What is the value of cultural analysis (incl. canons)?

Bloom, Harold (1930- )

• Sterling professor of the Humanities at Yale University who coined the term "the anxiety of influence" to describe the influence writers have on other writers.
  

• "What makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization, is that it contains one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that resembles Blake's Book of Urizen, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred, among other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works, Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics" (Bloom, "Afterword" 215).
  

• Bloom later critiques "Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors . . . members of the School of Resentment" for challenging the Western canon of literature (Bloom 20). "Nothing," Bloom writes, "is so essential to the Western Canon as its principles of selectivity, which are elitist only to the extent that they are founded upon severely artistic criteria" (Bloom, Western 21).
  

• "Shakespeare's eminence is, I am certain, the rock upon which the School of Resentment must at last founder. How can they have it both ways? If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, theen they need to show why the dominant social class selected him rather than, say, Ben Jonson, for that arbitrary role. Or if history and not the ruling circles exalted Shakespeare, what was it in Shakespeare that so captivated the mighty Demiurge, economic and social history? Clearly this line of inquiry begins to border on the fantastic; how much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference,a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer, even Chaucer, even Tolstoy, or whoever. Originality is the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate, and Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know" (Bloom, Western 24).
  

• See Bloom speaking "out against" the "adulteration" of the Western canon and modern academia. 

Canon

•  "rule, law, or decree of the Church; esp. a rule laid down by an ecclesiastical Council" ("Canon").
  

• "from an ancient Greek word, kanon, meaning  a 'reed' or 'rod' used as an instrument of measurement. In later times kanon developed the secondary sense of 'rule' or 'law,' and this sense descends as its primary meaning into modern European languages" (Guillory 233).

• At the university, Great Books courses, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
  

• "In the case of literary curriculum, I propose that the problem of what is called canon formation is best understood as a problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital, or more specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption. The 'means' in question are provided by the school, which regulates and thus distributes cultural capital unequally . . . Literary works must be seen rather as the vector of ideological notions which do not inhere in the works themselves but in the context of their institutional presentation, or more simply, in the way in which they are taught" (Guillory ix, Cultural).

• "From this perspective the issue of canonicity will seem less important than the historical crisis of literature, since it is this crisis--the long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature--which gives rise to the canon debate" (Guillory ix, Cultural).
  

• "By defining canonicity as determined by the social identity of the author, the current critique of the canon both discovers, and misrepresents, the obvious fact that the older the literature, the less likely it will be that texts by socially defined miniorities exist in sufficient numbers to produce a 'representative' canon . . . The historical reason is that, with few exceptions before the eighteenth century, women were routinely excluded from access to literacy, or were proscribed from composition or publication int he genres considered to be serious rather than ephemeral" (Guillory 15)
  

Leavis, F. R.

• "What I have in mind is the fact of the great tradition and the apartness of the two great novelists [Eliot and Austen] above the ruck of Gaskells and Trollopes and Merediths" (Leavis 14).
  

New Criticism

• "An approach to literary analysis and appreciation that flourished from the 1930's into the 1960's, New Criticism takes its name from John Crowe Ransom's book New Criticism (1941). He discusses the ideas of Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and others who were inspired in part by British critics I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and William Empson. The New Critics believed that a literary work is a self-contained entity to be studied on its own. They advocated close readings that identified the technical and formal properties in a work that reveal meaning. They excluded from consideration such external influences as authorial biography or intentions, literary history, or literary tastes and reader subjectivity. They believed that any text potentially holds multiple meanings, and they were accordingly interested in analyzing indications of ambiguity and irony, principally in the use of images and symbolism. For the New Critics, good literature evinces universal human truths and values, and so it is edifying to study. The critic's role is to help readers understand how the text produces meaning" ("New Criticism").
  

Discussion Questions:

• What does Guillory suggest is the function of teaching literature in American universities after 1945?
  

• How does Guillory account for the dearth of women writers in the English canon before 1800?