Harold Bloom, the literary critic whose melancholic visage graces a vast collection of literary guides in libraries around the world, died on Monday at the age of 89. He was still teaching his class at Yale University up until a few days earlier.
Certainly Bloom carried his share of notoriety for defending the great white literary canon--Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Emerson etc--and his reference to the multicultural literary movement as “the School of Resentment”, but he was one of the most passionate literary critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and definitely the most well known. His name and face (forehead perpetually propped in one hand) adorn 600 or so guides to literature--collections of critical articles from a vast array of critics, across multiple centuries, covering everything from understanding individual characters, to teaching and writing about a huge swath of literature. He authored 40 well-received books of his own, including two this year and another due out soon.
There are those who dismiss Bloom's canon as too Western, and highly subject to his personal whims, and perhaps he would agree. Bloom believed that aesthetics were paramount in literature, proposing that, “the canonical quality comes out of strangeness, comes out of the idiosyncratic, comes out of originality."
However, he lamented the fate of the university English departments, fearing that they "will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies, where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens."
I hope he left us his map.
