. Whereas a philosopher teaching Plato or Kant is teaching the canon of the discipline, since Plato and Kant were philosophers, a literary scholar teaching Cervantes or Shakespeare is not teaching his discipline, since he is not, primarily, a writer. As a result of the fact that programs in creative writing do more or less what philosophy departments do (they teach what they practice), we should conclude that what a literary scholar does is to teach how to read. It is at this point that the teaching of a skill (how to read) becomes desegregated from reading a given set of texts selected for their aesthetic, ethnic, or traditional values (what to read). Our everyday practice of teaching literature is a good example of the ambiguous constitution of literary studies as a discipline and of the fact that we expend a good deal of energy teaching literature at the vocational level. With this statement, I am not suggesting a criticism of the vocational versus the epistemic level but, rather, a mere description of the situation. My intention is to underline the fact that as long as we are aware of canon formation and transformation as a business conducted at the vocational level of literary studies, we should be able to distinguish between two different kinds of disciplinary conflicts: those in which we defend our cultural values (race, gender, class) in the formation of a literary canon, and those in which we defend our cognitive principles (empiricism, rationalism, understanding, interpretation, etc.) as well as our cultural values in the acquisition, transformation, and transmission of knowledge.

The critical confrontation between the vocational and the epistemic

5. It is not clear to me that what is persuasive from an economic point of view (Wallerstein 1974: I, 2-13, 66-131) should also be valid from a cognitive and cultural perspective, such as the one suggested by Lotman (1975). Research in different fields (e.g., art history [Arnheim 1988] or sociology [Greenfeld and Martin 1988]) suggests indeed that the center/periphery economic model should not be- cloud the fact that, from "the native point of view," the economic model's periphery could be the space in which a given community places itself at the center of the "world" (e.g., the Chamulas of northern Mexico studied by Gossen [1974]).


components of literary studies may help us resolve not only some of the perplexities of canon formation and transformation, but also some of the bewilderment which plagues discussions between literary historians or interpreters and literary theorists. Literary history and the history of literature (Godzich and Spadaccini 1986) and literary theory and theories of literature (Mignolo 1983, 1989b) have different dis-

ciplinary functions. The historians are involved in canon formation; the theorists in generating, transmitting, and transforming knowledge about verbal (oral and written) semiotic interactions. One of the difficulties we have witnessed (and still witness) in recent discussions about either canon formation or about literary theory or theories of literature has to do with the lack of differentiation between the vocational and epistemic levels of literary studies, and with the invocation-more often than not-of epistemic premises to justify vocational positions. Let's ponder this issue from a different angle.

III. Canons and Believing-Communities I would submit, based on the previous argument, that canon formation in literary studies is but one example of the need which human communities have to stabilize their past, adapt themselves to the present, and project their future. This general thesis is equally valid for both vocational and epistemic communities. While an epistemic community finds in the canon the historical foundation of and the justification for its current disciplinary situation (Lefevere 1977), a vocational commu-

nity finds in it historical confirmation of the cultural values held by its members. In both cases, the stabilization of the past is equally relevant to the decisions which will be taken in the present and the values which will be transmitted to the future. Through canon formation a commu-

nity defines and legitimates its own territory by creating, reinforcing, or changing a tradition.6 Having made this distinction, I will focus in what follows on vocational communities and canon formation.

Sanders (1984, 1987) has stressed the meaning of the Torah and the Bible for Jewish and Christian communities of believers.

The Bible as the churches' book is not primarily a historical document

(though I am among those who insist that it is full of historical fact; that is not the point). It is primarily a canonical document, functioning in the

believing communities as canon to assist the ongoing believing communities

6. When Quintilian, for instance, includes in book 10 (chapter 1) of his Institutio Oratoria an annotated list of Greek and Latin authors, he is creating a canon for those who aspire to be rhetoricians. When a literary historian at the end of the nineteenth century writes a history of American or Latin American literature, he or she is creating a canon for all those who need to know about their roots and the evolution of the society in which they are living. When a sociologist talks about authors and texts of the past, he is transmitting the canon to future sociologists.

