Canonicity, canon, canonizable and the implications of transcultural communication

Harold Bloom, in the Western Canon, selected only twenty-six sine qua non writers and, invoking Giambattista Vico’s New Science, where human history was distributed in three phases – Theocratic, Aristocratic, and Democratic – introduced another one, the Chaotic Age (represented by Freud, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka).1 Bloom did not expel this newly proposed Age, as it was also the container of beauty and strangeness, as Walter Pater desired for Romanticism. What has happened since 1994 to the status and condition of the canon? The article takes aim at describing the implications of the science of communication for the process of selecting values. At the same time, it follows the role played by various intercultural concepts in valuing cultural heritage and contemporary creations. The main purpose of the study is to configure the blueprint of an arch-canon founded on interdisciplinarity and the latest advances in different sciences, with a special touch on linguistics and discourse analysis.