re: #210 wheat-dogg

From the lofty intellectual side of the Right, we had Harold Bloom, arguing for a mostly European and American “canon” of literature en.wikipedia.org, and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which argued against post-modernism and relativism and for a more traditional (i.e., European Christian) mode of ethics and morals.

Interestingly, the two Blooms are not related.

There were a whole series of similar books that were published from the 1970s to the 1990s, all from intellectuals decrying moral relativism, pop culture, and most notably, the introduction of “non-canon” works in high school and university, such as novels by women (who were not named Austen or Brontë), and minorities, and 20th century novels that were more racy than the usual traditional fare. The arguments were essentially the same as the two Blooms — that all this “extraneous” learning detracted from the study of the core aspects of (white) Western Civilization. The subtext was Western Civ was inherently superior to all others, so fuck those others.

We had to read one of those books (maybe it was William Bennett’s) when I was a high school teacher as part of our faculty summer reading assignment. I remember getting so angry at times that I wanted to hurl the book into the nearest trash bin.

Come to think of it, we were exposed to a lot of writers of non European origin. Zora Neale Hurston, Sandra Cisneros, Maya Angelou, Amy Tan. Never bothered me because hey I had black, Asian, and Latino classmates and stories from writers of their cultures mattered too.