INTERTEXTUALLY, an autobiography emerges from the dense scholarly pages of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom's plea for literacy, and description of what it includes, and how it should be understood. A professor at Yale, Bloom reveals much of himself in the book. "Close...

Philologos Forward 02-26-1999 ON LANGUAGE: The Western Canon Not long ago, in a column on the influence of Western European Yiddish on Berlin slang, I referred to such Yiddish as "extinct." In response I received a chiding letter from Edwin Rosenberger of...

Elvis Is Titanic, out in late August from Knopf. Mr. Klaus seemed more subdued since last we sighted him, in September 2005, when the majority of the world’s newspapers noted the breakup of his three-year relationship with Ms. Clinton. Perhaps he’s been humbled by the...

In the following essay, Lauter suggests that the very idea of a mainstream literary canon is not appropriate to the heterogeneous society of the United States, and that a comparative approach is more useful in studying American literature.

In the following essay, Corse and Griffin explore the process of forming the African-American literary canon by analyzing the critical history of a key text—Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

In the following essay, Baumlin explores Harold Bloom's landmark work Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, criticizing Bloom for deliberately obfuscating the difference between religious and literary categories.