Mignolo ? Whose Canon? 11

to seek answers in their times to the questions: Who are we? and What are we to do? In dialogue with believers, the Bible as canon addresses itself to the questions of identity and obedience-and in that order-first identity and then life style. (Sanders 1987: 47)

Sanders (1984) has insisted that of the two aspects of a canonical

process (stability and adaptability), the first has received more attention than the second. He has also repeated that canon formation is not only stabilization of the past, but also (primarily) adaptation to the present and projection toward the future. Thus, he reminds us of the etymological meaning of the word "canon" (Qaneh-kanon), as

including the aspect of a "normative rule." From there he discusses the Bible in the previous context of the Torah, "those early traditions of ancient Israel which not only had a life of their own but gave life to those who knew them and molded their own lives around them. It was also clear that in that life process lay the meaning of canon" (1987: 9).7 The main difference between the Bible, as a canon, and a literary canon is basically the sacred and secular character of each, respectively. They are similar, however, in their functions vis-a-vis a

community of "believers" for whom the text serves as a "normative rule." It is understandable that, in a pluralistic society, what has been, is, or should be canonical for those who represent power has not been, is not, and cannot be representative of marginal communities.8 It is understandable that in a pluralistic world in which more and diverse communities "discover" their right to speak and to participate in a communal life, those who are relatively marginal do not feel themselves represented by the canonical texts of the community which is responsible for their marginal status.

When comparing biblical with literary studies from the point of view of canon (trans)formation, several interesting analogies and dif- ferences emerge.

A. First, the scholar of biblical studies-contrary to the literary scholar-is not engaged in canon (trans)formation. He accepts that

7. The fact that the pragmatic aspect of a canon has been pointed out by a literary critic and professor of English (Bruns 1984: 464) independently from Sanders could be taken as strong support for the assertion. Bruns observes that "a text, after all, is canonical, not in virtue of being final and correct and part of an official library, but because it becomes binding upon a group of people. The whole point of canonization is to underwrite the authority of a text, not merely with respect to its origin as against competitors in the field . . . but with respect to the present and future in which it will reign or govern as a binding text" (ibid.). See also Adams (1988). 8. It is useful to remember, in this context, William Bennett's words, quoted in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (5 June 1988): "The West is the culture in which we live. It has set the moral, political, economic and social standards for the rest of the world" (Atlas 1988: 26).

1 2 Poetics Today 12:1

the canon has already been formed by the believing communities. The biblical scholar's role is to understand the nature and function of canon formation and transformation.

B. Second, canon formation in literary communities of "believers" is less homogeneous than in religious communities. If sacred and literary texts both encourage the believing communities to seek answers to questions related to their identity (present and future), it is literary communities which are growing and becoming more and more heterogeneous 9-thus, the problem of canon (trans)formation. Socio- historical conditions supporting the spread of literacy have made it possible for various ethnic groups and social classes to have access to writing and printing and to transmit stories beyond their own communities. A glance at Chicano (Hinojosa 1986; Anzaldua 1987; Bruce- Novoa 1986) or testimonial literature in Latin America (Menchu 1984 [1983]) makes immediately unequivocal the fact that the communities of believers represented in such stories do not (and cannot) identify themselves with the communities of believers who have institutional- ized a literary canon in which the stories told and the values represented are alien to the needs of their original communities. Whoever reads Rigoberta Menchu's second chapter ("Birth Ceremonies") will soon realize the canonical forces of speeches and narratives in the transmission of culture and the preservation of tradition. The follow-

ing quotation comes from two descriptions of events occurring when a child is forty days and ten years old, respectively:

1. When the child is forty days old, there are more speeches, more prom- ises on his behalf, and he becomes a full member of the community. This is his baptism. All the important people of the village are invited and they speak. The parents make a commitment. They promise to teach the child to keep the secrets of our people, so that our culture and customs will be preserved. The village leaders come and offer their experience, their example, and their knowledge of our ancestors. They explain how to preserve our traditions. (Menchu 1984 [1983]: 13 [italics mine])

