Word: canon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...never mind. If reading the works of 26 authors proves too arduous a prospect, Bloom offers a final shortcut for the canonically hungry: "Shakespeare is the secular canon, or even the secular scripture; forerunners and legatees alike are defined by him alone for canonical purposes...
...this score, the Common Reader is likely to be overwhelmed by The Western Canon. At the end of his book Bloom ticks off more than 3,000 works by some 850 authors, ranging from Gilgamesh (anonymous) to Angels in America (Tony Kushner), that merit an educated person's attention. Good grief. Even if each work could be read in a day -- and most can't -- boning up on the Western Canon as set forth by Bloom would take nearly 10 years uninterrupted by any of ^ the mundane details of life, such as jobs, friends and loved ones, and most meals...
...sales, particularly when Bloom gets around to handing out pass-fail grades to 20th century writers (see box). But for all the prepublication hype it has aroused, Bloom's back-of-the-book grab bag of ancient and modern writers forms the least interesting part of The Western Canon...
Coming upon this assertion so early (page 24) in The Western Canon is a little like opening a mystery novel and being told straight off that the butler did it. Bardolatry took root shortly after the dramatist's death in 1616, flowered in the 18th century and has flourished largely unchecked ever since. If all Bloom has to say, as the 20th century winds down, is that Shakespeare is the best, the champ, numero uno, then the necessity of his doing so, at such length, seems dubious...
That is not all Bloom has to say. His re-exaltation of Shakespeare occurs as an end product of his own idiosyncratic notions of how literature is written and read. Bloom's Canon is the offshoot of a theory he first formulated in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and has modified somewhat in the interim. This presupposition, as so much in Bloom's criticism, is difficult to state succinctly. For openers, writers who wish to be "strong," that is, to produce works worthy of the Canon, must first confront and somehow conquer the power of "strong" writers...