As a representation of canon-worthy American literature since Emerson (and since his criteria include poets, essayists, playwrights, and novelists) one wonders why Bloom doesn’t include American writing before Emerson’s Transcendentalists like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Ten of the featured writers in this canon are women, and three are people of color. It begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson, “…the inescapable theorist of all subsequent American writing.” Starting from this period of the mid-19th century, Bloom ends with Thomas Pynchon, author of (among other titles), Gravity’s Rainbow and lead chronicler of “…the age of plastics and paranoia, corporations and capitalists dominated by the system.”
These essays form the basis of a lifetime Bloom spent reading and personally connecting with an American canon of his own making.
Still, she is among the 47 writers profiled in the new Library of America collection The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon introduced and edited by author David Mikics. Save for his introduction to her novel Song of Solomon, which he insisted be solely evaluated on aesthetic grounds, Bloom and Morrison had minimal connections beyond being on either side of the literary canon cultural wars. Bloom’s rigid orthodoxy about what is necessary for educational enlightenment was transformed by Morrison, along with other non-white, non-male, non-binary intellectuals, into a more diverse journey of learning - and appreciation. This focus helped transform the objective nature of the canon. Instead, she favored race, gender, and culture studies. Morrison minimized the need for a canon because its rigidity excludes diversity. Bloom saw adherence to the Western canon “as a process of intense personal engagement with great work” whose goal was to “enlarge a solitary existence.” His list of great works in the Western canon focused on only 26 authors and four major periods covering several millennia. While popular critical consensus and more glowing appreciations were justifiably aimed at Morrison, those of us who followed the early ’90s clash of these two literary titans over the subject of the canon’s relevancy probably saw perfect closure in the fact that they were now gone from the stage. Harold Bloom’s October 2019 death came two months after the death of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison.
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