The Western Canon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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| + | "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|The Western Canon]]'' | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "I am not concerned with . . . the current debate between the [[right-wing]] defenders of [[Western canon|the Canon]], who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) [[moral values]], and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the [[School of Resentment]], who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for [[social change]]." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 4 | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "Shakespeare, who scarcely relies upon [[philosophy]], is more central to [[Western culture]] than are Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 10 | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "[[Shakespeare]]'s eminence is, I am certain, the rock upon which the [[School of Resentment]] must at last founder." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 25 | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "Ideology plays a considerable role in literary canon-formation if you want to insist that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology, an insistence that is common to all six branches of the [[School of Resentment]]: [[Feminists]], [[Marxists]], [[Lacanians]], [[New Historicists]], [[Deconstructionists]], [[Semioticians]]." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 527 | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "The hero of these anticanonizers is [[Antonio Gramsci]], who in his ''Selections from the Prison Notebooks'' denies that any intellectual can be free of the dominant social group if he relies upon merely the "special qualification" that he shares with the craft of his fellows (such as other literary critics): "Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an '[[esprit de corps]]' their uninterrupted historical qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 25 | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "Finding myself now surrounded by [[professors of hip-hop]]; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by [[multiculturalist]]s unlimited, I realize that the [[Balkanization]] of [[literary studies]] is irreversible. All of these [[Resent]]ers of the [[aesthetic value]] of literature are not going to go away, and they will raise up institutional res enters after them." -- | ||
| + | ''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 517 | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | "Ideology plays a considerable role in literary canon-formation if you want to insist that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology, an insistence that is common to all six branches of the [[School of Resentment]]: [[Feminists]], [[Marxists]], [[Lacanians]], [[New Historicists]], [[Deconstructionists]], [[Semioticians]]." --''[[The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|The Western Canon]]'' (1994), Harold Bloom, p.527 | ||
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| {{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. [[Shakespeare]] is most important author in the book with 1145 mentions, [[Freud]] is also central with 359. Freud and Montaigne are the only two non-fiction only writers. |
| ==Summary== | ==Summary== | ||
| Bloom defends [[Western canon|the concept of the Western canon]] by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon: | Bloom defends [[Western canon|the concept of the Western canon]] by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon: | ||
| - | *1.[[William Shakespeare]] | + | [[William Shakespeare]], [[Dante Alighieri]], [[Geoffrey Chaucer]], [[Miguel de Cervantes]], [[Michel de Montaigne]], [[Molière]], [[John Milton]], [[Samuel Johnson]], [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]], [[William Wordsworth]], [[Jane Austen]], [[Walt Whitman]], [[Emily Dickinson]], [[Charles Dickens]], [[George Eliot]], [[Leo Tolstoy]], [[Henrik Ibsen]], [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Marcel Proust]], [[James Joyce]], [[Virginia Woolf]], [[Franz Kafka]], [[Jorge Luis Borges]], [[Pablo Neruda]], [[Fernando Pessoa]], [[Samuel Beckett]] |
| - | *2.[[Dante Alighieri]] | + | |
| - | *3.[[Geoffrey Chaucer]] | + | |
