Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism.
Insisting instead upon the autonomy of aesthetic, Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition.
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"One of the most useful works of non-fiction to be published in recent decades, written by the sturdy Yale professor Harold Bloom. Camille Paglia said that this work was as much about Bloom himself as it was about the "best that has been written"(one of many phrases that Bloom is quite of fond of using again and again), and this is certainty true, as the irascible scholar's personality comes through in every supple sentence. If there is a flaw in Bloom's work, it is repetition, as the reader is bombarded with constant statements on the School of Resentment, Shakespeare's unsurpassed Canonical centrality, and so on. However, Bloom makes a compelling case for all of the central arguments of the book: that Feminism, New Criticism and their ilk have destroyed the Humanities and aesthetic appreciation, that Shakespeare is the greatest and most unavoidable of all writers, and that the importance of the Canon is so great that if we let it be destroyed we could descend into Vico's Theocratic Age, a possible happening which frightens Bloom to no end throughout the text. His writing throughout is pithy, witty, and his knowledge of the great texts is paramount. He is truly an inspiring figure, and it is hard to argue with his general philosophy of Literature as he expresses it here, however controversial a figure he remains. He, and his student a spiritual successor Paglia, are wrongly associated with cultural conservationism; rather, they are radicals in the field of letters, fighting a noble battle against theoretical criticism mas it's students attempt to destroy the importance of greatest written works that have been made. Any book that fought this trend would have my approval, but Bloom is always a scintillating writer, making The Western Canon a healthy and necessary book for our climate."
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James (4 out of 5 stars)