When Harold Bloom died last October, the word “canon” was suddenly everywhere. Invariably, the obituaries and reminiscences that eulogized or reviled him mentioned The Western Canon — his popular and thoroughly Eurocentric account of Great Books, from Dante to Beckett, with Shakespeare, like God, everywhere and nowhere at once. Well before The Western Canon appeared in 1994, the classificatory impulse had fallen out of fashion in literary studies, especially categorization used not simply to describe but instead to establish an aesthetic hierarchy.
Bloom’s relentless list making is easily lampooned, and his self-presentation verged on caricature, as in this passage from The Anatomy of Influence, published in 2011, in which he spurns Northrop Frye, the great Canadian taxonomist of literature:
Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11...
Nicholas Bradley teaches Canadian literature and environmental writing in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. His latest poetry collection is Before Combustion.
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