An Elegy (?) for the Canon. Harold Bloom, Zachodni kanon. Książki i szkoła wieków, (transl.) Bohdan Baran and Michał Szczubiałka (Warszawa: Aletheia, 2019, 643 p.)

Abstract

This article reviews the book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) by Harold Bloom. A Polish translation by Bohdan Baran and Michał Szczubiałek appeared in 2019 (Aletheia, 643 p.). The book is presented in the light of Bloom’s earlier theories of comparative literary studies. The article contains key information about Polish readers’ familiarity with these theories (The Anxiety of Influence… etc.). The structure of the book is described, where the first and last parts contain theoretical considerations about the notion of a literary canon, titled An Elegy for the Canon and Elegiac Conclusion, while the middle section discusses 26 world writers regarded by Bloom as representatives of a core literary canon; the book has an annex with a list of writers from an extended canon classified by literary periods and countries (The Theocratic Age, The Aristocratic Age, The Democratic Age, The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy). At the centre of the canon, Bloom places Shakespeare. Russian literature is represented in the core canon by Leo Tolstoy. Bloom evaluated writers in terms of universality of their message and degree of originality, measured as otherness and novelty in comparison to their predecessors.