Canon to Right of Them, Canon to Left

For those who lived through the “Canon Wars” that raged within and among English departments and other bastions of the humanities during the 1980s, the present state of the literature curriculum at most schools may be dissatisfying. I suspect no one is very happy with the results, such that they are, of that epochal struggle. Proponents of a “traditional” canon undoubtedly feel that they lost the war, as English majors today can just as easily take courses on the Harry Potter series or The Wire as on Shakespeare and Milton in most departments. But advocates for reforming, expanding, or even more radically, eliminating the canon probably find that far too little has been done, and that the addition of a few more writers and texts to the mainstream curricula have hardly transformed literary studies, at least, not as much as had been desired. In some cases, it may not be clear whether there is any coherence at all, canonical or otherwise, in college and university literary studies.

Way back when, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, along with E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (each published in 1987), combined with controversies over required reading lists as Columbia, Stanford, and other major universities, turned the academic and curricular debates about canons into a topic of national conversation, featured on Sunday morning news shows and newspaper Op-Ed pieces. Conservative screeds like Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991) connected the canon debates to a more broadly politicized “culture war” between traditionalists and revolutionaries, a war that made for rather strange bedfellows in the decade to come. Perhaps the most significant figure weighing in on the matter, both within the groves of academe and in the broader media culture, was Harold Bloom (no relation to Allan), whose 1994 book The Western Canon was not only a defense of the canon and its contents from those he dubbed the “school of resentment” but also itself a canon-forming act. With each of its chapters devoted to an individual, canonical author, and with its infamous appendix comprising a list of the writers Bloom personally deemed canonical, The Western Canon could be accepted by many credulous readers as the canon after all, so influential and authoritative was Harold Bloom.

The recent publication of The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, edited by David Mikics, by the Library of America — itself another sort of canon-forming institution — will undoubtedly be viewed in some quarters as authoritative in designating a canon of US literature, for Bloom’s name still carries some weight among those who care about such things. However, times have changed. For one thing, as his obituaries may have served to remind us, Harold Bloom may well be the last academic literary critic to have such celebrity outside of academe, and it is unlikely that any living professor of literature will be able to sway public opinion concerning the necessity of reading works by this or that writer. Where Allan Bloom had complained that students read too much Nietzsche and not enough Plato, today’s “conservatives” do not seem very interested in promoting any sort of reading at all; meanwhile, today’s “liberals” seem reluctant to speak of required reading at all, other than to promote works that might serve tutelary or ideological purposes, perhaps, or more tepidly, to affirm that reading itself is somehow innately virtuous.

The very idea of a literary canon has become rather dubious, which is why this collection of essays by Bloom, given this title, seems rather anachronistic, and in more ways than one. By establishing Emerson as the fons et origo of a particularly American “literary genius,” Bloom urges a particular line of thinking that decides in advance what is to be valued — the Self above all — and what is not in the United States. He dutifully includes several anti-Emersonians, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and even Edgar Allan Poe, whom he loathes with special enmity, but it is clear that these are outliers within the cult of individuality he places at...