It began with the epic of Gilgamesh and ended with Tony Kushner’s (wholly worthless) Angels in America. To The Western Canon Bloom appended a 36-page list of canonical texts. Suitably alarmed, he now sallied forth in defense of the intrinsic value of literature. It seems he had discovered what he dubbed “the School of Resentment” and “the commissars of gender and power.” Deconstructionists and feminists, he belatedly noticed, were using literature not for aesthetic purposes but to further political agendas. It was also a book that saw Bloom fighting his first real skirmish in the culture wars. It was a book that compulsively repeated some of his idées fixes-the notion, for instance, that great writers, in order to reach selfhood, are engaged in “anxious” and parricidal struggles with one or another dominating predecessor. In 1994, Bloom published The Western Canon, a 578-page tome covering 26 authors from Shakespeare to Beckett. His amazing productivity has behind it a frenzied ambition to have his say, to insist on the correct apprehension of every known scrap of writing in the world.
Now full of titles-he is, among other things, Sterling professor of humanities at Yale and Berg professor of English at New York University-he has written more than twenty books and has superintended and introduced anthologies of criticism about hundreds of world authors. Harold Bloom is one of the characters of modern literary criticism.
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