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  • #OKBloomer: Contesting the American Canon
  • Dana C. McClain (bio)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed more book lists popping up online and on social media that offered recommendations of what to read during a time of anxiety and isolation. With titles like “Your Coronavirus Reading List,” the lists featured blends of classic and contemporary titles, fiction and nonfiction, works that would help the reader process current events and works that would help the reader escape. From Bill Gates to The New York Times to The Perpetual Page-Turner, many people had thoughts on what to read during the crisis. Each list was as unique as the individual(s) who composed it and the strange times in which were living.

Unexpectedly, reading these lists made me think of the recent publication of The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, a collection of Harold Bloom’s essays on American literature edited by David Mikics. Bloom’s tome may seem like a vastly different entity than the COVID-19 reading lists. Written by a critical colossus and clocking in at 400+ pages, The American Canon has a scholarly and material heft that far surpasses the modest articles from the internet, where, as we know, anybody can publish. The tenor of each work is also quite different. While the COVID-19 reading lists are worded as gentle suggestions (i.e., “10 Books Worth Adding to Your COVID-19 Reading List”), The American Canon oozes authority, down to the assertive “the” in the title, indicating that Mikics and the publishers would have us believe that Bloom’s American canon is the American canon.

No one can deny Bloom’s influence on literary studies. Better known for his work on literature from across the pond, Bloom has also written extensively about American writers. Mikics asserts that Bloom’s American canon — centered on the American Romantics, namely, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Elizabeth Bishop — has dominated the academy for decades, and it is true that American students are fed a steady diet of Bloom’s Western and American canons. However, Bloom’s largely white male canon has also been heavily criticized, and a lot of great work has been done to de-center the canon, such as recovering more women and minority writers, as well as literature from neglected time periods and regions. My area of expertise, American novels published before 1800, is excluded from Bloom’s canon, although recently some authors have achieved more recognition via the claim that they anticipate the themes and quality of canonized writers. For example, Charles Brockden Brown is styled the predecessor of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Susanna Rowson the originator of the American sentimental tradition that peaked with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). My point is that as a literary scholar you always know where you are in relation to the canon: entrenched within it, on the margins looking in, or completely outside. Bloom’s American canon has become so ubiquitous that it seems akin to the Greek goddess Athena, a being that emerged fully formed instead of created and sustained by actual people for personal and political reasons.

Here is where I think the phenomena of the COVID-19 reading list can help us understand the purpose of a work like The American Canon. Just as the COVID-19 lists were formed in response to a crisis, so too have canons been developed out of a sense of urgency and need. Far from an objective evaluation of literary texts, a canon is a rhetorical task, an argument for something and against something else.

Case in point: in the Introduction, Mikics explains that Bloom’s canon was a reaction to T. S. Eliot’s. “At Yale in the 1950s, Eliot’s judgments were largely sacrosanct,” Mikics writes. “He had deemed Romantics dangerous eccentrics, Emerson and Whitman bad influences. Bloom was ready to fight back. By the 1980s…Bloom’s new anti-Eliot canon had won out.” Thus, Bloom’s impetus to create a new canon came from a sense of discontent over what was currently being taught, a reaction against criticism...

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