Name: The Western canon
ISBN: 9781573225144

The Western canon

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 the 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 Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, 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. Bloom concludes this provocative, trenchant work with a complete list of essential writers and books - his vision of the Canon.

What Hacker News says

yamtaddleDec 2022

It's caught some shit over the years, but it's hard to go wrong picking almost anything off Bloom's (IIRC somewhat reluctantly-compiled, at the request of the publisher) list from the appendices of The Western Canon.

There's another pretty good one, that includes more science writing and such, at the end of Adler's How to Read a Book.

Bloom's:

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

Adler's:

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtadler.html

And that site has a bunch of other lists in a similar spirit, on it.

[EDIT] One thing to beware of with free ebooks and non-English works in translation, is that it's pretty common for older public-domain translations to be needlessly-obtuse to a modern reader, or outright bad. Worth taking a few minutes to compare your options before committing to one of those.

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oskaOct 2019

> it is a decent heuristic to not speak ill of the dead

I take somewhat the opposite view: once someone is dead they can no longer be hurt by anything bad said about them. Defamation law also follows the same principle.

Not that I want to speak ill of Harold Bloom. I only knew him through reading The Western Canon, which I found a very rewarding read, and for his disdain for the Harry Potter mania, where I felt the same way.

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vixen99Feb 2018

FW - 17 years in the writing. You might try the great critic Harold Bloom as a guide. "The end of Finnegans Wake, the monologue of the dying Anna Livia-mother, wife, and river-is frequently and rightly esteemed by critics as the most beautiful passage in all of Joyce."— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare.

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gralxJan 2018

The problem that Harold Bloom frames in his 1994 The Western Canon is that with a finite amount of time to read, we ought to choose wisely. A good literary critic helps with that, and The Western Canon is a great example.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/136-9956209-9412407?...

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asharkNov 2016

For most technical, scientific, and mathematic topics, it's usually very easy to find the next best book to read with a google search or two. Starting on or strengthening long-forgotten Calculus? Probably get Spivak. Et c. This might get tougher as you approach a field's state-of-the-art, but by then "what to read next" will often come from a journal, not a book.

Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon list, whatever its faults, is pretty damn good and could keep one busy for a lifetime. If you want to mix in more works by e.g. women or more asian works or whatever, there are very good lists for that, too:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/whatbooks.html

(above includes Bloom's list)

Want to learn science and math from classics? The list from How to Read a Book should help, and St. John's College's reading list is public: https://www.sjc.edu

For a given topic, there's often a subreddit with a decent reading list in the FAQ.

Which topic(s) are you having trouble with?

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slambamAug 2014

The Bible. Harold Bloom's "Western Canon", Knausgaard's "Min Kamp", "The World According to Garp", Robertson Davies Deptford Triology, "Anna Karenina", "Consilience of Knowledge", "House of Leaves" "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" All these books messed me up to varying degrees.

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