| - | *4.[[Miguel de Cervantes]] | + | |
| - | *5.[[Michel de Montaigne]] | + | |
| - | *6.[[Molière]] | + | |
| - | *7.[[John Milton]] | + | |
| - | *8.[[Samuel Johnson]] | + | |
| - | *9.[[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]] | + | |
| - | *10.[[William Wordsworth]] | + | |
| - | *11.[[Jane Austen]] | + | |
| - | *12.[[Walt Whitman]] | + | |
| - | *13.[[Emily Dickinson]] | + | |
| - | *14.[[Charles Dickens]] | + | |
| - | *15.[[George Eliot]] | + | |
| - | *16.[[Leo Tolstoy]] | + | |
| - | *17.[[Henrik Ibsen]] | + | |
| - | *18.[[Sigmund Freud]] | + | |
| - | *19.[[Marcel Proust]] | + | |
| - | *20.[[James Joyce]] | + | |
| - | *21.[[Virginia Woolf]] | + | |
| - | *22.[[Franz Kafka]] | + | |
| - | *23.[[Jorge Luis Borges]] | + | |
| - | *24.[[Pablo Neruda]] | + | |
| - | *25.[[Fernando Pessoa]] | + | |
| - | *26.[[Samuel Beckett]] | + | |
| Bloom argues against what he calls the "[[School of Resentment]]", which includes [[feminist literary criticism]], [[Marxist literary criticism]], [[Jacques Lacan|Lacanians]], [[New Historicism]], [[Deconstruction]]ists, and [[Semiotics|semioticians]]. ''The Western Canon'' includes four appendices listing works that Bloom at the time considered canonical, stretching from earliest scriptures to [[Tony Kushner|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 argues against what he calls the "[[School of Resentment]]", which includes [[feminist literary criticism]], [[Marxist literary criticism]], [[Jacques Lacan|Lacanians]], [[New Historicism]], [[Deconstruction]]ists, and [[Semiotics|semioticians]]. ''The Western Canon'' includes four appendices listing works that Bloom at the time considered canonical, stretching from earliest scriptures to [[Tony Kushner|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=== | ||
| + | Bloom divides the body of Western literature into four ages: | ||
| + | |||
| + | ====The Theocratic Age==== | ||
| + | (2000 BC – 1321 AD), with five main traditions that influenced the West: | ||
| + | *The Ancient Near East; e.g. ''[[Gilgamesh]]'', ''[[The Book of the Dead]]'' and the ''[[Bible]]'' | ||
| + | *Ancient India; e.g. ''[[Mahabharata]]'' | ||
| + | *Ancient Greece; e.g. the ''[[Iliad]]'' and the ''[[Odyssey]]'' of [[Homer]] and ''[[Oedipus Rex]]'' of [[Sophocles]] | ||
| + | *Ancient Rome; e.g. the ''[[Aeneid]]'' ([[Virgil]]) and the ''[[Metamorphoses (Ovid)|Metamorphoses]]'' ([[Ovid]]) | ||
| + | *The Middle Ages; e.g. the ''[[Confessions (Augustine)|Confessions]]'' of [[Saint Augustine]] | ||
| + | |||
| + | ====The Aristocratic Age==== | ||
| + | (1321–1832), with five major bodies of literature: | ||
| + | *Italy; e.g. the ''[[Divine Comedy]]'' ([[Dante]]), ''[[The Prince]]'' ([[Machiavelli]]) and ''[[The Servant of Two Masters]]'' ([[Carlo Goldoni]]) | ||
| + | *France; e.g. the [[Essays (Montaigne)|Essays]] ([[Montaigne]]), [[The Misanthrope]] ([[Molière]]) and the [[Candide]] ([[Voltaire]]) | ||
| + | *Germany; e.g. ''[[The Robbers]]'' ([[Friedrich Schiller]]), ''[[Faust]]'' and the ''[[Italian Journey]]'' ([[Goethe]]) | ||
| + | *Spain and Portugal; e.g. ''[[Don Quixote]]'' ([[Miguel de Cervantes]]), ''[[The Trickster of Seville]]'' ([[Tirso de Molina]]) and ''[[The Lusiads]]'' ([[Luis de Camoens]]) | ||
| + | *[[Great Britain]] & [[Kingdom of Ireland|Ireland]]; e.g. ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' ([[William Shakespeare]]), ''[[Paradise Lost]]'' ([[John Milton]]) and ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'' ([[Jonathan Swift]]) | ||
| + | |||
| + | ====The Democratic Age==== | ||
| + | (1832–1900), when the strength of American and Russian literature begins | ||
| + | *United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; e.g. ''[[Pride and Prejudice]]'' ([[Jane Austen]]), ''[[The Adventures of Oliver Twist]]'' ([[Charles Dickens]]) and ''[[The Picture of Dorian Gray]]'' ([[Oscar Wilde]]) | ||
| + | *Italy; e.g. ''[[The Betrothed (Manzoni novel)|The Betrothed]]'' ([[Alessandro Manzoni]]) and ''[[The Adventures of Pinocchio]]'' ([[Carlo Collodi]]) | ||
| + | *France; e.g. ''[[The Red and the Black]]'' ([[Stendhal]]), ''[[Madame Bovary]]'' ([[Gustave Flaubert]]) and ''[[Les Misérables]]'' ([[Victor Hugo]]) | ||
| + | *Germany; e.g. ''[[The Ring of the Nibelung]]'' ([[Richard Wagner]]), ''[[Children's and Household Tales]]'' ([[Grimm Brothers]]) and ''[[Effi Briest]]'' ([[Theodor Fontane]]) | ||
