The Western Canon by Harold Bloom5/9/2023 ![]() ![]() The long struggle against the totalitarian “East,” which had helped make the “West” seem a coherent entity from Plato to NATO, had ended. Published in 1994, Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon” could barely suppress its nostalgia for a time when the English department was the jewel in the crown of the humanities, and the literary critic with his refined sensibilities seemed the model public intellectual. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the study of literature - led by bow-tied men on East Coast campuses - became central to the cultural self-definition of a budding superpower’s elites. But a new empire of sweetness and light arose after the war across the Atlantic, and its most formidable paladins were literary critics with their new canons. ![]() ![]() Erskine’s “Great Books” curriculum advanced what Bourne called a “carefully deodorized and idealized education.” It may have been closing time in the gardens of Europe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |