I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English maj

Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The “Western Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

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2024-05-15 16:30:10

I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Bloom’s reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called “Canon Wars,” likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher Allan Bloom. That Bloom was himself no ideologue, writes Jim Sleeper; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and “an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.” Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values, The Closing of the American Mind, became a textbook of the neoconservative right.

Though Harold Bloom wished to distance himself from culture war polemics, he has unapologetically practiced what Allan Bloom preached, teaching the Canonical “great books” of literature and religion and opposing all manner of critics on the left, whom he lumps together in the phrase “the School of Resentment.” Bloom’s 1973 The Anxiety of Influence has itself exerted a major influence on literary studies, and best-selling popular works, like 1998’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have kept Harold Bloom’s name in circulation even when scholarly citations of his work declined. In 1994, Bloom re-affirmed his commitment to the Canon with The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a fierce sortie against his so-called “School of Resentment” adversaries and a work University of Minnesota professor Norman Fruman called a “heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities.” (Hear Bloom discuss the book with Eleanor Wachtel in a 1995 CBC interview.)