2. When the children reach ten years old, that is the moment when their parents and the village leaders talk to them again.... It is also when they remind them that our ancestors were dishonored by the White Man, by colonization. But they don't tell them the way that it's written down in books, because the majority of Indians can't read or write, and don't even know that they have their own texts. No, they learn it through oral recommendations, the way it has been handed down through the generations. They are told that the Spaniards dishonored our ancestors' fine sons, and the most humble of

9. In modern literature the examples proliferate, for instance: Chicano literature (to which I will refer later on) in this country, "testimonial discourse or literature" in Latin America (Jara and Vidal 1986), or the various and emerging literatures in English written within non-English cultural traditions (Smith 1987; Kachru 1983).


them. And it is to honor these humble people that we must keep our secrets. (Ibid.: 14 [italics mine])

Rigoberta Mench6 learned Spanish for political reasons when she was about twenty-one years old. Her Spanish narrative (recorded and then written down in Paris by E. Burgos-Debray, an anthropologist from Venezuela) makes it apparent that the canon of Latin Ameri- can literature is not a part of the traditions her community is eager to preserve. Therefore, a scholar of Latin American literature is confronted with the ideological choice of either ignoring the book because, although it is written in Spanish, it doesn't belong to the Spanish tradition in Latin America, or finding a justification to include it in the canon of contemporary Latin American narrative.

C. Third, matters become more complicated in literature because we are at the same time "believers" (on the vocational level), who make decisions in canon formation, and "scholars" (on the epistemic level), who study canon formation and transmission. In this regard, the discussion over canon formation is but a necessary outcome of the "double" nature of literary studies as a discipline. If we agree that "canonical criticism (should) focus on the function of authoritative traditions in the believing communities" (Sanders 1984: 24), we should replace normative questions concerning canon (trans)formation with explanatory ones regarding the conditions under which canons are formed and transformed. Questions concerning who decides by whom and why a given group of texts ought to be read will take the place of such questions as, What ought to be read?

I would like to illustrate the preceding propositions with an example. It was within this context of reflection that I included the "canonical" novel of Chicano literature, Bless me, Ultima (Anaya 1986 [1972]), in my course, "Introduction to Literary Theory and Criti- cism," taught within the Spanish curriculum for seniors and first-year graduate students. The inclusion of this book generated an unex- pected and heated discussion in the class. Those who opposed and questioned including such a book in a 400-level Spanish course felt that we must first read "good" books and preferably in Spanish; those in favor claimed that we should include books representing the needs and feelings of communities with which not all of us can identify. The students were obviously familiar with current literature and with academic events reported in newspapers, which they brought to the classroom as part of the discussion. What caught my attention, however, was that in spite of including the novel in a course which I considered to be at the "epistemic" level, the discussion turned to the "vocational" one. The fact that the group taking the course was a mix- ture of American and Hispanic students (no Chicano attended the class) contributed to the vocational tone of the discussion. What hap-


pened in the classroom endorsed my conviction that in literary studies we behave simultaneously as believers and as scholars (or as believers in both literature and science). In my epistemic mode, I acknowl- edged that Bless me, Ultima had already achieved recognition (over 200,000 copies having been sold!). In my vocational guise, I enthusiastically participated in the classroom discussions. The conclusions I have drawn from this example allow me to restate some of the points made earlier: (1) Literary studies, contrary to other disciplines, have been formed on the basis of a canonical set of literary texts rather than on the basis of a canonical set of texts' disclosing its disciplinary foundation; (2) quarrels about canon formation and transformation are due to the fact that we have difficulties in distinguishing our vocational from our epistemic roles and, consequently, in dismembering normative from explanatory questions.

These distinctions are also relevant in rethinking both the curriculum and our roles as scholars and teachers. If we accept that the norms which guide our scholarly and epistemic activities are not the vocational norms which guide the selection and interpretation (canon formation) of literary texts, we must also accept that forming definitions and hierarchical arrangements (masterpieces, mass literature, second-order literature, etc.) are not epistemic but vocational tasks. As scholars, we would like to provide "outside" explanations of the phe- nomena for which we, as participants, have "inside" information; or to describe and explain the descriptions and evaluations we concoct in order to justify and make sense of the discursive practices in which we

participate under the name of literature.10 As (epistemic) teachers we should make students aware that what we teach at the vocational level

(white male, women of color, Latin American, African, Chicano, or American texts) is what represents "us" (whatever the social structure and symbolic construction of "us" may be) as members of a commu-

nity of believers. We should invite students to think (critically) about the mechanics and the strategies of canon formation and transformation in literary studies. This, of course, is already being done (Von Hallberg 1983), and it has even attracted the attention of readers of the New York Times Sunday Magazine (Atlas 1988). However, it is not

only the shortcomings of the current canon which should worry us as teachers. It is also the ideological presuppositions of canon formation at the vocational level which we should critically examine from our own ideological presuppositions at the epistemic level.

10. For the general principles underlying this statement, see Maturana (1970, 1978), and Maturana and Varela (1984: 137-55); and for its significance in literary studies, see Mignolo (1978: 47-60, 1983, and forthcoming).


IV. Canon Formation across Cultural Boundaries Canon formation begs the question about the universality or the re- gionalism of literature. I have already mentioned the fact that the concept of "literature" gained currency during the eighteenth century (Foucault 1966; Rincon 1978; Viala 1985; Godzich and Spadaccini 1987), and has since created a series of uncomfortable situations which cannot be resolved if the distinction between the vocational and epistemic levels is not made. Let me give an example. "Literature" in the Middle Ages meant everything written in alphabetical writing. Never- theless, one of the canonical texts of medieval Hispanic literature is Arcipreste de Hita's Libro de buen amor. Dagenais (1988) has recently argued that, indeed, the Libro de buen amor as a masterpiece of His- panic literature is a romantic invention and that, in the Middle Ages, the Libro did not exist as such but as a series of diverse manuscripts. He has suggested suppressing the idea that the various manuscripts (Sala- manca, Madrid-Biblioteca Nacional, and Madrid-Academia Espanola) "represent" an aesthetic literary text which is the Libro de buen amor, for while the three manuscripts are medieval texts, the Libro de buen amor is not. In other words, the place the book has at the vocational level should not be confused with the place the manuscripts have at the epistemic. From the epistemic perspective, "literature" is a regional practice, while from the vocational perspective, we lean toward the natural ethnocentrism of all known human communities and include as literature all discursive practices which can be assimilated to the Western concept of literature forged since the eighteenth century. Consequently, when it is suggested that non-Western texts should be part of the canon, it is clearly a move at the vocational level. And that is fine from the restricted, regional perspective of the believing community. The problem arises when we realize that the regional literary values, which have been assigned from a restricted and vocational concept of literature (upon which we have built the canon), are taken to be a universal field of study! Thus, the need for finding literary "universals" is set forth as a research program in literary theory (Riffaterre 1988; Ruprecht 1989). The uncritical assumption that the regional literary values of those who are also scholars should be accepted as a universal field of study can be easily challenged by the distinction I have made between the vocational and epistemic dimensions of our discipline. These few examples should suffice to emphasize why I think we need models and theories which will help us understand discursive practices and canon formation across cultural boundaries, while at the same time preventing literary scholars and theorists from univer- salizing at the epistemic level their regional and vocational aesthetic values (Kachru 1987; Dissanayake and Nitcher 1987; A. Gonzalez 1987; Larson and Deutsch 1988).


Insofar as the distinction between the levels of canon formation by members of a community of "believers" and canon explanation by a

community of "scholars" is not made, the proper distinctions between discursive practices labeled "literature" by a community of believers and the "literature" of non-Western traditions will also fail to be made. Questions regarding the relationships between a literary canon (be it Western, Latin American, Italian, or French) and "other" literatures become unavoidable, for the very notion of "literature" and, indirectly, of a literary canon is called into question. The issue could be broken

up in the following manner. A. The need to include non-Western, third-world, women's litera-

ture, etc., in the canon reflects, through all such good examples, the fact of a group of scholars who feel, at their vocational level, that the canon should be transformed in order to represent a pluralistic society such as the American one (cf. Wald 1981; Krupat 1983; Kaplan 1987; Baker 1988). A different group of scholars may oppose the idea, but all this is part of our vocational conversation about literature. What I would like to bring forward are the implications of certain statements which have been pronounced in this context. As a member of a Latin American culture, as a literary scholar, and as a teacher of literature who has been working in the United States for the past fifteen years, I was more than surprised when I read that a distinguished English professor at Harvard had stated that in this country, not only have women's literature and black literature been neglected, but that of the third world as well. Since one of the things I did during those fifteen

years was to teach third-world literature to American students, I came to the realization that both the literature and the role of entire for-

eign language and literature departments were being, and may still be, ignored. For what is the function of a Latin American literature

department or program if third-world literature counts only when it is integrated to the English curriculum? I was as amazed as Ahmad

(1987) when I read that, in Jameson's opinion (1986: 65), "the third- world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce" until I realized that Jameson had not bothered to ask if his observation was

pertinent for third-world readers (see, however, Jameson 1987). I realized, with the same surprise as Ahmad's, that we (third-world people) will not only begin to enjoy the benefits of being included in the En-

glish curriculum, but that we will also profit from being theorized by first-world intellectuals. It should be obvious by now that I am not

construing the epistemic dimension of literary studies as an ahistori- cal or acultural one but, rather, as an activity which differs from our vocational reading of literature. I am taking it for granted that theo-

rizing could be done either in the first, the second, or the third world,

by women of color or by white men. The ways in which theoretical

Mignolo * Whose Canon? 1 7

objects and models are built would depend on the scholar's ideological assumptions of what the human sciences should be all about. Thus, theories of literature "from" the third world are not only as valid as theories of literature "from" the first world, but they are as necessary (Christian 1987).

B. If we accept the distinction between teaching literature at the vocational level and teaching the discipline at the epistemic level, we should be able to cope with what may otherwise sound like discrimi- natory remarks (Harvard English professor) or as imperialist theories

(Jameson). While the vocational point of view allows the integration of non-Western or third-world literatures into the English literature curriculum,"1 the epistemic perspective alerts us to the fact that what makes sense from the point of view of the English curriculum and the needs of a given community of believers does not necessarily make sense for that community of believers from whom the texts have been borrowed. Thus, a fruitful dialogue on canons and on the study of canon formation across cultural boundaries could be attained when first- and third-world scholars realize that what is valuable to each of "us" as members of a given community (vocational level) should be kept carefully apart from what is relevant to "us" as scholars (epistemic level). We would be able to understand that, as members of different vocational communities, we are represented by different canons; that, as practitioners of the same discipline, we should have a disciplinary core-canon which we will apply, develop, and transform according to the historical and social conditions in and from which we theorize. Thus, modeling semiotic discursive interactions across cultural boundaries may very well be an epistemic urge of a third-world scholar, teaching and doing research in exile, for whom understanding cultural difference through literature is more crucial than including third-world literature in the English curriculum.

Let me justify this programmatic claim by discussing the canon from the viewpoint of both a Latin American and a Latino-Americanist. Recently, in Uruguay, the Popol Vuh has been included as a required reading in high schools. The Secretary of Education has recently published, in Guatemala, a Spanish edition of the Popol Vuh as a canonical text in the history of Guatemalan and Latin American literature. The Popol Vuh is a sacred narrative from Guatemala's Quiche communities. First transmitted orally, a written version in Mayan language and alphabetic script was discovered during the eighteenth century. Pre- sumably, the text was written during the early years of the conquest in the Yucatan Peninsula (circa 1550). It was unknown to the Spaniards

11. "It wasn't only women we'd neglected. It was the whole third world" (a Harvard English language and literature professor, quoted in Atlas [1988: 72]).


until the eighteenth century when a Dominican friar, Francisco Xime- nez, who was an expert in the Mayan language, managed to obtain from the natives a "book" in which they had recorded an account of the forefathers of their own lordly lineage (Tedlock 1985: 23). This "book" was consulted when the Lords of Quiche sat in council, and it was called, precisely, Popol Vuh because that meant "Council Book."

