Western canon

The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the globe. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature". Classic book A classic is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second-century Roman miscellany Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius refers to a writer as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Such classification began with the Greeks' ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard"). Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction, thus, being comprehended in a canon ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes ("the admitted", "the included") to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Vedas. With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino, and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including T. S. Eliot, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Michael Dirda, and Ezra Pound. The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous.