The Western Canon

Bloom argues against what he calls the "school of resentment", which includes feminist literary criticism, Marxist literary criticism, Lacanians, New Historicism, Deconstructionists, and semioticians. The Western Canon includes four appendices listing works that Bloom at the time considered canonical, stretching from the earliest scriptures to Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Bloom later disowned the list, saying that it was written at his editor's insistence and distracted from the book's intention. Bloom defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as central to the canon: • William Shakespeare • Dante Alighieri • Geoffrey Chaucer • Miguel de Cervantes • Michel de Montaigne • Molière • John Milton • Samuel Johnson • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • William Wordsworth • Jane Austen • Walt Whitman • Emily Dickinson • Charles Dickens • George Eliot • Leo Tolstoy • Henrik Ibsen • Sigmund Freud • Marcel Proust • James Joyce • Virginia Woolf • Franz Kafka • Jorge Luis Borges • Pablo Neruda • Fernando Pessoa • Samuel Beckett ==Reception==

Norman Fruman of The New York Times wrote that "The Western Canon is a heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities." The novelist A. S. Byatt wrote: Piotr Wilczek and criticized Bloom's narrow interpretation of the concept of the West, significantly underrepresenting and even ignoring works from countries he was not familiar with, such as Poland. They interpret his list as dominated by British and American culture, with a small dose of ancient Western classics and a few non-English works from other Western European countries. At the same time, they concur that such a group is pretty standard for the Western canon as understood by most Western European scholars. ==School of resentment==

"School of resentment" is a term coined by Bloom and expounded upon in his work. It is used to describe related schools of literary criticism that have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contended are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values. Broadly, what Bloom termed "schools of resentment" approaches associate with Marxist critical theory, including African-American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism and post-structuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The "school of resentment" is usually defined as comprising all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western Canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contended that the school of resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. ==See also==