Where does canon collide?

The body of literary works that a culture treats as authoritative and worth studying, transmitting, and imitating: the set of texts that get taught, anthologised, and returned to as major, together with the disputes over how that set is formed and revised. Guillory's 1993 Cultural Capital argued that the literary canon is not a fixed list of great books but the outcome of how access to literacy and to the schools is distributed. The referent is a selection of texts and the process that sanctions it, not a body of church rules, a musical form, or a standard mathematical representation.[1]

Unit

A body of works treated as authoritative, seen in what is taught, anthologised, and returned to as major

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced by what teachers assign, what anthologies collect, and what critics keep citing; canon formation is studied historically

A contrapuntal form in which a melody stated by one voice is imitated, note for note, by one or more other voices that enter after a fixed delay: a round is the familiar strict example, where each voice takes up the same tune in turn. The Harvard Dictionary of Music (Randel, 2003) describes the canon as the strictest form of imitative counterpoint, defined by the pitch interval and the time interval at which the following voices answer the leader. The referent is a way of composing and organising simultaneous voices, not a list of authoritative texts, a body of church law, or a standard form in mathematics.[2]

Unit

A piece or passage in which a leading voice is imitated exactly by others at a fixed pitch and time interval

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified in a score by the strict imitation of a leading voice, and described by the interval and delay between the parts

A standard, unique representative chosen for each class of objects that count as equivalent, so that two objects are equivalent exactly when they reduce to the same canonical form: putting an object into canonical form gives a normal way of naming it that sets aside inessential differences. Hoffman and Kunze's 1971 Linear Algebra develops the rational and Jordan canonical forms, the standard representatives to which a matrix or linear operator can be reduced. The referent is a normal form under some equivalence, a device for deciding sameness and for computing, not a canon of texts, a body of church law, or a musical round.[3]

Unit

A single standard representative for each equivalence class, so two objects match when their canonical forms are identical

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Computed by a fixed procedure that reduces an object to its canonical form, such as the Jordan or rational form of a matrix