Yeah, ok, these are my last words...
>>The development of a canon depends on political decisions as to who
>>gets in and who doesn't. Aesthetics aren't god-delivered laws, as I
>>think we'd agree. T.S. Eliot popularized the Metaphysical Poets, did
>>much to shape up their aesthetic viability, and helped shape the
>>course of Modernism in the process. Today in the US Charles Brockden
>>Brown is enjoying his first popularity, thanks to the emergence of
>>"Amercanism" in academia. Bloom's canon isn't very generous to female
>>writers. Aesthetic development, such as you frame it, is largely a
>>result of politics.
I can agree that the critics version of the canon is open to contestation, and even that these might be influenced by politics, but you can't make a case for something that is just weak - like the joke made against the poet Robert Southey that his work would be read when Shakespeare has been forgotten (Coleridge, I think). Critical canons are often cranky, like Leavis's was often (though not all the time). However, there is a rational basis to the critics idea of the canon, and that is that artists tend to develop their work on the basis of what has gone before. Nobody wants to re-invent the wheel. Good artists influence other artists, because of the originality with which they attacked a problem. All this seems to me to be undeniable, and in no sense reducible to political or market considerations.
>>What I mean by ideology is roughly an aesthetic theory impacted with
>>moral, ethical, etc. dimensions that aren't aesthetic as such.
>>Ideology in the sense that an artistic tradition (techniques, styles)
>>can imply evaluations of good and bad, masculine and feminine, for
>>instance, that aren't set in stone but perpetuated for better or
>>worse. Not to mention the class position of expensive colleges, and
>>how it might be in their interests not to challenge the status-quo.
>>Bloom's made much of a career out of his canon. I don't mean to harp
>>too much on Bloom.
Maybe Bloom oversold his argument, but he had something to work on, which is that art needs standards of excellence, which are not the same thing as social elitism. Why should we want sub-standard workmanship, in our arts any more than in our plumbing? Of course there is always the possibility that elites will decorate their own shabby institutions with the excellence that they monopolise in the arts, but that does not mean that you should destroy the Winter Palace, just seize it. Discrimination in culture is a good thing, just as discrimination in society is a bad thing.
I should hope that Bloom was not generous to women, or to men in the critical judgements he made. Generosity does not make for good judgements. If he failed to notice that women, far from being excluded from the history of literature, have been the principle developers of the novel form, then he was a fool.
>>But seriously, Helen Vendler has argued that Oscar Wilde's sensibility
>>and work suffered from his time in jail. That may be possible, inside
>>the formal context of his previous works. But from what I remember
>>she implied that good art requires certain amenities and repose in
>>one's material conditions. This brings a baggage of class judgments
>>to bear on artistic works.
Does it? Cyril Connolly said that the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art, but I don't think that he was making an anti-woman argument, just an entirely understandable complaint that it was difficult to write when you had other responsibilities (mind you, his excuses were legend). -- Jim heartfield