Much of Bloom’s argument in The Western Canon focuses on refuting what he calls “the School of Resentment,” which he summarizes as consisting of multiculturalists, Marxists, Feminists, gender theorists, and critical race scholars. Bloom sees the “Resenters’” desire to expand the canon as “the destruction of the Canon, since what is being taught includes by no means the best writers who happen to be women, African, Hispanic, or Asian” (6). He thus frames his discussion of literature as a binary between appreciating the aesthetic value of literature or its political value.

To Bloom, the expansion of the canon to include more women and authors of color inherently degrades the value of the predominantly white, male authorship of the existing canon. He credits white male authors as representing a supposedly “universal” ideal, treating white masculinity as a default. Further, he claims that it is “a mark of the degeneracy of literary study” that he is “an eccentric” for arguing that “the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology” (10), portraying himself as a lone defender of the value of aesthetics against those who seek to reduce aesthetics to “mere” ideology. Such assertions enable Bloom to sidestep acknowledging his own ideology, as his habitual dismissal of the gendered experiences of female writers, for example, reveals his own underlying biases at play in his assessment of what counts as aesthetically valuable.  

In discussing the center of his Western canon, Shakespeare and Dante, Bloom claims that both authors transcend their gender, class, and race through aesthetic value and artistic strength. He calls Dante “the poets’ poet” and Shakespeare “the peoples’ poet,” emphasizing that “each is universal” (49). The importance of “universality” is critical to Bloom’s argument, as he continues: “I am aware of no cultural criticism, no materialist dialectic, that can account for either Shakespeare’s classless or Dante’s elitist universalism” (49). For Bloom, the aesthetic study of literature takes precedence over any other readings, and the basis of his determinations of “greatness” is grounded in the idea that great aesthetic value is inevitably universal, appealing to all readers regardless of identity.

Critically, Bloom is sometimes open about his own limitations in making this argument, as he notes in the prior quote that he is “aware of no cultural criticism” that can subvert his view of aesthetics. Later, in discussing Virginia Woolf, Bloom acknowledges that he is “not yet competent to judge Feminist criticism” (403), implying that he is not well-versed in the ideology which he opposes. With these admissions, Bloom dismisses “opposing” ideologies without fully explaining their reasoning or addressing their arguments, reducing his portrait of the School of Resentment to a strawman instead of serious scholarly engagement.

In Chapter 23, Bloom summarizes this contrast by saying: “Either there were aesthetic values, or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender” (487), urging the reader: “You must choose.” This binary leaves no room for a compromise between Bloom’s defense of aesthetics and the alleged attacks by the School of Resentment, centering The Western Canon as Bloom’s argument in favor as aesthetics against an ambiguous group of “resenters.”