![]() ![]() ![]() My own experience certainly chimes with his: It’s the conclusions he draws, or the aspects he celebrates, that are the reason to read The Western Canon. Doing this, he necessarily talks about ‘the canon’ - his particular Valhalla of great works from Western literature - but whether you agree with his choices or not is beside the point. ‘Such a reader,’ he says, ‘does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.’ But the real core of the book is Bloom’s attempt to, as he puts it, ‘confront greatness directly’. It has achieved a certain notoriety for Bloom’s taking a stance against what he saw as the unwanted politicisation of literary criticism (‘the School of Resentment’ as he calls it, being deliberately provocative), when for him the key to all ‘deep reading’ is the experience of the individual, alone with a book. Published in 1994, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon is a celebration of great literature. ![]()
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