A PASSION FOR THE CANON: TWENTY YEARS AHEAD

Abstract

The Russian translation of the seminal and highly controversial book (at the time of its publication in 1994) The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages by Harold Bloom provokes thinking about the process and interim results of the nearly 500-year-old dispute around ‘classicization’, or the forming of a literary canon. Important to grasp are dissimilarities in the functioning of national literatures and the emerging ‘global’ literature (the latter both adhering to the traditional ideas about the literature of ‘universality’ and ‘the world classics’ originated by Goethe, and differing from them). The viewpoint of the American scholar combines conservatism and radicalism, and his book has a pronounced personality, being biased and highly polemical. Inspired by the US cultural reality of twenty years ago, this viewpoint receives a new interpretation in today’s Russian and transnational literary contexts. The review emphasizes one of the key merits of Bloom’s thinking, which his book not merely proclaims but rather consistently and clearly demonstrates with his consummate analysis of literary forms and a keen eye for the deep interconnectedness of the aesthetic and the anthropological.