THE CANON...mwah hahaha!!!

I am going to start off with my list of what I think everyone should read...
Before leaving high school:

Anyone of Maya Angelou's autobiographical works...
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Any book by Shel Silverstein - the language play is great fun!
Either 1984 or the Animal Farm by George Orwell

English Majors (I am pretty new to this, but I will give it a whirl) Also, I chose books based on a representation of a dialect or type of English diversity...

If possible Othello, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Macbeth by Shakespeare - London Modern English
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - colonized English
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - southern dialect & dominated English
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen - British Women's English
Oedipex Rex by Sophocles - translated into English

What separates the Discourse of English from other Discourses is the written element. Discourses can be written or spoken and speak to the cultural context from which the Discourse emerges. Therefore, the most definitive difference is that the Discourse of English (primarily academic English) is it has a written form.
Also the syntactic complexity of the Discourse of English is much greater in writing, then in speaking within this Discourse. Embedded clauses, beginning sentences with adverbial phrases, fragmented sentences, etc...

Often times, the delight I take in the Discourse of English is to bend syntax (how words are put together to make sense and communicate an idea), semantics (what is the actual meaning), and punctuation and mechanics (a period vs. a semicolon vs. no punctuation.) until it is just about to break and then allow others to make meaning.

Particular to English, the practice of meaning making of a text, often this can be done from several perspectives provided evidence can be provided from the text one extrapolates an idea.
Again, the practice of writing, using the rules of English to bend and shape to create something that has meaning without breaking the "rules of the language" and most everyone that speaks your dialect can understand.

I don't know if I can adequately answer the question of what makes a text "special," but let me create an analogy, perhaps this will help me because this seems a very sticky subject, but hopefully in the end I will understand it.

If I am a soccer player then I know that there are 11 positions of field, we can use many parts of our body to play, but just not our hands or any part of our arms unless we are the goalie and even then I can only use my hands and arms in the goalie box.

There are a set of rules that determine soccer playing and soccer players must follow them otherwise they are no longer playing soccer. If you break a rule of soccer on the field you may be expelled from the game depending upon the severity of the penalty. Okay, so I think I can safely say that there really would not be much argument or upheavel about what a regular soccer player is (I qualify this because some might argue professional players).

I think I have found the obstacle. Defining literature is not easy because literature often comes from the mind of someone who has most likely put a lot of thought (we hope) into her writing. So if we begin to define what is good literature and not do we by association judge the person writing it or are we supposed to stay away from that?
If we stay away from that, then can we define good literature? At first glance, sure we have removed the pearl from the oyster cool. But even pearls are inevitably affected by the type of irritant that gets into the oyster. The pearl is also affected by the type of secretions the oyster uses and how it is moving when the pearl is getting created, water type also affects this process. Because of the way in which pearls are created and the fact that most often times it is a grain of sand that irritates the oyster, most pearls are round and "pearl-colored" for lack of a better word. But sometimes by happy coincidence the oyster is in a different environment, different water, some weird misshapen irritant comes along. Now, the oyster has a pretty cool pearl. Little do we know, but there are a lot more pearls like this one, but because we encounter this one the least, this becomes better. Okay, I digress...

So now I am a human being and the pearl is my piece of work. Is this work tainted by my experience unconscious or conscious? If so, then will my writing be filtered through this lens or perspective without my knowledge?
If so, then what I write may speak more to one group than another, unintentionally. And if for whatever reason I am given an advantage and so are others like me and suddenly there are 100 writers just like me writing from the same "filtered" lenses. Then my voice may unintentional include people like me & exclude people who are not like me or who do not understand me.

Also, because people similar to me have a large voice out in the body of literature (through good writing and hapy coincidence) we become the authority. Now people look to us to find out what is good. Since we like what we write and others seem to agree, then what we write is what everybody should read.

If other people are excluded, it should be okay because they enjoy what we write and they may have good stuff to read and write too, but there just aren't enough voices to determine if what you have to say is better or worse then what is already being said. (Here we differ from the pearl analogy because it is the unique pearl that is better, here it seems I am saying that the most common writing is better, but what I am saying is that in American culture, the strength and type of voice you are using is more important then the rarity of it).

Okay, after all this, I say that a text is special because the culture in which it exists says it is special. When I go to the Philippines, the writings of Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and Jose Rizal are part of the special text. Shakespeare is good if you will be schooled in Britain or the US, but Shakespeare is on the list of "read when you have time" but funnily enough Carl Sagan's writings are special text as well as any body of scientific or mathematical work. Their school system, is heavy science/math-based, they don't have BAs or MAs only BSs and MSs because their programs do not have large amounts of arts in the curriculum. General sciences, philosophy, math, and linguistics are under science. Some universities have literature/arts, but those are rare schools that have that.

So based on my cursory introductions to literature, it is very subjective, but I think if you are going to be in a major where interpretation is a large part of what you do, keeping an open mind to different perspectives would only allow you to become a better interpreter of meaning, rather than worse.