The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
In his book The Western Canon, Harold Bloom included four appendices listing books he includes in the canon. He has since disowned these lists, claiming he was forced to write them by his publisher and it is the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish in this book, which is a series of essays of great writers. Nonetheless, it makes for interesting reading, especially the most contemporary list in Appendix D which covers the 20th Century up until the early 1990s. That list tarts with Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello and ends with Angels In America By Tony Kusher.
[quote]The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy: I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug’s game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any sort. What I have omitted seem to me fated to become period pieces: even their “multiculturalist” supporters will turn against them in another two generations or so, in order to clear space for better writings. What is here doubtless reflects some accidents of my personal taste, but by no means wholly represents my idiosyncratic inclinations. Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin are here because I seem to be the only critic alive who regards them as overesteemed, and so I am probably wrong and must assume that I am blinded by extra-aesthetic considerations, which I abhor and try to avoid. I would not be surprised, however, could I return from the dead half a century hence, to discover that Lowell and Larkin are period pieces, as are many whom I have excluded. But critics do not make canons, any more than resentful networks can create them, and it may be that poets to come will confirm Lowell and Larkin as canonical by finding them to be inescapable influences.
"But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind." - this is patently bullshit. We all have our biases whether we admit them or not, Bloom included, and for the most part, most adherents to whatever theory guides ones thinking would deny that the modalities guiding their worldview and principles affect them unfairly. He has added in some cases the worst work by an author and ignored their best; some of his choices are shit and others glaringly absent.
But using this list as inspiration for your book next to read is very useful. What I particularly like is that he includes his recommendation of translations for (some) non-English Language works.
I would post it here, but the formatting requires to much editing for such a large amount of text. Here is a link to it.
| by Anonymous | reply 9 | February 16, 2020 6:42 AM
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People in English literary studies today don't think very highly of him or of the book "The Western Canon," OP. Bloom was a huge deal in the profession in the 1970s when his two most famous books "The Anxiety of Influence" and "A Map of Misreading" came out, but he became pretty discredited by the early 90s (by which time those two books were considered extremely blinkered and misleading), although he was very popular still among the general public.
His idea of what constitutes the Western canon is predicated almost entirely on what he was taught and (more importantly) what he thinks is valuable--it's very particular to him. He was a grotesque egomaniac (there's a reason he was Camille Paglia's mentor at Yale!), but it can be fun to see what he likes and what his opinions are, although he tends to dash his writing off very quickly.
You can have fun with him, but I wouldn't take him too seriously.
| by Anonymous | reply 1 | February 16, 2020 3:51 AM
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LITERAL TRANS GENOCIDE. It's a fact that both Laclos and the fictional author "in" Les Liaisons dangereuses were gender fluid non-binaries. All 18th century salonists KNEW this, but it's been erased by hegemonic Anglo academia obsesses with the WHITE HETERO. The Marquise de Merteuil was a woman of color!
| by Anonymous | reply 3 | February 16, 2020 4:08 AM
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Thank you for your input, Prof @ R1!
Much as I expected. I know nothing about poetry (sorry Ms Sexton) so that bulky element of the list meant nothing to me.
May I ask you to share a handful of your 20th Century+ "must reads"?
| by Anonymous | reply 4 | February 16, 2020 4:28 AM
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I like western cannons. What's so terrible about that.
| by Anonymous | reply 5 | February 16, 2020 4:46 AM
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Harold Bloom, aka The Divine Afflatus. He had a great capacity for saying a lot, in sophisticated language, and not meaning much. He was a campy, comic figure, self-dramatizing, ultimately a performer at the last. I liked him as a persona, not so much as a critic.
My favorite book of his was the one on American religion. A very strange read. I think that he at least fancied himself a mystic of sorts.
A lesbian friend of mine went to Yale and said that Bloom had a circle of lesbian students who acted as personal assistants and acolytes of a sort. This went on for decades. I guess that Camille Paglia was one of those back in the ‘70s.
And whoever mentioned Sexton, Bloom found her and Plath distasteful (though he liked Lowell of course). Sexton and Plath were too modern; they were rock ‘n’ roll, something that Bloom could not understand.
| by Anonymous | reply 6 | February 16, 2020 5:24 AM
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OP, although I am flattered you would ask me, unlike Bloom I really don't have a list of 20th century "must reads" since I don't really believe in a the maintenance of a canon. I like to teach lots of different kinds of books.
The only ones I have taught absolutely regularly in my career are some of the British and Irish modernist fiction writers: I specialize in James Joyce, and also frequently teach figures Bloom would recognize as canonical as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Bowen, Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Samuel Beckett. I also teach many figures whom Bloom did not consider canonical by Bloom back when The Western Canon came out but who are now considered as such for the period: Sylvia Townsend Warner, George Lamming, Henry Green, Sam Selvon, Rebecca West, and Rose Macaulay. But even beyond that I like to mix it up a bit, and also teach less canonical figures like Dorothy L. Sayers, John Buchan, Mervyn Peake, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, and Lytton Strachey.
| by Anonymous | reply 9 | February 16, 2020 6:42 AM
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