Page 42 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Canon The idea of a canon refers to a body of work held to be the most important
within a particular tradition, or sometimes to the parameters that surround the
work associated with a given author. The concept derives from the Greek word
kanon that means measure or rule and was further developed in the context of
fourth-century Christian scholars concerned with the orthodox and the heretical.
Thus, a canon is centrally involved with questions of inclusion and exclusion and
in the context of contemporary culture that process of selection centres on
questions of aesthetic value. That is, an item is selected for inclusion in the canon
of, say, literature on the basis of the quality of its expression of ‘universal’ aesthetic
values. Such a list of ‘great books’ would include the work of Chaucer, Homer,
Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot amongst others while Bach, Beethoven and Mozart form
the core of the European classical music canon.
The formation of a canon involves a process of judgement and discrimination
the authority and grounds for which have been challenged not least from within
the domain of cultural studies. The whole idea of a canon as ‘the good and the
great’ has been questioned on the grounds that there are no universal grounds for
aesthetic judgements so that those which are employed can be understood as
distinctions of taste and power associated with class-based groups. In particular, the
policing of the boundaries of a canon of ‘good works’ had led to the exclusion of
popular culture. Ironically, while challenging the very idea of a canon, there has
also been an attempt to widen the boundaries of the traditional canon to include
the works of, for example, postcolonial and feminist works in the canon of literature
or to include film under the rubric of Art. From a cultural studies perspective
perhaps the more pertinent issue is the exploration of the conditions and processes
that underpin the formation of a canon at a particular time and place.
Links Aesthetics, cultural capital, cultural studies, popular culture, values

Capitalism The most influential understanding of capitalism within cultural studies
has come from the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Marx. Here capitalism is
grasped as a mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means
of production. In the past this would have included factories, mills and workshops
while today it signals multinational corporations. Class conflict is a marker of
capitalism whose fundamental division is between those who own the means of
production, the bourgeoisie, and a working class or proletariat who must sell their
labour to survive. Today the class structures of Western societies are considerably
more complex and internally stratified than Marx described them. Class is now

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