Time was when a student didn't graduate from college without studying Plato's "Republic," Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Milton's "Paradise Lost." The texts were read lovingly with sharp attention to detail, to beauty, to allusion.
That time is long past.
Now, argues Yale University professor Harold Bloom, few students receive a bachelor's degree without reading the novels of Alice Walker. Shakespeare, if studied at all, is examined for evidence of class warfare; Plato is reviled as fascist and "Paradise Lost" as sexist.
The appreciation of great literature has been usurped by a culture of chatterers, Dr. Bloom writes. And in "The Western Canon," a 578-page Jeremiad against modern academics published this month, he fights back. In apocalyptic tones, he argues that literature departments have become irrelevant, and he calls for the common reader to wrest control back from the professionals.
Dr. Bloom's book includes what he calls the Western Canon -- a 36-page list of great works that have shaped European and American culture. His controversial canon has reignited a long-running debate between traditionalists and multiculturalists, who argue that students should read the minority and female authors usually left off such lists.
Though some women and minorities appear on Dr. Bloom's list, he doesn't hesitate to take aim at those he considers mediocre writers.
In the book and in an interview, the 64-year-old professor calls the success of black women such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou the triumph of identity over talent and says their work should not displace enduring classics.
That position provoked a strong response, including, he says, a flood of anonymous hate mail calling him a racist and a sexist.
"You cannot legislate genius," he retorts. "There are no more [female] novelists of the 20th century to compare with Jane Austen and George Eliot in power and authority."
In Maryland, as in the rest of the nation, a survey of campuses reveals few books that all students must read. Instead, freshmen at Loyola College, Johns Hopkins, St. Mary's College and the University of Maryland Baltimore County take survey courses that offer readings from an array of eras and cultures.
At the University of Maryland College Park this year, all freshmen will read "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." But that move follows a recent student government initiative two springs ago, not any grand curricular wranglings.
"Years ago, it seemed that the first common educational experience all students had was graduation," says senior Paul Mandell, who stepped down this week as president of the student government at College Park. "We thought about ways to improve tradition on campus, and we wanted to create an educational focus."
St. John's College in Annapolis, where students banter about Euclid and Ptolemy with the familiarity of old friends, may come as close as any U.S. campus to drawing required readings from Dr. Bloom's list. Its compulsory works stretch through all four years, giving undergraduates a common basis for discussion. Sitting around the small quad in front of McDowell Hall, St. John's students are quick to defend the notion of great books.
"To go through life in our society without having read the Bible -- or Plato -- is going out in life without really knowing the whole picture," says freshman Ian Robertson.
"You read the original works, and you find out what they're really saying," says Lynette Dowty, a sophomore from Sacramento, Calif. "It's intensely personal."
Literary Odyssey
The curriculum clash is not new. It has raged since the day more than a century ago when a University of Michigan professor embarked on one of the first known courses studying American literature, a counterpart to classes focusing on Latin, Greek and English authors.
The battle was joined throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when student protest forced administrators to pry open course lists to writers and peoples other than the dreaded dead white males. And it was revived by "The Closing of the American Mind," a 1987 book by University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom (no relation) that argued popular culture had overwhelmed Western civilization, stripping American society of its values.
The issue leaves some scholars cold.
"It's somewhat irrelevant to the real problems that most American students have," said Gerald Graff, a University of Chicago English professor. "Their problem is books, period, not whether the books are chosen by the trendies or the traditionalists. . . . Why bicker about which books we're teaching? Most students would not be able to read Shakespeare at the level we want."
Not all schools have abandoned a universal reading list. At Columbia University, a pioneer of the "Great Books" curricula in the early decades of this century, students still must read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, several Greek tragedies and comedies, the Bible, Dante's Inferno and Cervantes' "Don Quixote."
'The enemy'
Nevertheless, the inclusion of a few texts from outside the canon unsettles Dr. Bloom.
"There has been penetration by multicultural authors," he said. "Bad books tend to displace the good."
He brooks little deviation from the straight and narrow. His own list of modern authors, which he concedes could be proved wrong in time, includes many prominent and lesser-known women, black, Hispanic and foreign writers: black writers Rita Dove and August Wilson, Catalonian poet Pere Gimferrer and African author Wa Thiong'o Ngugi.
Yet he is vigilant against the addition of a popular new book here, or another poet there, to the canon.
"Those who say it should be more amenable are simply gradualists in destroying" the canon, Dr. Bloom said. "All of them, in the end, are profoundly anti-intellectual, profoundly anti-aesthetic.
"They are the enemy," he said.
An exceptionally well-versed scholar whose innovative interpretations of poets made him a giant in literary criticism three decades ago, Dr. Bloom has since despaired of the direction the field has taken.
His revisionist colleagues at Yale began dragging the classics off their pedestal. This so distressed Dr. Bloom that he threatened to leave for Harvard if he were not given a position outside the English department. He now splits time between New York University and Yale, where he is a department of one with the title of "professor of the humanities."
Now the one-time bad boy of "lit crit" finds himself a lonely, if amplified, voice in the academic wilderness. And the protest his book has stirred up suits his publisher fine.
Harcourt Brace gave Dr. Bloom an advance of $650,000 for "The Western Canon," and has already printed 75,000 copies. Both figures are far beyond those usually commanded by academic publications, and the publishing firm expects a wide audience.
Several scholars said Dr. Bloom's polemic reflects a fear about a new definition of American culture.
"We have been willing to define major authors in new ways," says Jeff Hammond, chairman of the English department of St. Mary's College. "There's always Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, and, in America, Melville, Hawthorne and Hemingway. That's changed, and I think for the better. We've had Toni Morrison taught that way, and added some other writers as well."
"Bloom's outrageous exercise in canon-forming -- laying down the law -- is only a very conspicuous example of what we've had to do all along without wanting to admit that's what we're doing," says former Johns Hopkins University professor J. Hillis Miller, a friend and colleague who taught with Dr. Bloom at Yale from 1972 to 1986. "For us to choose English literature as a basis of national culture was a choice. It's not a given."
Dr. Bloom rejects that reasoning. But what makes his entry in the curriculum wars new is that, while he appears to side with cultural conservatives, he curses all combatants.
Unlike academic conservatives and a slew of politicians, Dr. Bloom scorns the push to find values in great literature -- it should simply be read because of its enduring influence, he says.
"If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values," he writes, "I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation."