Uma abordagem do cânone literário: origem, manutenção e contestação

Abstract

This monograph aims to present the main aspects related to the origin, contestation and maintenance of the Western Literary Canon. In view of this purpose, the general objective of this work is to bring some discussions about the Western literary canon, considering the universalizing pretension of the West and the cultural relativism of postmodernity, as well as the changing concept of culture in the West. To this end, three specific objectives were considered: a) to problematize the idea of modernity/civilization based on the challenge of the Eurocentric conception of the world, the approach of postmodern thought and the concept of transmodernity brought by Latin American scholars; b) present na overview of the idea of culture, discussing the implications of this idea for the conception of literary canon; and c) comment on the conflict between aestheticians and revisionists or between the discourse of modernity and discourses of postmodernity in relation to the literary canon. As a result of the research, considering the proposed objectives on the theme of the Western literary canon, the following was inferred: the historical changes that have occurred in the Western world around the concepts of modernity and postmodernity imply a significant change in the idea of literary canon that concerns the dispute between ancients and moderns and between moderns and postmoderns; the implications of the term culture to talk about the literary canon brought to light three meanings of culture, clarifying that these three meanings correspond to changes in thinking in the West that permeate the concept of modernity and post-modernity; and discussing the literary canon in the arena of conflicts between aestheticians and revisionists, showed that, on the one hand, there are theorists who argue that the literary canon is based on strictly aesthetic criteria and that establishing or perpetuating the canon does not imply ideological factors, and on the other, that revisionists do not aim to abolish the canon, but to revisit it, verifying in it the hegemonic discourse of modernity, as they also enrich and reinvigorate it. In the midst of it all, there is the certainty that the literary canon is a matter of choice that implies value and that value is not an objective fact.