Indefinitely Expanding Canon?

Let's say that the Enlightenment era gets culled as thoroughly as the pre-Enlightenment. The canon becomes easily manageable at this point; we'll call it approximately "super important" texts in the last three centuries. However slow this pace is, it will still eventually add up to a number as ridiculous as we have now. Unless we are close to a nonnegotiable end of intellectual history, we will need to find better criteria for classics.

Whats up with all the ropes before each alley?

Do you think they'd actually let any dumb freshman at the college waltz down the shelves and finger up priceless books from the 16th century?

It’s spelled “canon.” A “cannon” is something you shoot a cannonball out of.

I's already beyond manageable if you care about completion. The only cope is to start using a much more restricted, autistic, elitisti and/or niche definition of the canon.
Ir just accept you'll never read it all.

You can easily read hundreds of books in ten years. With two books a month in average between the ages of 25 and 50 you would already be at 600 books. Some people read dozens of thousand of books in their lifetime. But the Wetern Canon is vastly bigger than that.

It's all historical semi-autistic controversies and personal opinion. Not that it is really bad, but really reliably measuring the impact of books besides insufficient stuff like quotations and sales is something humans most likely haven't figured out yet.

If you're able to read more than 10 books in one year, you're reading the wrong books.

>It's all historical semi-autistic controversies and personal opinion. Not that it is really bad, but really reliably measuring the impact of books besides insufficient stuff like quotations and sales is something humans most likely haven't figured out yet.
Does this call the entire notion of the canon into question? If the canon is meant to be the common foundation and "great conversation," but in reality everybody is going their own way, then why do we bother with lists and charts?

If it takes you 36 days to read a book, you must be the slowest reader in history.

>I think the idea of a western cannon as a thing shared by every western country is wrong

Cringe and idiotic take.

The Canon is the foundation of white literary culture, and it's important that white people defend and add to it each generation. That jews are deconstructing it now and trying to shoehorn non-whites and women in is the primary short-term obstacle we face, but jewish postwar cultural retconning is falling apart fast, and non-whites and women are simply incapable of producing anything of merit, so their efforts will ultimately fail.

The western literary Canon represents white / western culture. It is absolutely a shared cultural heritage, and white men are the only people who will ever care about it or be capable of upholding it.

The Canon stopped expanding with the release of Ulysses
Nothing afterwards is Canon

Based

Bad outlook to have. What are we just supposed to cut it off and declare literature over? Boomer and Gen X lit didn't offer much in terms of important narratives but they still reflect their times and should be judged on that basis, as well as their contributions to style. Potential additions aren't necessarily abundant but there are a few worthy of being let in.

taking any author that hasn't been dead for 300 years seriously

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I often see this kind of comments on Yea Forums It's absolute brainletism. You don't need to spend 10 minutes of every page of a 19th century novel from Dosto, Balzac, Tolstoy or even Flaubert (and yes all of those are canonical and worth reading, fuck anti-fictionfags and anti-serialized novelsfag). Spend more than one hour a day on reading and see how far you go.

Also reading a book three times should be counted as reading three books for that purpose.

It's always been the case and the idea of a canon in that sense is modern. Bfore that people read "the Ancients", which for most of the Middle Ages was less than a few dozen Greek and Roman authors. Scholars did read much more but as scholars today they were pretty specialized. Sure the main speciality of almost everyone was Aristotles but most commentaries on him was only read by scant few people related to ther author. They also would comment texts mistakenly attributed to Aristotles as if they were his own. Archaeology and history have become much more precise since, and correspondingly our views of who the Ancient were has grown richer but also more fragmented.

Basically that's a long way to say yes. But ths should prevent people from having conversations, or treating some authors as near-universally important. Just be prepared to meet well-read people who don't hold your wn canon in uniformly high regard (there are still very safe choices like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare).

The /pol/ bot strikes again. You could almost have an argument if your post wasn't the millionth parroting of the usual tired points. This is why people here hate you guys, not because of muh jews, but because you have to self-importantly repeat the same three simple-ass takes in every thread no matter the relevance. And if we corrupted NPC are ungrateful enough not to bow before the incredible insight of your fourth rate rehashed rant, you instantly assume we must be shill on jewish payroll.
Do you also go to /tg/ to lecture people about how W40K i a jewish corruption of the white culture of boarding game? You're just making this place worse for everyone including yourself.
My point is that you're no being provocative or "real", or "redpilled" (an idiotic meme that should have died long ago), you're just boring and predictable as fuck. Go back to your echo chamber.

*this shouldn't

Moshe mad

You're correct that the Enlightenment has been trash overall, but are you serious about there being no exceptions?

You need to understand what a canon is: a canon is a tradition aimed at delineating "the essential books", to get around the problem that none of us have the time to read everything. (And the type of reading I am talking about here is essentially 'study': it is reading a book three times or more and trying to completely understand it, as well as reading it (if possible) in its original language)

It does not make sense to talk of "The Canon" because people have different reasons to read books: there is a canon for philosophy, for poetry, for history, for scripture (the Bible itself is a canon).

In a sense we each must decide, somewhat arbitrarily, what we will have as our own canon: what books we will attend to and what books we will not. We can get some guidance in this choice by looking at what books were judged as great in the past, but ultimately what you choose to read is an existential choice, because in choosing to read this book you are closing off thousands on thousands of other books which you might have read instead, and you only have a limited number of books you can read before you die.

For me, Plato and Shakespeare are in my Canon, because I have a pretty good guess that, having lasted this long, they must have something good to tell us. I generally also think that you ought to lean more towards classics when making your own Canon, because in reading classics you can gain a better understanding of what authors throughout the history of the west were responding to: you can easily understand Plato without Aristotle, and you can easily understand Aristotle without Aquinas, but it is not clear that the opposite is true in either case, and thus it seems wise to start as far back as possible when choosing what books you should study and digest.

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