![]() ![]() ![]() One of the problems with this canon is that it is biased toward realism.* Mimesis is the literary critic’s drug of choice, thus modern fantasy and medieval allegory is largely left behind. The books of the Euro-American canon are the books by which our culture measures itself. There are problems with a “Western canon.” Though we think of the canon as simply our chief books, the word “canon” means rule or measurement. The book is a sermon against what he calls “the school of resentment”-readers of feminist, Marxist, and deconstructionist leanings that would remove the Western canon from its central place. Moreover, Bloom is anti-ideological, and understands pretty well the self-contradiction that this entails. He is one of the last great literary priests left in the empty cathedrals we call the Western library. I’m not sure an audience exists for his breadth of reading any more. ![]() He has perhaps gone mad with his own reading, and I have trouble understanding what he means by “we” when he claims to speak for readers. Harold Bloom, a curmudgeonly anti-academic ivy league scholar, fills this challenging read with fresh insights on every page. Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages was a sensation when it appeared in 1994. ![]()
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