| + | *Spain and Portugal; e.g. ''[[Fortunata and Jacinta]]'' ([[Benito Pérez Galdós]]) and ''[[La Regenta]]'' ([[Leopoldo Alas]]) | ||
| + | *Russia; e.g. ''[[Crime and Punishment]]'' ([[Dostoevsky]]), ''[[War and Peace]]'' ([[Leo Tolstoy]]) and ''[[The Seagull]]'' ([[Anton Chekhov]]) | ||
| + | *United States; e.g. ''[[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'' ([[Mark Twain]]) and ''[[Moby-Dick]]'' ([[Herman Melville]]) | ||
| + | |||
| + | ====The Chaotic Age==== | ||
| + | (1900–today), which includes a multitude of countries and authors: | ||
| + | *United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; e.g. ''[[Ulysses (novel) | Ulysses]]'' ([[James Joyce]]), ''[[Mrs Dalloway]]'' ([[Virginia Woolf]])' and ''[[The Waste Land]]'' ([[T.S. Eliot]]) | ||
| + | *Italy; e.g. ''[[Six Characters in Search of an Author]]'' ([[Luigi Pirandello]]) and ''[[Zeno's Conscience]]'' ([[Italo Svevo]]) | ||
| + | *France; e.g. ''[[In Search of Lost Time]]'' ([[Marcel Proust]]), ''[[The Stranger (Camus novel) | The Stranger]]'' ([[Albert Camus]]) and ''[[Waiting for Godot]]'' ([[Samuel Beckett]]) | ||
| + | *Germany and German-speaking Central Europe; e.g. ''[[The Magic Mountain]]'' ([[Thomas Mann]]), ''[[The Castle (novel) | The Castle ]]'' ([[Franz Kafka]]) and ''[[The Man Without Qualities]]'' ([[Robert Musil]]) | ||
| + | **Spain and Portugal; e.g. ''[[Gypsy Ballads]]'' ([[Federico Garcia Lorca]]) and ''[[The Book of Disquiet]]'' ([[Fernando Pessoa]]) | ||
| + | *Russia; e.g. ''[[The Master and Margarita]]'' ([[Mikhail Boulgakov]]) and ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'' ([[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]) | ||
| + | *United States; e.g. ''[[The Great Gatsby]]'' ([[F. Scott Fitzgerald]]) and ''[[The Old Man and the Sea]]'' ([[Ernest Hemingway]]) | ||
| + | *Latin America; e.g. ''[[Ficciones]]'' ([[Jorge Luis Borges]]), ''[[Canto General]]'' ([[Pablo Neruda]]) and ''[[One Hundred Years of Solitude]]'' ([[Gabriel Garcia Marquez]]) | ||
| ==Reception== | ==Reception== | ||
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| The novelist [[A. S. Byatt]] wrote: <blockquote>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. | The novelist [[A. S. Byatt]] wrote: <blockquote>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. | ||
| </blockquote> | </blockquote> | ||
| + | |||
| + | ==See also== | ||
| + | *[[Anecdote of the Jar]] | ||
| {{GFDL}} | {{GFDL}} | ||
Current revision
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"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 "I am not concerned with . . . the current debate between the right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change." --The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 4 "Shakespeare, who scarcely relies upon philosophy, is more central to Western culture than are Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein." --The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 10 "Shakespeare's eminence is, I am certain, the rock upon which the School of Resentment must at last founder." --The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 25 "Ideology plays a considerable role in literary canon-formation if you want to insist that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology, an insistence that is common to all six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians." --The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 527 "The hero of these anticanonizers is Antonio Gramsci, who in his Selections from the Prison Notebooks denies that any intellectual can be free of the dominant social group if he relies upon merely the "special qualification" that he shares with the craft of his fellows (such as other literary critics): "Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an 'esprit de corps' their uninterrupted historical qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group." --The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 25 "Finding myself now surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by multiculturalists unlimited, I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible. All of these Resenters of the aesthetic value of literature are not going to go away, and they will raise up institutional res enters after them." -- The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p. 517 "Ideology plays a considerable role in literary canon-formation if you want to insist that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology, an insistence that is common to all six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians." --The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom, p.527 |
