The Country That Made Its Own Canon
When the list was released in the fall, the selections seemed to confirm detractors’ fears. This vision of Sweden was antiquated, out-of-touch, and white. One feature came in for particular scorn: a requirement that all hundred works predate 1975. (Otherwise, the committee argued, they could not be said to have stood the test of time.) ABBA was thus excluded, causing many a dancing queen to clutch her boa. For the social anthropologist Marlen Eskander, the cutoff silently excised immigrant experiences and second-wave feminism from Swedish culture. Eskander had been part of the original canon committee, but quit a year into the work. “The entire project is characterized by distinct national Romantic overtones and excludes a third of the contemporary Swedish population,” she wrote.
These are, in some ways, old debates, but Sweden has revived them in a new moment and with a new frame. Long the purview of classrooms and anthologies, the canon is now of interest to the state itself. For the Sweden Democrats and their coalition, culture, like borders, merits strategic defense. This is not nineteenth-century nation-building, but twenty-first-century national crisis management.
Canons are by definition exclusionary. The word derives from the Greek kanon, for “rule,” or standard of excellence. It arrived in Old English through Latin and French, by which time its meaning had become ecclesiastical, referring to the set of Church laws judged to be authoritative. Its first secular use, as a term for major literary texts, dates to the eighteenth century, and that sense became gradually more pervasive as authority was divorced from scripture. Today, “canon” is also used in fantasy communities to denote those texts which properly belong to an imagined world. The seven Harry Potter books are canon; fan fiction that couples Hermione and Malfoy is not.
Like their Christian cousins, literary canons derive authority from institutions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, American colleges began to implement Great Books courses: surveys designed to introduce students to the touchstones of Western thought. Some of these programs, including Columbia’s famous “core curriculum,” had a surprising origin in the First World War. As part of the war effort, the government installed conscript units on campuses and required that the soldiers receive an alternative curriculum, including a class on “war issues.” This was not a crash course on military strategy but an introduction to literary and philosophical classics such as Plato’s Republic. The goal was to link American culture with its European antecedents—a heady way to justify shedding blood for another continent’s conflict. “This is a war of ideas,” one government report asserted, and conscripts needed “some understanding of the view of life and of society which they are called upon to defend.”
After the war, these programs were largely disbanded. But the Columbia faculty campaigned for their course’s preservation, and in 1919 the name changed to Western Civilization. In the thirties, other institutions, such as the University of Chicago and St. Johns College, developed similar curricula, and by mid-century “Western Civ” was a standard fixture of higher education. The Great War paved the way for Great Books.
But which books were great? In the seventies and eighties, core curricula were attacked for their Eurocentrism and exclusion of minority voices. Known today as the “canon wars,” these skirmishes were a prelude to the debates over diversity, equity, and inclusion that dominate higher education today. And, just like today, they triggered a backlash. In “The Closing of the American Mind,” from 1987, Allan Bloom synthesized the counter-argument, declaring the “Great Books approach” to be the “only serious solution” to the nihilism and relativism plaguing American society.
As Sweden’s canon debate attests, such rhetoric remains part of the global right-wing playbook. But Bloom’s legacy has had the unfortunate effect of making even more reasonable canon defenses look reactionary. Consider a modest point. The Great Books provide common objects—besides the state of dining-hall food—for all undergraduates to discuss. This may not solve teen-age nihilism, but it offers the chance to gain new perspective on that angst. Plus, there’s a social and federating function at play. As a colleague who attended the University of Chicago put it, “You could go to a frat party, and even there everyone would have something to say about Aristotle.” These works needed some minimum level of aesthetic value, he thought, but the most important thing was that they were shared.
