O cânone ocidental (original 1994; edição 2013)

Now this is probably more the type of book my colleagues back in public school would have approved so many years ago. What can I say? Bloom can be heavy at times, but the guy is very well read and brings a lot to the book. In spite of the heaviness at times, the guy does have a passion for the books that he discusses. This is a book to read a little at a time until you get to the end. Anyone who considers themselves well read probably ought to read it. ( )

Overall it is very easy to hate on Harold Bloom, but he really knows his lit. I think he has some very well thought out ideas on the Canon. IMO he is the final authority. He has obviously read all of it, though many people do not agree w him. I concur that he has an unreasonable attachment to Shakespeare. However, you should be able to disregard that somewhat annoying habit of HB and concentrate on what he actually has to say.

He was a way of identifying the essence of an author, and putting him into perspective,comparing and contrasting.

I could take this book if stranded on a deserted island. Previous owner managed to defile significant potions with a yellow highlighter. I have made some additional under linings in pencil, but the yellow highlighter tapped out in the Elizabeth Browning chapter.

I think Bloom even convinced me to eventually make a run on "Paradise Lost." Enough so that I did not donate my Penguin copy of PL or my Cliff notes. ( )

I leave it to others to discuss how Bloom's "criticism" consists of angry rants against his academic enemies mixed with such tail-swallowing oracles as "George Eliot at her most Wordsworthian...seems curiously Tolstoyan." I just want to say one thing about his list of canonical works in the Appendix.

Bloom's list of canonical works, running from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Angels in America, is 37 pages long. Bloom divides his list into four historical epochs, and further subdivides the list (for some reason) by nationality. This leads to such absurdities as Nabokov being classified as an American and Erasmus being included with the Germans, but never mind. The arrangement does make one thing easy to quantify. About seven pages of Bloom's list are given over to literary works written in the 20th Century by American writers.

7 out of 37 pages. According to Bloom, approximately one fifth of the "Great Books" of the Western World were written in English by U.S. writers between 1900 and the beginning of the Clinton administration.

For a critic who claims to "abhor" extra-aesthetic criteria in elevating a work to canonicity this is a pretty damning manifestation of nationalistic bias. ( )

What's fascinating to me is that even though there is all the unfortunate blather and fulmination against his critical antagonists in the academy, most of whom appear to have completely ignored him, and there is also a lamentable amount of the Because I Say So school of argument, Harold Bloom, when he actually gets down to talking about the authors he loves and why he loves them, makes a certain amount of sense. He has what would have been called, in the era he should have lived in, good taste in literature. That is, he understands how a writer's mastery of complex ideas and of techniques to express them can create both pleasure and insight, i.e., real beauty. And his theory of influence, through which the artists of what he calls canonical works can be seen as choosing one another, is actually defensible, I think.

What's wrong is saying we have to choose, a la George Bush and the terrorists, between the pre-eminence of aesthetic concerns or socio-political ones, once and for all, in all discussions of literature. I reject that choice. So did some the critics I most admire, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Hayden White and Frederic Jameson. They all loved canonical literature just as much as Harold Bloom, I venture to say. And White and Jameson actually bothered to take French critical theory on on its own ground, and in my view, showed exactly why, necessary as it may have been in a particular historical moment, it was a dead end for literary study. Bloom just rants about dreary feminists and multiculturalists who force us to read b-a-a-d books. He may have a point about the vagueness of focus in "cultural studies" programs producing bad scholarship, but he buries it in personal prejudice.

Perhaps he ought to have examined how his anxiety about his own influence both confirms his theory and makes it impossible for him to appreciate that the chaotic time with which he's so out of joint still offers up much creative possibility, and a legacy for literature. I wonder if a graphic novelist who writes a lesbian bildungsroman that's also a critical appreciation of Proust (Alison Bechtel), or television series writer David Milch's characters who bleed Shakespeare in every line, or Patti Smith's rock performance tributes to Rimbaud and William Blake would sway him at all. I doubt it. Too bad, because canonical literature is morphing before our very eyes. Far from dying out, it's the many-headed hydra, and it's popping up everywhere. ( )

This book sets out to be a defense of the Western literary canon, and only partially succeeds. Bloom seems to have read everything and remembers everything he ever read; his evident passion is undeniable. However, in this, just as in The Anxiety of Influence (which remains an essential book) his concentration of the highest of high points, almost to the dismissal of all other literature, is troubling and unhelpful, especially because he drops hints that indicate how much other literature he enjoys and loves. The essays here are really more like highly impressionistic personal (rather old-fashioned) readings of certain aspects of great works, than a reasoned defense of the canon. For the most part, I did not find the essays on works I have read particularly helpful, and the chapters on works I haven't read rarely made me want to go out and find a copy. His hero worship of Dante and Shakespeare feels entirely out of scale to the subject at hand, Curiously, his reading list in the appendix includes hundreds of works, many by authors of decidedly second rank. ( )