ABSTRACT
Serving as a conclusion, this chapter takes stock of what the previous chapters attempted to investigate and suggests that the literary canon and the teaching of literature be viewed as necessarily incomplete and subject to revision. As conceptualizing the literary canon in the teaching of literature as an assemblage implies that the canon is not immutable, being influenced by a variety of forces that seek to regulate and alter it, the literary canon is always in a state of “becoming,” though there are certainly processes that work to slow down change. This accounts for the numerous shifts in the teaching of literature that have changed what it means to teach literature as well as what counts as a teachable text; from the founding of the discipline in the 1800s to the Basic Issues Conferences, the Dartmouth Seminar, and more recently to the Common Core Standards, the teaching of literature and the canon have changed at secondary schools and colleges. In addition, this chapter suggests that while current cultural and educational movements could shed further light on canon formation through empirical studies into the canon, a conceptual framework such as one based on assemblage theory and the ideas of Michel Foucault can offer significant explanatory power in identifying, understanding, and interrogating processes of canon formation in the teaching of literature.
