Literature, culture, and the canon : a cultural critique of Umberto Eco's The name of the rose and Foucalt's Pendulum, and Dan Brown's Angels and demons and the Da Vinci code

Abstract

The fact that literature is nowadays a persuasive subject across most strata of education docs not mean that we have actually grasped what it is. To address this question, this study looks at several important characteristics within the literary tradition while focusing on two spheres that this dissertation deems inextricably linked: the literary canonical and the cultural. The first chapter opens by highlighting the difficulty many critics and theorists have faced in their attempt to explain what the literary is. This chapter, basing most of its discussion on the externality of the text, raises the possibility that the definition of Literature might be in the end a cultural construct. Chapter Two, on the other hand, focuses more on a text's internal construction and, referring to the critical works of Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, strives to understand whether literary and non-literary works nonfiction (differently because they are constructed differently. Chapters Three and Four form the heart of the dissertation by providing a close reading of four novels, two representing what critics have called high literature/ culture (The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum) and two representing what critics have considered an interior literature (Angels and Demons and the Da Vinci Code. The concluding chapter interweaves together various important threads of the main argument in the attempt to provide a sound cultural critique which argues that the study of neglected popular fiction might actually contribute to a better understanding of the distinctiveness of the literary. The significance of this study eventually lies, as its title suggests, in the simultaneous consideration of Literature, Culture, and the Canon.