They sometimes also referred to it as the "writing about Toulan," or the writing about their origin. Knowing what we know today, it is amaz-

ing to read the comments made by Ximenez in describing this "book." Ximenez observed that the "book" was written not by an author but

by several members of the Quiche community and that, in doing so, they had inscribed their oral tradition in alphabetical writing. Xime- nez also noted, not without a certain amount of surprise, the secrecy employed by the Quiche community in order to keep the book out of the colonizers' sight for almost two centuries. Ximenez did not understand that, of necessity, the canon of a colonized community has to be

kept out of view of the colonizer. He also did not understand that each

community has its own canonical text(s). What are the implications of these examples for our topic? For a

member of a vocational community and a teacher of Latin American literature, the Popol Vuh is (and has been) a challenge. Latin Ameri- can literary scholars and teachers are confronted with two options: to ignore it or to justify it. The side that a teacher or scholar takes would depend on whether s/he thinks that the canon should be restricted to texts which have been written in Spanish, in or about

Spanish-American countries; or whether s/he thinks that a canon of Latin American literature should include not only native (Amer- indian) texts, but also texts written in English, French (in the Carib-

bean), and Portuguese (in Brazil) (Pizarro 1985). Suppose s/he decides that the second option is the best, and, consequently, s/he appropriates the Popol Vuh as a canonical text of Latin American literature in the same spirit with which Jameson would include third-world literature in the English curriculum. I believe that this example illustrates very well that at the vocational level we are entitled to talk about the canon

(taking for granted that "the" is equal to "our"). At the epistemic level we should realize, however, that there are as many canons as there are communities. Canonical texts which may not be (from the perspective of a first-world observer) as aesthetically pleasing as texts by Proust or

Joyce would be equally respected and admired from the point of view of the community for which the text is "canonically" representative. Although this conclusion may be obvious, it is often forgotten. The second conclusion (which is more troubling than obvious) is the fact that the Popol Vuh (awarded, in my thought-experiment, a canonical niche in the context of Latin American literature) does not have, for a Latin American literary scholar, the same canonical values that it has for the


Quiche community. While, for a literary scholar, it could be a literary text representing a cluster of values related to the Latin American identity, his/her own values would be alien to the Quiche community for which the Popol Vuh represents, precisely, a way of keeping their own traditions segregated from those of the Spanish-speaking world (cf. Menchu 1984 [1983]).12

Why should a literary scholar encourage or promote the need to take a book or a narrative such as the Popol Vuh out of context (as Jameson proposes to do with "third-world" literature) in order to en- rich "our own cultural development" and literary canon, when such an appropriation would mean little or nothing to the community to which the text belongs? Such a move could be justified on two grounds. First, at the vocational level, I would be justified so long as I believed that a canon was needed in which the Latin American (and not only the Spanish-American) community would be represented. My goals go beyond the purpose of stabilizing the past (which cannot be changed) to touch upon understanding the present and programming the future (which can be changed): that is, the decolonization of Latin American culture ("imaginary," according to Pizarro [1985]) for which contemporary writers, such as Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, and Vargas Llosa (to name a few) are also striving.13 Second, at the epistemic level, I would be justified so long as the Popol Vuh and the social situation which it represents are taken as a paradigmatic example (or model) of the realm of semiotic interactions across cultural boundaries, which I perceive as one of the fundamental research programs for literary studies in the near future. Consequently, while at the vocational level my decision to include the Popol Vuh in my classes on Latin (not Spanish-) American literature might elicit a confrontation with those who pre- fer to maintain a Spanish-American literary canon, at the epistemic level the confrontation will be with those who insist on maintaining literary interpretation (and canon formation) as one of the main goals of literary studies.

Let me take a last example from a case recently presented by Ballon- Aguirre (1987), where the writing of literary history in Peru is discussed in the context of a broad range of discursive practices. What is stressed are the plurilingual and multicultural realities of Peruvian societies.

