![]() ![]() Doubtless, much of the debate The Western Canon is intended to provoke will rage around the Cultural Literacy-style "ideal canon" Bloom sets forth in an appendix (no Behn, Gaskell, or Alice Walker - a favorite target of Bloom's ire - though it does include poet Rita Dove, Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, and other geographically and culturally far-ranging writers). ![]() ![]() So too is the reading list that emerges from his account of the endless contest between "strong poets" and their even stronger precursors (the agonistic principle of "anxiety of influence" familiar from Bloom's earlier criticism), the strongest being Shakespeare, whom Bloom adores with unqualified Bardolatry. Bloom disclaims any ideology, but his preferred model of literary study - a solitary one - is as unexceptionally conservative as the qualities by which he determines merit. ![]() For Bloom, literary interest is always a question of artistic merit, which rests on the degree of "literary individuality and poetic autonomy" a text achieves. In measures carefully calculated to raise the hackles of would-be canon revisers Bloom (The Book of J, 1990, etc.) assails "the current disease of moral smugness that is destroying literary study in the name of socio-economic justice." He loftily derides the notion that literature either has a social mission or can profitably be discussed in its own social and historical context. One of our biggest critical gun fires a characteristically Olympian broadside into the canon debate, no quarter spared for the politically correct. ![]()
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