11–20 of 64 posts
I'm still undecided how much I'd recommend someone else studying English (full time, as their only major). I enjoyed the studies though!
For what it's worth, he disavows this list, which was in the appendix of his book [1] Bloom : But can we make an agreement? Let’s forget that damned list. Interviewer : Ha. Do you mean the appendix in the back of the book that lists all the canonical works? Bloom : The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of…
“Disavowed” is a misleading word to use. He had criticisms of his list, but what the quote doesn’t mention is that Bloom was involved in a decades-long battle on the value of the idea of a canon. I think he was just tired of talking about it with people that hadn’t read the book in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Disavowed” is a misleading word to use. He had criticisms of his list, but what the quote doesn’t mention is that Bloom was involved in a decades-long battle on the value of the idea of a canon. I think he was just tired of talking about it with people that hadn’t read the book in the first place.
Well, disavowed was my word, not his, but I stand by it. It seems pretty clearly to be a disavowal to me.
I can't imagine anyone having read everything in this list. It would take more than a lifetime for me at my reading speed.
I can't imagine anyone having read everything in this list. It would take more than a lifetime for me at my reading speed.
I can't imagine anyone being anywhere close to an expert (meaning, highly familiar with the relevant scholarship) on more than a tiny fraction of this list - and do note that whole areas of world lit (East Asia, etc.) are entirely missing from the list, because they're so hard to even characterize in a useful way. Perhaps this is what illustrates the very real failure of this whole "canon" concept more than anything…
“I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
If you’re looking for an Eastern-focused selection (although obviously from a Western perspective), I recommend these lists:
https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/7315/7307/1179/Santa_F...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, disavowed was my word, not his, but I stand by it. It seems pretty clearly to be a disavowal to me.
Right, but you’re misreading the context in which he said it. He disavowed some of the specific choices, maybe the idea of comprehensively enumerating them in a list. But he didn’t disavow the concept of a western canon or even most of the specific books in the list. “I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick…
I just got a copy of The Western Canon by Bloom from the library, and I think it is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read in my life. He is a very convoluted writer that goes for as much high emotional impact as possible, because his theories are generally ridiculous and only make sense when you're lost in his fog of anger and disdain for everything. He also has a weird tendency of using "Western Civilization" and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but you’re misreading the context in which he said it. He disavowed some of the specific choices, maybe the idea of comprehensively enumerating them in a list. But he didn’t disavow the concept of a western canon or even most of the specific books in the list. “I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick…
The original post links to the list, the one he is disavowing. That's the context, that specific list.
Disavowed suggests that he is dismissive of the contents of the list entirely, which again, could not be further from the truth. Quoting a brief Vice article leaves out decades of context.
If I'm overly simplistic, this seems to be 1/3 of an English degree. The remaining 2/3s being linguistics and history with cultural studies of the times. I'm still undecided how much I'd recommend someone else studying English (full time, as their only major). I enjoyed the studies though!
Look at the Oxford curriculum. All literature.
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate-admiss...
[1] Unless you think studying only English grammar, morphology, syntax etc. qualifies as studying linguistics, in which case you’re wrong. Linguistics is about the study of language, not the study of a language.