A canon isn’t just what gets kept. It’s what gets chosen, repeatedly, by people with the power to make the choice stick.
Canon stems from the word canonical.
Every tradition, religious, literary, legal, scholarly accumulates far more material than it can treat as central, so it draws a line: these texts are foundational, authoritative, worth returning to; the rest are peripheral, disputed, or forgotten. That line is not discovered in the texts themselves; it’s actively constructed, defended, and periodically re-fought, by whoever has the institutional standing to say what belongs inside it. A foundational study of literary canon formation traced exactly this mechanism — canons are not simply “the best work survives,” they’re the product of specific institutions (schools, publishers, academies) deciding, and re-deciding, what to teach and preserve.
This is the deliberate weight behind this essay’s use of “the canon” alongside “the taxonomy” and “rules of interpretation” as foundational-layer decisions — a canon is not a byproduct of building a knowledge system, it’s one of the load-bearing choices in building one at all.
Source: Guillory, J. (1993), Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, University of Chicago Press.