The Western Canon
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book about Western literature by the American literary critic Harold Bloom, in which the author defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon.
Summary
Bloom argues against what he calls the "school of resentment", which includes
Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon:[2][3]
- William Shakespeare
- Dante Alighieri
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Michel de Montaigne
- Molière
- John Milton
- Samuel Johnson
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- William Wordsworth
- Jane Austen
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Charles Dickens
- George Eliot
- Leo Tolstoy
- Henrik Ibsen
- Sigmund Freud
- Marcel Proust
- James Joyce
- Virginia Woolf
- Franz Kafka
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Pablo Neruda
- Fernando Pessoa
- Samuel Beckett
Reception
Norman Fruman of The New York Times wrote that "The Western Canon is a heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities."[4]
The novelist A. S. Byatt wrote:
Bloom's canon is in many ways mine. It consists of those writers all other writers have to know and by whom they measure themselves. A culture's canon is an evolving consensus of individual canons. Canonical writers changed the medium, the language they were working in. People who merely describe what is happening now don't last. Mine includes writers I don't necessarily like. D. H. Lawrence, though I hate him in a way, Jane Austen, too.[5]
Piotr Wilczek and Adam Czerniawski criticized Bloom's narrow interpretation of the concept of the West, significantly underrepresenting and even ignoring works from countries he was not familiar with, such as Poland. They interpret his list as dominated by British and American culture, with a small dose of ancient Western classics and a few non-English works from other Western European countries. At the same time, they concur that such a group is pretty standard for the Western canon as understood by most Western European scholars.[6]
School of resentment
"School of resentment" is a pejorative term coined by Bloom and expounded upon in his work. It is used to describe related schools of
Philosopher Richard Rorty[8] agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in his description of the "school of resentment", writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use "subversive, oppositional discourse" to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general. Yet "this school deserves to be taken seriously—more seriously than Bloom's trivialization of it as mere resentment."[9]
See also
References
- ^ Pearson, James. "Harold Bloom [Interview]". Vice Magazine. Retrieved 23 September 2020.
- ^ Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 1994, p. 2.
- ^ Tucker, Ken (21 October 1994). "Book Review: 'The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages'; Books". EW.com. Retrieved 1 May 2011.
- ^ Fruman, Norman (9 October 1994). "Bloom at Thermopylae". The New York Times.
- ^ Lawrence, Tim; Guttridge, Peter. "Reloading the ancient canon". The Independent (London). 21 November 1994.
- ^ ISBN 978-83-87819-05-7.
- ISBN 978-1-57322-514-4.
- ^ pdf[full citation needed]
- ^ Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture, edited by Ladina Bezzola Lambert.