"They have not been moved by literature..."

I wrote last week about the general "I like what I like" philosophy of assessing art. In the academy, it isn't much different. The qualifiers might not come down to enjoyment, but being offended that anyone might announcing themselves as the arbiter of taste. As the creator of standards.

These people who have been most offended by the Western canon and its standards are cheekily labeled by Bloom as The School of Resentment. 


"They have not been moved by literature," he says in a 1991 interview with The Paris Review. "Many of them are my former students and I know them well. They are now gender and power freaks."


Harold Bloom, as he has often said in interviews, does not create followers. But he has sparked great love by some powerful voices in the field of criticism. Some of the most outspoken ones women: Camille Paglia, Marjorie Perloff and his arguments can be seen laced in theirs. 

"We can't really ask literature, or the representatives of a literary culture, to save society. Literature is not an instrument of social change or an instrument of social reform. It is more a mode of human sensations and impressions which do not reduce very well to social rules or forms."

I was trained in the study of literary theory. I have a master's degree in it. But when I left the academy 10 years ago, I found that what I still read, I read to keep my spirit alive. And to do that, I have to approach a text as sacred, whole, mystical. 


And what I hear in Bloom's interviews makes sense to me. But I can still see the value in theory. So I write this play to work out the dialectic for myself. And hopefully to give my audience both sides to ponder. 

What do you think?