Assigned Reading: Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. 1994. Chapter 1: “An Elegy for the Canon,” pp. 15–41.

Who am I to assign a reading? Who am I to assume that you haven’t already read, absorbed or rejected, and debated to death Harold Bloom on the canon? It's not compulsory. I’m hopeful. The chapter helped me to think. It might help others. It's a contribution to the discussion here of reading lists, politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics, and ideology. It’s on Internet Archive, so there’s no friction. Glide through it: https://archive.org/details/westerncanonbook00bloorich/. Read the first and last five pages, at least.

The text didn’t feel quite so dated when I read it as an undergraduate. It felt dated when I read it again tonight. Bloom was worried in 1994 that "the School of Resentment," who made it their goal to subvert the canon, could take over. He was right. And they have already been replaced by their angrier and less literate students. He was worried that the "art and passion of reading well and deeply" was already in critical decline. He was right, again. But so, what can we get out of this? Comfort. Some direction. Maybe it's a guide to educating those that sink to the aesthetic underground.

Anyway, it's a pleasure to read or re-read. Talk shit about Harold Bloom.

A game to drive engagement... Check out Appendix D, “The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy,” pp. 560–567 (“The United States”). How many of the canonical modern American books listed by Bloom have you read? Which one would you hope we've all read?

(Thirty-odd. And I would otherwise name something too obvious, so it's Paterson by William Carlos Williams. It might've been Updike, honestly, but Bloom cruelly held him to a single lesser novel.)

I very much enjoy Bloom but always felt that he dramatically overestimated the importance of Freud. Duped by the zeitgeist and perhaps by his own anxiety of influence with respect to Northrop Frye.

Frye struggled to justify and defend Western canonicity against its enemies and the apathetic as well. “The Educated Imagination” being his strongest attempt to distill his thought down for layman. One quote I think has lasting relevance in an age lacking literature and dreaming of machine gods:

“…in the history of civilization literature follows after a mythology. A myth is a simple and primitive effort of the imagination to identify the human with the nonhuman world, and its most typical result is a story about a god.”

Frye’s “Fearful Symmetry” on William Blake is highly recommended.

If one is bothered by the archive.org log-in wall, they might consider checking out their local library instead: https://annas-archive.org/search?index=&page=1&sort=&display=&q=Harold+Bloom+Canon

I strongly support the canon, but always in a forward-looking, not backward-looking way. We should immerse ourselves in the canon in order to orient, then chart a path forward. We should not contrast the canon with things like AI. We should use the canon to help us decide what we want to do with things like AI.