From the wide spectrum of different languages and discursive prac-

12. For simplicity's sake I am disregarding, in this argument, two important facts: (1) that the Popol Vuh in the written narrative/book form as we know it today is not the same as the Council Book in its oral and picto-ideographic written form; (2) that a literary scholar who is an expert in Latin American literature may be of Maya-Quiche origin. 13. See, for instance, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize address, in Cardwell and McGuirck (1988).


Figure 1. DISCURSIVE PRODUCTION IN PERU. Based on Ball6n-Aguirre (1987: 18-23).

Written Spanish

Institutional I

Individual subject. Western tradition

Printed

Academic (literature and

other academic disciplines)

Individual (divided) subject. Amerindian-

Western traditions +

Printed

Academic (literature and

related academic disciplines, such as anthropology)

Written/oral Spanish

Parainstitutional I

Marginal

Printed Not-printed

. i Private;

Political/ resistance

Newsstand

Clandestine

Printed and not-printed

Political/ resistance


Oral/written Amerindian languages

Non-institutional

Inter-cultural Cross-cultural Intra-cultural

Oral transmission Written transmission Oral transmission

Legends, riddles, Alphabetic Myths, ethnic proverbs, etc. transcription of narratives, and

oral narrative identity discursive (after the strategies conquest)

Note: The total population of Peru is 18,274,200. 72.64% is Spanish-speaking (13,273,628). 24.08% is Quechua-speaking (4,400,023). And 24.08% speak other native languages (including Aru and jungle languages) (600,549). From Cerr6n- Palomino (1989).

tices shown in the diagram (Figure 1), it emerges that canon formation is usually discussed at the level of written/formal/academic discursive

practices. The diagram helps us to remember that canon formation and transformation is, on the one hand, related to power and, on the other, to the official language (in this case Spanish) in which power and tradition are understood as synonyms. Consequently, one lan-

guage and one tradition are taken as the language and the tradition when, indeed, and as the diagram shows, there are several languages and traditions for which the "official" canon would be meaningless. But that is, precisely, what the history of literature does. The history of literary historiography in Latin America is perhaps a striking ex-

ample of canon formation and suppression because of the colonizer/ colonized friction arising from its plurilingual and multicultural fea- tures. The Hispanic-American canon was constructed on the basis of a "standard" language and of a set of aesthetic criteria embedded in the colonizer's concepts of "poetry" and "literature."

Concluding Remarks

My aim has been to uphold-on the one hand-the view that (vocational) canon formation is community-relative and that literary canons are, consequently, a part of literature itself, as a self-organized cultural activity, and-on the other hand-the belief that theorizing across linguistic and cultural boundaries ("diatopical hermeneutic") would allow us to understand better the regional scope of literature as a West- ern discursive practice, in contrast to the universal scope of human


semiotic interactions. Understanding discursive practices and semiotic interactions as self-organizing systems across cultural boundaries would be a way to avoid teaching regional literary canons as if they were universals. Canon formation and the teaching of literature could also benefit from the awareness we develop at the epistemic level, whereas understanding self-organizing discursive practices and systems of interactions across cultural boundaries could benefit from the "inside" (vocational) view that each of "us" has of our "own" liter-

ary canon. Fifteen years ago, Lotman (1976: 344) stated that "literature never constitutes an amorphously homogeneous body of texts: it is not only an organization, but a self-organizing mechanism." He pro- posed, furthermore, that at the "highest grade of organization literature marks out a group of texts which are of a level more abstract than that of the entire remaining mass of texts, i.e., which are metatexts." He added that "metatexts" are norms, rules, theoretical tracts, and critical articles which "turn literature back on itself in an organized, struc- tured and evaluated form." This self-organizing mechanism operates both by exclusion of a given category of texts from the realm of literature and by a hierarchical organization employing a taxonometric evaluation of the remaining texts.14

