Whereas the School may see all writing as a political action, Bloom views literature as a largely solitary endeavor, a way we find the self-within. Bloom sees the canonical writers as operating from largely aesthetic motives, so that the supposed political or moral content of their works is tertiary, and only weakens the works when it appears. For Bloom, the cardinal error of the School, is that it fails to appreciate the sheer aesthetic power of canonical writers. This brief summary does not begin to cover the multifaceted complaints against the canon made by the School of Resentment, whose various agendas, given ample time to fester in lifelong university careers, attack the canon on a variety of grounds. 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 Resentment opposes them for their political and moral content: when read, the literary giants perpetuate social ills. al–are, for the School of Resentment, merely dead white European males, products of the “social energies” of their time.

Hence the greater Western writers–Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Joyce, Kafka, et. The School of Resentment views the traditional canon politically, as a means the social elite drives home the inferiority of subject classes. 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. 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.įorming bookends around his incisive critiques of twenty-six representative canonical authors, Bloom engages in a polemic against what he terms the School of Resentment. 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.

See also reviews of Bloom’s The Book of J, The Anxiety of Influence, and Omens of Millenium.

Harold bloom's the western canon