The Western Canon

Harold Bloom’s Elegy for Western Literature

Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon reads like a work a desperation; a work from a man convinced that imaginative literature as he knows it is dying, only to be replaced by literature of alienation. Whether or not this fear is grounded can only be known in the future, but as a reader of Bloom it is always refreshing to be in the presence of a writer who is enthusiastic about literature, and has a solid command of his material.

Forming bookends around his incisive critiques of twenty-six representative canonical authors, Bloom engages in a polemic against what he terms the School of Resentment. This school is composed of Feminists, Historicists, Deconstructionists, and Afrocentrists, among others, all of who wish to widen the canon so as to include works of the oppressed: blacks, Hispanics, and women. The School of Resentment views the traditional canon politically, as a means the social elite drives home the inferiority of subject classes. Hence the greater Western writers–Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Joyce, Kafka, et. al–are, for the School of Resentment, merely dead white European males, products of the “social energies” of their time. Since most of their works seem politically incorrect to modern sensibilities, containing as they do strong elements of chauvinism, elitism, archaic political views, anti-Semitism, etc., the School of…