As part of my teaching load, I participated in a team-taught course devoted to the Western canon. Instead, all the canon can teach “is the proper use of one’s own solitude.” As for what he called “the School of Resentment”-the motley crowd of feminists, African-Americanists and the like responsible, in his view, for the “Balkanization” of literary studies-Bloom devoted much of his own solitude to denounce them.īloom’s book appeared shortly after I started my career as a university professor. In his uncompromising defense of the great literary works of Western civilization, Bloom denied any political or ideological purpose.
In 1994, the industry was given a shot of adrenalin by the publication of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. I now ask myself, with horror, how it is that I never understood the horrified response of so many of my students.Ĭriticism of the Western canon has long been a cottage industry among American academics. As a professor of humanities, I have often taught this novella. They do so, in part, because they describe our collective response to the nature of his death-a policeman’s knee driven into his neck for nearly 10 minutes while Floyd struggled to breathe.īut they also keep returning to my mind because they are the well-known words from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. “The horror! The horror!” Ever since George Floyd’s death, those four words continue to run through my mind.
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