Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

This lecture is on the topic of canonicity and value.  Up until the 1960s, literary critics whether of the traditionalist or the Romanticist/humanist persuasion simply assumed the value of the literary tradition and the need to preserve and maintain it.  The reasons for it were varied, but there was a common cause amongst the scholars.

Bloom's 1995 work 'The Western Canon' marks the rapid decline of the previous consensus.  He writes it almost as an elegy to a lost sensibility.  Bloom blames its decline not to neglect but to the way in which the humanities have been subsumed under the allegedly larger approach of 'cultural studies', which are little other than the outworkings of identity group politics and its language of political correctness.  

Bloom represents a response to 'theory' of the variety we last saw defended by Terry Eagleton.  For 'theorists', there is no such thing as literature.  For Bloom, on the other hand, literature is as it was for Oscar Wilde - a purely aesthetic thing.  This is far from a traditionalist defense, but Bloom's work indicates how much the study of literature as literature had already disappeared from the academy.

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