The Canon: Tent Poles in the Circus of Literary Culture

A comment to a post at Arcade:

Think of literary culture as a circus tent. The canonical texts are the tent poles. The other literary texts, the ones that didn't make the canon, including of course those that shift in and out of it, pop culture, whatever, are the canvas, tent pegs, guy wires, etc. Everything else, everything under the tent, that's the secondary and tertiary texts and jillions of conversations.