The Literary Bent: In Search of High Art in Contemporary American Writing

There's little camaraderie to be found at the uncomfortable juncture of contemporary literature and contemporary literary theory. It seems poets and fiction writers simply can't produce important new works of art at the same pace at which their theorist peers can dismantle what used to be called the canon. Bloom, who teaches English at Muhlenberg College and is the author of Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, is a scholar of unlikely sympathies and insights. He chooses not to judge the academy's recent distrust of Shakespeare and tradition. Instead, he turns the curious reader's attention to the work of contemporary American writers as disparate as Robert Stone, Tony Morrison and John Ashbery, to demonstrate that despite overwhelming critical and public apathy, current poetry and literary fiction continue to revere a worthwhile (and still considerably healthy) literary tradition. Stone's Children of Light is Bloom's chief example, but his reading reaches from the Romantics to yesterday's New York Times. At the same time Bloom admits that the literary canon he loves is up against the wall, he reminds us all that literariness is continuing to experience a boom as ""cultural capital."" Dejected writers and readers need merely return to their adored classics to cash in on Bloom's investment. (Apr.)