According to the theory, first articulated in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), writers become great through a symbolic slaying of their literary forebears this attempted Oedipal vanquishing of the “father” is accomplished by swerving away from or deflecting the powerful metaphors and myths of the great figures of the past. In the early 70’s, Bloom started developing a theory of literary influence, in which he married this Promethean theme to Freud. For him, there is no higher divinity than the exalted sublimity of our deepest self (or Self). And Bloom himself has always identified with this Romantic Prometheanism-the battle of man to overcome the limitations imposed by the gods. Where earlier critics had tended to see the Romantics as sentimental, nature-worshipping pietists, Bloom emphasized their Promethean side, turning them into visionary questers. What explains this obsession with strangeness? Bloom started his career as an ingenious interpreter of British Romantic poetry-William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley being his special favorites. To be sure, there have been counteroffensives to these attacks on the Western cultural tradition, but most of them have been confined to arguing with the philosophical premises of the radicals, or to exposing the solecisms and irrationality hiding behind the scholarly veneer of multiculturalist “theory.” Valuable as such fusillades have been, there has been a missing dimension, and that is why one approaches the latest work by the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom with high expectations. The new historicists reduce literary works to ideological manipulations in this reading, the great books of the West amount to a sorry parade of racist, sexist, chauvinist, and hyper-rationalist apologetics.

Worse, the multiculturalists have been joined in spirit by two other academic movements: the gender-feminists, and the “new historicism.” The gender-feminists aim to undo the Western “canon”-the commonly accepted great works-as the cultural traces of male privilege or “patriarchy” (to use the agitprop slogan). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.Īs has been recorded in dispiriting detail by numerous observers, the wholesale embrace of multiculturalism in our universities has mainly led not to an opening-up of the curriculum to other cultures, but to a denigration of the products of our own Western tradition.

The western canon by harold bloom