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Title: The Western Canon

Subtitle: The Books and School of the Ages

Author: Harold Bloom

Narrator: James Armstrong

Format: Unabridged

Length: 22 hrs and 30 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-26-00

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 157 votes

Genres: History, World

Publisher's Summary:

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 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 while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and 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.Listen to a conversation with Harold Bloom.

©1994 by Harold Bloom (P)1997 by Blackstone Audiobooks

Members Reviews:

A personal and opinionated book on the Canon

My main motivation for writing this review is my disappointment in the other reviews here on Audible so far. There are many much better reviews of this very book on amazon.com, and I would urge you to check them out before being discouraged from picking up Bloom's excellent book.

Most of the reviews here so far either complains about the narration or complains about Bloom's personality and choice of books. Bloom's personality and choice of books has been discussed to death in many other reviews (for example the ones on amazon), so I will mainly focus on the narration.

Luckily, the task of defending the narrator, which I think does an excellent job, is eased through the availability of the audio-preview on this page. Be sure to check it out. The sound quality of the actual download is also somewhat better than the preview. Amongst the complaints that are raised is that the narrator does not emulate, say, the French pronunciation of a French name. This seems petty, and perhaps some of the very same people would complain that the narrator was snobbish if he, say, switched to an upper-class Parisien pronunciation of Foucault. Not only does the narrator manage to read a difficult and almost baroque text in a natural way, he also manages to maintain the calmness, humor and humanity that Bloom's text so beautifully contains. In fact, when I read Bloom's other works, I can still almost hear James Armstrong's voice as I read. Bloom's personality has become forever mixed with Armostrong's interpretation of him.

Amongst the reviews here on Audible, the main attack on Bloom's personality and choice of books is raised by Jerry from Topeka. His rhetoric is that of the rebel. However, other than his supposed authority as a college graduate and having read Ulyesses (not particularly strong arguments), he does not offer any good reason for disliking the book as much as he seems to be doing. His stabs seems to be applicable to any opinionated text on the western canon written by someone famous.