Despite the fact that he is obsessed with ranking authors on a scale with Shakespeare at the top, he cannot name a single objective criteria for doing that. "Pragmatically, the "expansion of the Canon" has meant the destruction of the Canon, since what is being taught includes by no means the best writers who happen to be women, African, Hispanic or Asian, but rather the writers who offer little but the resentment they have developed as part of their sense of identity: There is no strangeness and no originality in such resentment: even if there were, they would not suffice to create heirs to the Yahwist and Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Joyce."Īpart from the irony that Bloom's book is immersed in his own identity-shaping and unoriginal resentment, the problem also is that he can't SHOW the aesthetic distinction at all. Here's a random quote that keeps repeating itself in every chapter in its myopic implied misogyny and monoculturalism bordering on open racism: I added quotes from almost all parts of the book to the reading updates to show the consistency of his fixation, even when it seems absurd. The other theme is that the School of Resentment is destroying great literature.
The first is that Shakespeare is in every single work of fiction of any importance, and that Shakespeare always "wins" in an unspecified aesthetic value contest. What makes Bloom seem like an "impressive scholar", when he is clearly just repeating his mantra over and over again? He has two main themes, actually. Too much hatred, too much bias, and too much bigotry and repetition to get more than a solitary star for being a printed book with letters in it. My reading experience after finishing has not changed the overall impression, but it has made me think, and I took away the second star, which initially was awarded for writing style and erudition. So killed what he loved, and emptied the Room! Who thought Great Literature faced Final Doom, There was an old critic called Harold Bloom,
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