General and Comparative Literature
Subject: The Internal Canon: An In-Depth Study of the Single Artist's Oeuvre
Supervisor: Prof. David Fishelov
Abstract: My dissertation addresses the notion of internal canon, namely the selection of works associated with each artist. Many times, only a small portion of an artist's body of work becomes widely known. James Joyce, for example, is widely recognized as the author of the novels Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, however few are aware that Joyce was also a poet and dramatist. Although this phenomenon touches most if not all artists of all mediums, it is rarely studied. In my dissertation I focused on a couple of writers and tried to determine which are their most canonical works by examining academic studies, literary anthologies, universities' syllabi, translations, literary adaptations and so on. In addition, I explored in which ways this limited selection of works with which these writers are identified is or isn't representative of their entire artistic production.