ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 uses Michel Foucault’s analytics of power relations to call attention to important forces of canon formation in the teaching of literature. Drawing on a variety of Foucault’s texts, especially his later works on power-knowledge and subject formation, this chapter first explores what Foucault means by power, as well as his idea of resistance, which can explain how new relations of power are at times catalyzed in the teaching of literature, leading to changes in the literary canon. Then, using case studies and the system of canon formation explicated in the previous chapter, Chapter 3 illustrates the ways that English teachers are themselves implicated in processes of canon formation as they govern each other and themselves as subjects of a specific field of knowledge. Power relations help to describe how the actions of English teachers not only reinforce both the canonization of certain texts and processes of canonization, but also cause ruptures in relations of power through acts of resistance, altering the types of texts that come to be taught in English classrooms.