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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. Shakespeare is most important author in the book with 1145 mentions, Freud is also central with 359. Freud and Montaigne are the only two non-fiction only writers.
Contents |
Summary
Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon:
William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, Samuel Beckett
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
Bloom divides the body of Western literature into four ages:
The Theocratic Age
(2000 BC – 1321 AD), with five main traditions that influenced the West:
- The Ancient Near East; e.g. Gilgamesh, The Book of the Dead and the Bible
- Ancient India; e.g. Mahabharata
- Ancient Greece; e.g. the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and Oedipus Rex of Sophocles
- Ancient Rome; e.g. the Aeneid (Virgil) and the Metamorphoses (Ovid)
- The Middle Ages; e.g. the Confessions of Saint Augustine
The Aristocratic Age
(1321–1832), with five major bodies of literature:
- Italy; e.g. the Divine Comedy (Dante), The Prince (Machiavelli) and The Servant of Two Masters (Carlo Goldoni)
- France; e.g. the Essays (Montaigne), The Misanthrope (Molière) and the Candide (Voltaire)
- Germany; e.g. The Robbers (Friedrich Schiller), Faust and the Italian Journey (Goethe)
- Spain and Portugal; e.g. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes), The Trickster of Seville (Tirso de Molina) and The Lusiads (Luis de Camoens)
- Great Britain & Ireland; e.g. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare), Paradise Lost (John Milton) and Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
The Democratic Age
(1832–1900), when the strength of American and Russian literature begins
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; e.g. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
- Italy; e.g. The Betrothed (Alessandro Manzoni) and The Adventures of Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi)
- France; e.g. The Red and the Black (Stendhal), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) and Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
- Germany; e.g. The Ring of the Nibelung (Richard Wagner), Children's and Household Tales (Grimm Brothers) and Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane)
- Spain and Portugal; e.g. Fortunata and Jacinta (Benito Pérez Galdós) and La Regenta (Leopoldo Alas)
- Russia; e.g. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) and The Seagull (Anton Chekhov)
- United States; e.g. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) and Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
The Chaotic Age
(1900–today), which includes a multitude of countries and authors:
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; e.g. Ulysses (James Joyce), Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)' and The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot)
- Italy; e.g. Six Characters in Search of an Author (Luigi Pirandello) and Zeno's Conscience (Italo Svevo)
- France; e.g. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust), The Stranger (Albert Camus) and Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
- Germany and German-speaking Central Europe; e.g. The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann), The Castle (Franz Kafka) and The Man Without Qualities (Robert Musil)
- Spain and Portugal; e.g. Gypsy Ballads (Federico Garcia Lorca) and The Book of Disquiet (Fernando Pessoa)
- Russia; e.g. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Boulgakov) and The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
- United States; e.g. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) and The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
- Latin America; e.g. Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges), Canto General (Pablo Neruda) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
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.
See also
