SOURCE: "Bloom and The Canon," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 333-38.

In the following review, Dooley notes that The Western Canon marks a "significant change of direction" for Bloom.

Consider the two following kinds of critical writing:

1) I must admit that each time I reread [Bleak House], I tend to cry whenever Esther Summerson cries….

2) [T]here are no texts, but only relationships between texts.

The first quotation may seem naive or at least old-fashioned, not only pre-Derrida but pre-New Criticism. The second kind of writing is immediately recognizable as a specimen of academic deconstruction or literary "theory"; the source is the first page of Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading (1975). Surprisingly, the first quotation is later, not earlier, than the second; it comes from Harold Bloom's new book, The Western Canon. Part of the interest of The Western Canon lies in measuring the...