I finished reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence yesterday, and am not quite sure what to make of it. Partly, this is because most of my reading sessions were begun at two in the morning and ended at two fifteen, and so I couldn’t absorb anything other than the most striking of points. But quite apart from that, even if I had read it all while fully awake, I’m quite certain that much of it would have passed me by. This is partly Bloom’s fault and partly mine. It is Bloom’s fault in that he seems to insist, in his writing, on making bold assertions of fact without the kind of backing up that would be accepted anywhere other than in the world of literary criticism. And it is my fault in that I find this style of writing hard to just accept and get on with. [Read more →]

The idea of the canon, though innocuous enough to begin with, has been reappropriated on the one hand by apocalyptic cultural doom-mongers and on the other by cultural relativists. The debate, among those in academia, seems to be between two opposites, equally extreme: there either must be a canon and it must be defended, or there is no canon at all, and please just let us get on with reading whatever we want to read. [Read more →]