Word: canonically
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...vast corpus of literature that decries the evils of multiculturalism, these books are sometimes useful. But often, they are so clumsily argued and poorly-wrought you would think the author didn't spend too much time reading the canon he so adamantly defends. Traditionalists are sometimes the most ignorant of tradition...
...Jack Gilpin, Julie Hagerty, Mary Beth Peil, Robert Stanton and Jennifer Van Dyck -- shifts from one role to another as smartly as commuters leaping from the Stamford express to the Cos Cob local. But as directed by Playwrights boss Don Scardino, the evening is a failure. It ransacks the canon for easy laughs and outbursts. With only a few minutes devoted to each story, the characters rarely rise above caricature...
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...
Surely no one opens The Interpretation of Dreams or Finnegans Wake in the hope of finding out exactly how Freud or Joyce dealt with that pesky, overbearing Shakespeare, particularly when Harold Bloom is ready with shorthand answers in The Western Canon. Why then, in this distraction-besotted time, read demanding, imaginative literature at all? On this topic, Bloom is uncharacteristically tentative. "Reading the very best writers -- let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy -- is not going to make us better citizens." And: "The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will...
...difficulty in finding Dante's Comedy to be divine." He amplifies this perception a bit later: "As a writer, Shakespeare was a sort of god." Bloom is entitled to his worship, since he has spent a lifetime of reading achieving it. But he is not, in The Western Canon, a very effective prophet for his cause. Imaginative literature -- sacred texts or a rich lode of inspiring writing -- badly needs a less agonized champion...