CONCEPT
The School of Resentment
Bloom's polemical name for the schools of criticism that reduced literary texts to their social and political contexts — a reduction he insisted eliminated exactly what made strong work valuable.
The School of Resentment was Bloom's polemical name for the schools of criticism — Marxist, feminist, Foucauldian, New Historicist, postcolonial — that in his view reduced literary texts to their social or political contexts, treating works as symptoms of ideology, power, or identity rather than as autonomous achievements of imagination. Bloom coined the term in The Western Canon (1994) as part of his defense of aesthetic criticism against what he saw as the politicization of literary study. The reduction, he argued, eliminated exactly what made strong work valuable: its strangeness, its irreducibility, its resistance to paraphrase. The term became one of the most contested in late twentieth-century criticism — defenders saw Bloom as championing aesthetic autonomy against reductive politics; critics saw him as defending privilege against needed political analysis.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The School of Resentment polemic was part of Bloom's lifelong defense of aesthetic judgment as an irreducible category. Bloom insisted that literary texts