Bloom the aesthete: Does Bloom abandon the humanistic tradition in his take on the canon?

Dr. Scott Masson: Harold Bloom's strange defence of the Western Canon

This lecture briefly discusses the idea of a literary canon, as opposed to the Biblical canon. The former unlike the latter can admit of additions. Harold Bloom defends the idea of the Western canon on exclusively aesthetic grounds, which is an extraordinary departure from the rationale given for studying it traditionally.

However, while the 'canon wars' of the 1980s that pushed for the inclusion of authors usually on grounds of what we now call ...