The generation of a literary canon is a continuous process of acceptance and communication in time and space,in which both purely literary and academic elements as well as non-literary,non-canonical and even secular powers are involved.Only by constant self-generation and self-enrichment through continuous absorption of the political and aesthetic energies from both the conventional and the elite,can a literary text possibly become a classic.The task of genealogy is to demonstrate how a text is shaped in the historical process,and to reveal how traces of meaning are inscribed in the text through dialogue or the wrestling of various energies within it.The tracking of complex routes in the generation of a literary canon should therefore be the starting point of genealogical analysis.
A literary canon has strong diffusibility and absorptivity.It can absorb a text that predates it and make it an organic part of its own in the form of a pretext.During the process of dissemination it can inspire writers in their subsequent creation of a series of post-texts at different levels.Along the horizontal timeline,any classic literary text has more than one pretext or non-text,which might appear irrelevant and scattered without any sign of canonicity but has actually accumulated massive social and cultural narrative energy to constitute the preconditions for a classic literary text.Along the vertical axis of space,we find that discourses in a classic text have at least three strata: the generally-accepted core text (or main text),the subtext and the hypertext,etc.
A literary canon in this sense is not an isolated or independent text but a group of texts or discourse relations,or more precisely,a ''field'',with fights and wrestles among various literary and non-literary powers within it.It is these dialogues and tensions created in the fights and wrestles that become the most fundamental and profound reasons for the formation and dissemination of a literary canon.A literary canon in this field not only undergoes the whole process from nascence at its birthplace to renaissance in a foreign context,but also experiences transformation in different forms of media,from oral,written and printed to audio and visual texts.In the contemporary context,only by seeing a text as a field,by examining the inherited relations within a literary canon,and by exploring the interactions between a literary canon,the social discourse system,and communication media,can we truly appreciate the value and significance of a literary canon from the dialogue between texts,from the dialogue between the carriers of different media within a text, and from the dialogue and interaction between texts and audience.From a methodological perspective,the research into the genealogy and communication mechanisms of a literary canon also avoids an arbitrary split between the text and its contexts,and builds a bridge between literature and the society,the elite and the public as well as its commercial and aesthetic values.
张德明. 文学经典的生成谱系与传播机制[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2014, 44(1): 87-99.
Zhang Deming. Genealogy and Communication Mechanisms of the Literary Canon. , 2014, 44(1): 87-99.