Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

canon The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a canon as ‘n. Church decree; canon law, eccl. law; general law governing treatment of a subject; criterion; list of Bible books accepted by Church; list of recognized genuine works of a particular author’ (5th edn). This discussion will focus primarily on the last definition. It will be useful, first, to return to the etymological origins of the term, for the issue of the formation of canons, a highly contested area in aesthetic debate in the late twentieth century, continues to raise questions about the foundations of value, if not of truth. Engaged here, on the one hand, are critics who claim that aesthetic values are essential and universal and thus self-evidentially reflected in a broadly stable canon of great works of art. Some of them might argue that such values may be intuited in a subliminal way, but in their transcendence of or resistance to the categories of conceptual thought they must finally remain outside that which can be described. For others, aesthetic values arise out of modes of formal and structural complexity peculiar to works of high art and which guarantee the possibility of their endless interpretability. Although a range of divergent meanings may be attributed to such works in different ages, their essential trans-historical aesthetic value remains stable. Moreover, if it is a property of form it may be described ... log in or subscribe to read full text