The Canon in Southeast Asian Literatures

By David Smyth

The literary canon is one of the most lively areas of debate in contemporary literary studies. In the English-speaking world, the term 'canon' is most widely understood to refer to an institutionally recognized list of exemplary works, such as the body of works constituting the national literature of a country. The term is also used, however, to denote a system of rules for creating such works. These two fundamentally different, although not irreconcilable, usages of the term were reflected in the papers presented.
A traditional and popular view of literature sees it as a chronological arrangement of famous authors and major works which are linked over the centuries by a perceived cultural unity and which 'have stood the test of time'. Increasingly -- although by no means universally - literary scholars have begun to view the literary canon as primarily a social construct and literary worth as a reflection of power relations rather than intrinsic aesthetics. A major aim of the workshop was to look at such ideas in the context of the literary canons of Southeast Asia. Papers varied in focus, from the broad panoramic survey of trends in a national literature to very specific discussions of the role of an individual in shaping a canon or the place of a particular text within a tradition, and from contemporary to traditional literature.
Anna Allott (SOAS) and Anna-Marie Esche (Humboldt University Berlin) offered broad surveys of the developments of prose fiction in Burma to the present day, the former focusing in particular on present government censorship and artistic guideline. In Vietnam, too, writers risk incurring Party censure despite the official lip-service paid to artistic freedom; nevertheless, Dana Healy (SOAS) noted the cautious emergence of a more innovative literature,m where contemporary writers have begun to abandon socialist realism.

Western influence
A recurring theme throughout the workshop was the multi-faceted influence of the West upon Southeast Asian literature, ranging from the cultural transfer of prose fiction as a literary genre to the emergence of a tradition of academic description and analysis of imaginative works. Phan Cu De (University of Hanoi) described the impact of French and English literatures on literature in Vietnam since 1930, while Bernard Arps (Leiden University) and Ungku Maimunah Modh (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) discussed the role of Westerners in codifying Javanese poetics and writing Malay literary history respectively.

The emergence of literature as an institutionalized branch of knowledge was addressed in papers analyzing Indonesian literary histories for secondary schools by Ulrich Kratz (SOAS), Thai histories of the novel by David Smyth (SOAS) and the development of Malay literary criticism by Lisbeth Littrupo (University of Copenhagen). Christine Cambell (ANU) presented a paper entitled: Is there a women's canon?', which prompted lively discussion about the role of women in Southeast Asian literature and the relevance of Western feminist theory to the Southeast Asian context.

Several papers dealt with indigenous aesthetics, Peter Koret (New York) illustrating the concept of creativity within the rigid conventions of traditional Lao verse, Mohammed Haji Salleh (Leiden University) 'rescuing' Malay poetics from Western cultural domination, and Vladimir Braginsky (SOAS) describing an instruction of how to read and write a specific Malay text.

Papers taking an overall view of the canon included the discussion by Juri Osipov (St. Petersburg) of the role of Buddhist hagiographies in forming the canon in the classical literatures of Indochina, an analysis of the Indonesian canon by Budi Darma (IKIP Surabaya) and the comparison by Luisa Mallari (University of the Philippines) of the reconstruction of the Philippine and Malay novel as national literature, Ruth Mabanglo's paper on the classics of Tagalog literature prompted a lively discussion on the status of competing literatures in a multi-lingual society.
There was a widely expressed feeling among participants that this workshop represented both a timely and innovative development in the study of Southeast Asian literatures and that papers presented would be of interest not only to regional specialists but also those working from a broader, comparative perspective. Two offers to publish the complete set of papers have been immediately forthcoming: a number of further possibilities are also being investigated.
The organizers would like to express, once again, their sincere thanks to the European Science Foundation for their generous sponsorship of this workshop.