Harold Bloom's strange defence of the Western Canon

This lecture briefly discusses the idea of a literary canon, as opposed to the Biblical canon. The former unlike the latter can admit of additions. Harold Bloom defends the idea of the Western canon on exclusively aesthetic grounds, which is an extraordinary departure from the rationale given for studying it traditionally.
However, while the 'canon wars' of the 1980s that pushed for the inclusion of authors usually on grounds of what we now call 'identity' was objectionable, it is nothing like as problematic as the idea that the previous canon needs to be utterly replaced. The cultural studies approach to literature is an expression of the latent cultural Marxism of the earlier critics being more fully articulated.
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[@umlivroumvinho]

Professor Scott Masson demonstrates high knowledge, perfect ability to explain the content.

[@shawnbrewer7]

I enjoyed this lecture. Thank you Dr. Masson.

[@LitProf]

You are very welcome!

[@artfuldodger9550]

Many thanks for sharing your lecture. You really helped me to understand how we currently find ourselves as passengers on, what feels like, a runaway train. I've come across others point to the gnostic characteristics of progressivism (James Lindsay, for example), and it's encouraging to find that there's a robust and coherent critique of the current moment. I just hope that we hold course against the prevailing storm. (Forgive the mixed metaphor.)

[@allen5455]

What books should be read? Personally, I like "Tip and Mitten."

[@TheLookingGlassAU]

In order to have a conversation there needs to be some core knowledge and understanding from which a subject can be discussed. How can we all understand each other if everyone has his or her own canon and there is no standard or coherence within them. Any conversation will consist of an hour for simply agreeing on terms! We live in an age where our governments are happy to kill us or kill our unwanted children. We live in a culture that thrives on chaos and the opposing voices are a cacophony of grumbles.

[@jimsteele9559]

Anyone know a good book or site to understand the Trivium?

[@allen5455]

What the hell is the Trivium? Is that like the world guide to trivia?

[@jimsteele9559]

@@allen5455 Trivium is ancient idea of how to gain and use knowledge. Grammar, logic and rhetoric. But more to it than that. I think there’s an article on wiki to get you started it’s interesting. Wish I knew more about it.

[@allen5455]

Are the Great Books part of the humanities? If I major in the humanities what will I study? Few seem to know much about the humanities. Recommend a few choice introductions.

[@LitProf]

@allen5455 It depends very much where you study humanities.

[@allen5455]

...at the community college; but my friend and I are most interested in organizing our own college, accreditation and transcript service. Many of the so-called "hippies" did the same in the early 70s and proceeded on to various Ph.D. programs. Today they teach at the many colleges and universities.

[@TheLookingGlassAU]

In Australia the national curriculum is based on a progressive critical pedagogy. It uses experimental psychological methods for socialisation (indoctrination) called social-emotional learning (as implemented by CASEL). Basically designed to create social activists. In your lecture here, for the first half hour I thought you were talking about Allan Bloom who wrote The Closing of the American Mind. After I cleared that up it made a whole lot more sense 😀.

[@LitProf]

We need a better group of thinkers than the ones who have currently platformed themselves in the academy, that’s for sure.

[@warmcoffee226]

I am a lover of Bloom, but disagree with him on so many ways. Thanks for clarifying what was once just an intuition. Time to seek some lewis!

[@pattube]

1. On the one hand, I generally respect the late Harold Bloom as a literary critic, a Romantic scholar, and a Shakespearen scholar. Moreover, it's notable that he pushed back against the woke left agenda which seeks to replace "dead white men" with their favored progressive minorities (e.g. radical feminists, LGBTQIA+ writers, and racial minorities who weren't elevated due to literary skill but due to their minority status such as their homosexuality or the color of their skin - and I say this despite being a minority myself). Bloom came under considerable fire throughout his career for standing against this trend, of which he was cognizant as early as the 1990s if not earlier. He said he left the Yale English department to become his "own" department at Yale in the mid-1970s in protest of this very trend. Related or not, allegations of sexual misconduct were raised against him, which he vehemently denied. I don't know if they were true or false, but if false the allegations would not be surprising given the left wished to get rid of him because he defended "dead white males" and great literature for literary beauty, and given there's a long history across many colleges and universities of these sorts of allegations evidently arising in the media whenever there's a professor who needs to be "disciplined" according to the powers that be. For example, see what happened to former Princeton professor Joshua Katz. Victor Davis Hanson has some useful commentary on the Katz incident, if I recall correctly. 2. On the other hand, Bloom was still very much a man of the left and himself a member of the coastal elite. In addition, as Prof. Scott Masson notes, Bloom was a self-described "Gnostic Jew" with an overemphasis on the aesthetic, viz. literary beauty, virtually to the exclusion of other factors in what should constitute great literature. He jokingly - though I think only half jokingly - has called Shakespeare the God whom he worships. His "anxiety of influence" theory on literary development reflects a significant Freudianism too. In any case, ultimately speaking, what is beauty but one's subjective preferences if untethered from truth and goodness? 3. I'm far more inclined toward the position of C.S. Lewis. Such as in An Experiment in Criticism, The Abolition of Man, as well as several other places like his Selected Literary Essays and Image and Imagination. Among other things, Lewis's Experiment in Criticism seeks to reconsider and reframe how we ought to evaluate a great work of literature. That is, more on the basis of good reading or good readers who "receive" rather than "use" art. Experiment is well worth reading and rereading. I find it's far more intellectually intriguing and perhaps even satisfying on literary criticism and evaluation than what Bloom has said despite being from a generation before Bloom. Lewis still holds up, whereas Bloom doesn't, or at least not as well, I don't think. 4. As an aside, it's interesting Bloom met and for about a month or so conversed regularly with Lewis when Bloom was at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1950s. Bloom recounts this in his introduction to Bloom's Modern Critical Views on C.S. Lewis. If I recall, Bloom calls Lewis "aggressive" and "dogmatic" and Bloom disdains Lewis's fiction, but Bloom respected Lewis as a Renaissance literature scholar and believes The Discarded Image to be Lewis's best scholarly work. Bloom also explicitly admits he's put off by Lewis's Christianity across all of Lewis's works, but that's the precise opposite for me, who appreciates Lewis's open faith infused throughout his works. Anyway Bloom's introduction on Lewis is a brief but interesting read, I think, not so much for Lewis, but because it tips Bloom's own hand as to his biases and prejudices, jealousies and rivalries, ego and superego if we wish to be as Freudian as Bloom often is, among his other vices - scholarly and personal. It speak to us more about Bloom than Lewis, which brings insight to us about him.

[@Kyleology]

You literature people are way up your own butts. Imagine if you had to work an actual job.

[@nothingmatters321]

bloom was a dolt.