School of Resentment

School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.

Broadly, Bloom terms "Schools of Resentment" approaches associated with Marxist critical theory, including African American Studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism, and poststructuralism — specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The School of Resentment is usually defined as all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit and/or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contends that the School of Resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. Philosopher Richard Rorty agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in describing the School of Resentment, writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use "subversive, oppositional discourse" to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general.

Bloom outlines the term "School of Resentment" in the introduction to his book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). Bloom stresses that he does not necessarily object to analysis and discussion of social and political issues in literature, but expresses indignation toward college literature professors who teach their own political motives through literature more than the aesthetics of literary worth. In his book, Bloom defends the Western canon of literature from this "School of Resentment", which in his view threatens to break down the canon through the insertion of potentially inferior literary works for political purposes. Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the "forces of resentment" or a goal of "improving" one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position is that politics has no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet would reveal something about feminism or Marxism, he says, but likely nothing about Hamlet itself.

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