Books, Arts & Manners: Canon Law

The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom (Harcourt, Brace, 576 pp., $29.95)

INTERTEXTUALLY, an autobiography emerges from the dense scholarly pages of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom’s plea for literacy, and description of what it includes, and how it should be understood. A professor at Yale, Bloom reveals much of himself in the book. “Close reading may not have ended with my generation,” he writes, “but it has certainly been eclipsed in the generations after us.” “Is it irrelevant that I was nearly forty before I first owned a television set?” At one point in the book, he notes the sound of “gunfire drifting across New Haven even as I sit here writing.” He recalls one summer, “in crisis,” being in Nantucket, where only by reading books aloud could he find his bearings. Mr. Bloom notes in passing, and self-consciously, that his father was in the garment business, that by reading and striving he has become a professor, but literature is in a state of supreme scruple. Ideology, political correctness, multiculturalism have warped the way we read. The barbarians are at the gates.

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Alexander Theroux

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The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom (Harcourt, Brace, 576 pp., $29.95)

INTERTEXTUALLY, an autobiography emerges from the dense scholarly pages of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom’s plea for literacy, and description of what it includes, and how it should be understood. A professor at Yale, Bloom reveals much of himself in the book. “Close reading may not have ended with my generation,” he writes, “but it has certainly been eclipsed in the generations after us.” “Is it irrelevant that I was nearly forty before I first owned a television set?” At one point in the book, he notes the sound of “gunfire drifting across New Haven even as I sit here writing.” He recalls one summer, “in crisis,” being in Nantucket, where only by reading books aloud could he find his bearings. Mr. Bloom notes in passing, and self-consciously, that his father was in the garment business, that by reading and striving he has become a professor, but literature is in a state of supreme scruple. Ideology, political correctness, multiculturalism have warped the way we read. The barbarians are at the gates.