The Western Canon  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
Revision as of 09:07, 16 October 2019
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

← Previous diff		 Revision as of 09:10, 16 October 2019
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

Next diff →
Line 1: Line 1:
 +{| class="toccolours" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5"
 +| style="text-align: left;" |
 +"Here Vico's prophecy is again illuminating; the Theocratic Age exalts the gods, the Aristocratic Age celebrates heroes, the Democratic Age mourns and values human beings. There was for Vico no Chaotic Age, only a Chaos during which the recourse to a Theocratic Age would commence." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages]]''
 +|}
 +
{{Template}} {{Template}}
'''''The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages''''' is a 1994 book about [[western literature]] by the critic [[Harold Bloom]], in which the author defends [[Western canon|the concept of the Western canon]] by discussing 26 writers (22 men and 4 women) whom he sees as central to the canon. '''''The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages''''' is a 1994 book about [[western literature]] by the critic [[Harold Bloom]], in which the author defends [[Western canon|the concept of the Western canon]] by discussing 26 writers (22 men and 4 women) whom he sees as central to the canon.

Revision as of 09:10, 16 October 2019

"Here Vico's prophecy is again illuminating; the Theocratic Age exalts the gods, the Aristocratic Age celebrates heroes, the Democratic Age mourns and values human beings. There was for Vico no Chaotic Age, only a Chaos during which the recourse to a Theocratic Age would commence." --The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop

Featured:

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is a 1994 book about western literature by the critic Harold Bloom, in which the author defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers (22 men and 4 women) whom he sees as central to the canon.

Contents

Summary

Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon:

Bloom argues against what he calls the "School of Resentment", which includes feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, Lacanians, New Historicism, Deconstructionists, and semioticians. The Western Canon includes four appendices listing works that Bloom at the time considered canonical, stretching from earliest scriptures to Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Bloom later disowned the list, saying that it was written at his editor's insistence and distracted from the book's intention.

Bloom's four ages

The American literary critic Harold Bloom has divided the body of Western Literature into four ages:

The Theocratic Age

(2000 BC – 1321 AD), with five main traditions that influenced the West: [[File:Snakesacrifice.jpg|thumb|The snake sacrifice of Janamejaya. Mahabharata ]]

The Aristocratic Age

(1321–1832), with five major bodies of literature:

The Democratic Age

(1832–1900), when the strength of American and Russian literature begins

[[File:Famous fantastic mysteries 195306.jpg|left|thumb|upright|Kafka's The Metamorphosis was even reprinted in the June 1953 issue of the pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries]]

The Chaotic Age

(1900–today), which includes a multitude of countries and authors:


Reception

Norman Fruman of the New York Times wrote that "The Western Canon is a heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities".

The novelist A. S. Byatt wrote:
Bloom's canon is in many ways mine. It consists of those writers all other writers have to know and by whom they measure themselves. A culture's canon is an evolving consensus of individual canons. Canonical writers changed the medium, the language they were working in. People who merely describe what is happening now don't last. Mine includes writers I don't necessarily like. D.H. Lawrence, though I hate him in a way, Jane Austen, too.


Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Western Canon" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Retrieved from "http://artandpopularculture.com/The_Western_Canon"
Personal tools
Metas