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Canon and Narratives of Domination

 The idea of a literary canon is a variation of traditional censorship that makes only sense in the general processes of enculturation and development of narratives of domination. It certainly helps the teacher to reduce the number of candidates to be read on a classroom, but does a poor service to creativity endlessly repeating a transcendental pattern of inspired geniuses giving the law (literary or otherwise) to an ignorant humankind. When some years ago Harold Bloom made his famous top-ten hits in the History of Literature, leaving Hamlet and Don Quixote to play a very disputed final, after a disqualifying process of other literary works, he was consciously marking a censorship general reference, a nihil obstat for future works that creates an unreasonable mortgage for future generations. Media industry (publishing houses and general audiovisual ones) benefits from this trivial pursuit endeavors as much as the lover of literature is impaired. We do not read the way people read 100 years ago or 1.000. In fact, the web is reshaping the publishing world and the art of literature faster than ever before. The ratio et auctoritas of the censor has only place in medieval societies where the citizen remains forever a child, not in a society centered around the narratives of the human law. The idea of the canon would finally disappear once it is understood that to a desert island is better to bring paper and pen than any particular book, for writing and reading are self-constructing tools (both socially and individually) that expand our memory capabilities, allowing the construction of more rich and deeper realities. 

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