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The Western Canon

The Books and School of the Ages

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The Western Canon

By: Harold Bloom
Narrated by: James Armstrong
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About this listen

Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism.

Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition.

©1994 by Harold Bloom (P)1997 by Blackstone Audiobooks Essays Literary History & Criticism World

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Bloom deserves a better narrator

It is really a pity that such an excellent work is mismatched by the narrator, whose knowledge of literature and writers is so evident.
Not only he mispronounces the names but sticks to read the text at full speed not giving the time for the listeners to reflect on what Bloom exposes.

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