Practice question · True or false
Because a genuinely new work rearranges the existing order, admitting a work to the canon changes how the works already in it are read.
Hints
- This is Eliot's claim about tradition.
- If the order is rearranged rather than extended, the existing members shift position.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and it is the point of Eliot's argument. Once Kafka exists, earlier writers who make bureaucratic dread available to us start looking like precursors, a relation invisible before Kafka wrote. The canon is not a queue with a growing tail.
Practise The Canon, Tradition and the Idea of a Classic
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More questions on The Canon, Tradition and the Idea of a Classic
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