 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Harold Bloom |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Western canon |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace |
Publication date | 1994 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 578 |
| ISBN | 978-1-57322-514-4 |
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.
Bloom argues against what he calls the "school of resentment", which includes feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, Lacanians, New Historicism, Deconstructionists, and semioticians. The Western Canon includes four appendices listing works that Bloom at the time considered canonical, stretching from the earliest scriptures to Tony Kushner's Angels in America . Bloom later disowned the list, saying that it was written at his editor's insistence and distracted from the book's intention. [1]
Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon: [2] [3]
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 for narrow interpretation of the concept of the West, ignoring works from countries he was not familiar with, such as Poland, which are significantly underrepresented in his scheme. 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" is a pejorative term coined by Bloom and expounded upon in his work. It is used to describe related schools of literary criticism that have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contended are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values. [7] Broadly, what Bloom termed "schools of resentment" approaches associate with Marxist critical theory, including African-American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism and post-structuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The "school of resentment" is usually defined as comprising all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western Canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit and/or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contended that the school of resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. [6]
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]
The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the globe. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. The book became a bestseller, received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars, and was praised by numerous literary critics.
Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."
Literary fiction, mainstream fiction, non-genre fiction, serious fiction, high literature, artistic literature, and literature are labels that, in the book trade, refers to market novels that do not fit neatly into an established genre ; or, otherwise, refers to novels that are character-driven rather than plot-driven, examine the human condition, use language in an experimental or poetic fashion, or are simply considered serious art.
In a society, high culture is the subculture that encompasses the cultural objects of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as being exemplary works of art, and the intellectual works of literature and music, history and philosophy, which a society consider representative of their culture.
Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of William Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess first published in 1964. It tells the story of Shakespeare's life with a mixture of fact and fiction, the latter including an affair with a black prostitute named Fatimah, who inspires the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The title refers to the first line of Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", in which Shakespeare describes his love for a dark-haired woman.
Annette Kolodny was an American feminist literary critic and activist, held the position of College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her major scholarly writings examined the experiences of women on the American frontiers and the projection of female imagery onto the American landscape. Her other writings examined some aspects of feminism after the 1960s; the revision of dominant themes in American studies; and the problems faced by women and minorities in the American academy.
Studies in Classic American Literature is a work of literary criticism by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It was first published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. The British edition was published in June 1924 by Martin Secker.
Poetic tradition is a concept similar to that of the poetic or literary canon. The concept of poetic tradition has been commonly used as a part of historical literary criticism, in which a poet or author is evaluated in the context of his historical period, his immediate literary influences or predecessors, and his literary contemporaries. T. S. Eliot claimed in Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1919, that for a poet to fully come into his own, he must be aware of his predecessors, and view the work of his predecessors as living, not dead. The poetic tradition is a line of descent of poets who have achieved a sublime state and can surrender themselves to their work to create a poem that both builds on existing tradition and stands on its own.
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920). The essay is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays".
The reception history of Jane Austen follows a path from modest fame to wild popularity. Jane Austen (1775–1817), the author of such works as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815), has become one of the best-known and most widely read novelists in the English language. Her novels are the subject of intense scholarly study and the centre of a diverse fan culture.
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a collection of seven short stories by Danilo Kiš written in 1976. The stories are based on historical events and deal with themes of political deception, betrayal, and murder in Eastern Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Several of the stories are written as fictional biographies wherein the main characters interact with historical figures. The Dalkey Archive Press edition includes an introduction by Joseph Brodsky and an afterword by William T. Vollmann. Harold Bloom includes A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in his list of canonical works of the period he names the Chaotic Age (1900–present) in The Western Canon. The book was featured in Penguin's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s, edited by Philip Roth.
Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today, art history examines broader aspects of visual culture, including the various visual and conceptual outcomes related to an ever-evolving definition of art. Art history encompasses the study of objects created by different cultures around the world and throughout history that convey meaning, importance or serve usefulness primarily through visual representations.
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. Bloom was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras. The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Sainte-Beuve. These books can be published as a collection or presented as a list, such as Harold Bloom's list of books that constitute the Western canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
Covering cherub is the obstructing presence for the artist of the inherited tradition, and cultural predecessors, with which they are faced.