New Media

words of our colleagues from the past and into the present. When Nietzsche in 1873 cited Goethe's words from the previous century, presumably literary scholars had already begun annotating the canonical author. Granted, the word, "canonical," in relation to secular authors, had not yet widely entered scholarly parlance: that would happen during our own present, when the notion of a literary canon would be challenged - first by revisionist scholars, and then (definitively) by new media. Goethe's greatness, and the need for great authors generally, was in no small part a necessity constructed by a rising nationalism - intensified in a country such as Nietzsche's Germany that came to nationhood later than most European countries.[3] Indeed, the need for "great authors," like the need for military conquests, monumental achievements, and authentic national traits, can be seen (retrospectively) as the kind of mis-use of history that Nietzsche warns against. Nietzsche himself, notoriously, would be mis-used in the century after his death, by those finding support for Nazism in his admiration of forgetful action and blind passion, his preference for action over the slow workings of justice.

We have succeeded in removing canonicity from our discourse; we have in fact removed all appeal to cultural authority not least because of its demonstrable mis-use in past nationalist formations not only the German nation-state of of the 1930s and 1940s, but also in Russia which, like Germany, emerged as a nation (and then a short-lived empire) later than its European counterparts. The establishment of Pushkin and Tolstoy in positions of cultural authority was as much a political development as a cultural one, and their centrality proved useful throughout the Soviet period. During the Cold War, George Steiner could pose world-political alternatives by titling his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoyevski. That was one among a relatively few realistic, world-historical choices available then, in 1960. Today, our choices have multiplied, as the number of