Finally, I would like to add to the previous discussion that Lotman's "metatexts" are responsible for canon formation and that "metatexts" are what we generate at the vocational level. When this hypothesis is tested within the context of cross-cultural discursive practices, it becomes clear that, on one hand, it could be extended to a wide range of discursive practices and that, on the other, the field of literary studies at the epistemic level could no longer be conceived in terms of "literature" but as a field of self-organizing systems of discursive practices and interactions. "Metatexts" at this level become the plane of the "observers' description of semiotic interaction," to borrow Maturana's

(1970) expression (Mignolo [forthcoming]). Canon formation is a particular example of a self-organizing system's regulating the discursive

practices by which human communities stabilize the past and project the future. Canons (literary or nonliterary, Western or non-Western, "first-" or "third-world") are community-relative. Literary canons are the result of a vocational self-organizing system of discursive practices, the outcome of which has been projected from the regional level, where they belong, to the universal level of a field of study, thus dis-

regarding either the boundaries between cultures or the transmission between regions.

14. A more extensive discussion of this hypothesis can be found in Mignolo (1978, 1986). See also Van Rees (1984).


Appendix

A Bush-Era Canon The following works form the 1988-89 reading list for one of eight "Culture, Ideas, Values" survey courses offered at Stanford University. This one is entitled "Europe and the Americas."

St. Augustine, Confessions Left Handod, Son of Old Man Hat Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday

Life Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit

of Capitalism Marx, The Communist Manifesto Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener" The Bible: Genesis and Revelation Zora Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching

God Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His

Hand Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Juan Rullo, The Burning Plain and Other Stories

Popol Vuh, A Maya creation myth I ... Rigoberta Menchu Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango

Street

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture Paul Radin, The Trickster M. J. and F. S. Herskovits, Dahomean

Narrative

African Myths and Tales Homeric Hymn to Hermes

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Shakespeare, The Tempest Aime Cesaire, A Tempest C. L. R. James, BlackJacobins Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This

World Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti Zora Hurston, Tell My Horse

Euripides, Bacchae Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Euripides, Medea Derek Walcott, Collected Poems Aime C6saire, Return to My Native Land

Sir John Mandeville, Travels Columbus, Letters from 1st, 3rd, & 4th

voyages

Clarice Lispector, "The Smallest Woman in the World"

Fray Bernardo de Sahagin, The

Conquest of Mexico Carmen Tafolla, "La Malinche" Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of

New Spain Bartolome de Las Casas, In Defense of

the Indians

James Clifford, "Identity among the

Mashpee" Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, New Chronicle and Good Government

Documents from the Tupac Amaru rebellion

Jose Maria Arguedas, "Ode to the Jet Plane," "Hymn to Our Father Tupac Amaru"

Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, The Social Contract

Declaration of the Rights of Man (France, 1789)

Declaration of Independence (U.S., 1776)

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (U.N., 1948)

Freedom Charter (South Africa, 1956) Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the

Rights of Woman Frederick Douglass, Autobiography Esteban Echeverria, "The Slaughter-

house"

Juana Manuela Gorrill, "He who does evil should expect no good"

Whitman, Leaves of Grass Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman

Warrior

24 Poetics Today 12: 1

A Roosevelt-Era Canon The following works formed the 1937-38 Freshman Book List, required reading in the humanities at Columbia University.

Homer, Iliad Dante, Inferno Aeschylus, Oresteia Machiavelli, The Prince

Sophocles, Oedipus the King Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel Sophocles, Antigone Montaigne, Essays Euripides, Electra Shakespeare, Henry IV, Parts I and II

Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris Shakespeare, Hamlet

Euipides, Medea Shakespeare, King Lear Aristophanes, The Frogs Cervantes, Don Quixote Plato, Apology Milton, Paradise Lost Plato, Symposium Spinoza, Ethics Plato, Republic Moliere, Le Tartuffe Aristotle, Ethics Moliere, Le Misanthrope Aristotle, Poetics Moliere, The Physician in Spite of Himself Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Swift, Gulliver's Travels Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Fielding, Tom Jones Virgil, Aeneid Rousseau, Confessions

Voltaire, Candide St. Augustine, Confessions Goethe, Faust Goethe, Faust From "Who Needs the Great Works?" Harpers (September 1989): 45-46.

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