Literary Value and Canonicity: The Value of Value

After reading Hernstein-Smith and Guillory I became very much convinced that ‘literary value’ is nothing more than what its valuers happen to value. In other words, the categories of ‘valuable’ and ‘canonical’ are arbitrarily defined by the tastes of those who are valuing texts. According to Guillory, it appears that those texts considered ‘canonical’ are simply those valued by those in the most powerful positions within a society. But why must the canon exist, and why must some texts be valued over others, and the proponents of these texts seek to perpetuate their value?

I think the answer to this comes down to cultural reproduction. Guillory states that Smith ‘confines the aesthetic function to the biophysiological level’. I think it is interesting to look at the value of texts from a biophysiological perspective. Perhaps, in an extreme sense, valuable texts are essential for our survival. While we will not necessarily die if we cease to read Shakespeare, our social systems are founded on the traditions of the past which are repeated, adapted and improved upon in the future. It is important for present generations to transmit cultural values onto future generations in order to ensure the survival of the group using the practices that have worked in the past. So therefore various cultural practices, such as the reading of Shakespeare, exist in a system of biophysiological survival and prospering of the group.

Our education system values the texts that were taught before, and this creates a new generation of readers whose tastes follow on from those of the previous generation in a similar but adaptively different way in the process of fitting to a new external context. Guillory claims that Hernstein-Smith conceives canon formation as a process of the ‘survival of the fittest object’. Therefore, those texts which belong to the canon are those that have happened to be adaptable to or suitable within their external environments. I think that Guillory’s problem with this argument is that it is these texts that shape those environments through their role in the formation of the reading subject. So the canonical texts themselves, by being valued and taught, ensure their survival in the future.

This doesn’t appear to be a problem to me, as this is the natural function of culture: to promote the repetition of the values of the past in the future. It seems that the texts we value are those we have been taught to value throughout the entire formation of our subjectivity. One cannot argue that texts can have some inherent value, because this will be entirely based on the personal values of that reading subject, determined by culture, as taught through the reading of the canon. Whichever way one chooses to value a text: be it based on popularity, its application of conventions, its complexity, its reflection of ‘truth’, these values will always be contingent. There is no more to literary value than the taste of the reader, but it is the canon which (in part) determines these tastes.

Therefore, it is the canon which ensures its own existence, survival and form through its status as a culturally reproductive agent. The idea of the canon, of ‘literary value’, is what creates and sustains the canon. The canon is not reflective of value but the engine which perpetuates and changes itself to ensure its survival in the changing environment. Perhaps value is shaped by the contingencies of Hernstein-Smith’s communities of readers, but it is also the contingency which shapes these communities.




Hernstein-Smith, B., 1988. Excerpts from Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Guillory, J., 1993. Excerpts from Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.