Mokyklinis lietuvių literatūros kanonas: šimtmečio raidos rekonstrukcija
LTTeoriniuose kanono svarstymuose nuo XX a. pabaigos pasikartoja mintis, kad bendriesiems kanono formavimo procesams suvokti būtini detalūs empiriniai tyrimai. Be jų diskusijos apie kanoną liktų spekuliatyvios ir paviršutiniškos. Savo monografijoje siekiame pateikti faktais ir moksline jų analize grįstą vyresniųjų klasių mokyklinio kanono rekonstrukciją.
ENLiterary scholar John Guillory highlighted the importance of general education schools in the formation of the national canon. His idea led us to a coherent reconstruction of the entire process of the establishment and sub-sequent transformation of the Lithuanian literary canon in the upper grades, from the restoration of Lithuania's statehood in 1918 to the 2010s. We aimed to identify the works that had been at the centre of the school canon the longest and their dominant interpretation, as well as the criteria for selecting literature that had been shaping the canon in a particular historical period and their historical changes. In our work, we applied the methodology of descriptive canon research. The underlying starting point of these studies was to view the formation of the canon as a socio-cultural process in which the elite of a given society selected a corpus of texts significant from the point of view of tradition and created practices that ensured the transmission of these texts to future generations. The structure of the canon depends directly on what the dominant societal group recognises as the measure of literary value. In our research, we investigated how the political, social, and cultural development of Lithuanian society in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries influenced the selection and interpretation of Lithuanian literary works in the upper grades of general education schools. In the final two to four grades (the structure of general education has changed many times over the century), the history of Lithuanian (and world) literature was taught consistently throughout the period analysed. It is this - chronological - principle of teaching literature that best reveals the value code of the school canon, i.e., the aesthetic, ethical, and worldview criteria for the selection and interpretation of works.The selection of works for the lower grades abides more by the psychology, interests, and cognitive abilities of the pupils and therefore includes more specific genres of literature for children and young people, as well as entertainment genres, which are usually not represented in the national canon. In contrast, the upper-secondary syllabus has always conveyed the concept of the Lithuanian literary tradition and the national historical narrative modelled by the dominant social group. Therefore, in order to understand the dynamics of the national canon, the literature syllabus and other teaching materials in the upper grades are much more eloquent than those in the lower grades. [...].
