Curtis White: All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real: Wherein lies the greatness of the great books? Does Harold Bloom (The Western Canon etc.) in particular have anything of worth to say about this?

“…Unfortunately, … Bloom has taken far less care than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them into one monstrous and threatening whole, just like any Reagan-era hack, called variously the School of Resentment or simply (when he’s feeling very mean-spirited, the well-paid champion of right wing pundits everywhere) cheerleaders. He also strongly implies, just as Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, George Will, Lynne Cheney, et al, have done, that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author, to suit his own polemical purpose.”

And in the second part of the essay, he points to places we may get help with alternate aesthetics. Context