Waubonsee Community College

The Western canon, the books and school of the ages, Harold Bloom

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

The Western canon

bibliography

29637737

Harold Bloom

"Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism." "Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of the aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights poets or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition." "Bloom concludes this provocative, trenchant work with a complete list of essential writers and books - his vision of the Canon."--Jacket

the books and school of the ages

On the canon: an elegy for the canon -- The aristocratic age: Shakespeare, center of the canon. The strangeness of Dante : Ulysses and Beatrice. Chaucer : the wife of Bath, the pardoner, and Shakespearean character. Cervantes : the play of the world. Montaigne and Molière : the canonical elusiveness of the truth. Milton's Satan and Shakespeare. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the canonical critic. Goethe's Faust, part two : the countercanonical poem -- The democratic age: Canonical memory in early Wordsworth and Jane Austen's Persuasion. Walt Whitman as center of the American canon. Emily Dickinson : blanks, transports, the dark. The canonical novel : Dicken's Bleak House, George Eliot's Middlemarch. Tolstoy and heroism. Ibsen : trolls and Peer Gynt -- The chaotic age: Freud : a Shakespearean reading. Proust : the true persuasion of sexual jealousy. Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare. Woolf's Orlando : feminism as the love of reading. Kafka : canonical patience and "indestructibility". Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa : Hispanic-Portuguese Whitman. Beckett ... Joyce ... Proust ... Shakespeare -- cataloging the canon: Elegiac conclusion -- Appendixes