The debate about a literary canon : A discourse analysis of articles from the cultural pages of newspapers

Literary debates about canon occur regularly. In the summer of 2006 such a debate took place in Sweden. The aim of this Master thesis is to examine the debate to identify the different discourses and what they reveal about ideas concerning the role of literature in society. The empirical material used for the analysis consists of 46 debate articles from three important newspapers. The combined theory and method applied is the discourse analysis described in Ernesto Laclau’s & Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory. The discourse theory is combined with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories about power, habitas, taste, field and capital. In this thesis the authors of the articles are looked upon as belonging to the cultural elite. They have positions in the literary field that, in relation to other positions, give them symbolic capital. In the theories of Bourdieu culture and education play a dominant role in the reproduction of differences between social classes and are an important arena for symbolic violence. Relating to research it is in this thesis argued that the canon in the school literary curriculum plays the same role. This is also related to questions of power and the post-modern situation. Four discourses are identified in the analysis: The global discourse, the national discourse, the self-Bildung discourse and the teaching discourse. The discourses are in the analyses connected to cultural views and illustrated in a theoretical model.Uppsatsnivå: