You prepetuate the myth I mentioned earlier. Margaret Atwood is a best selling novelist, who is perhaps the most recognizable of Canadian authors. I don't dispute her place as a somewhat canonical figure (though some of her books are rather repetitive, and I think she peaked early on). Alice Munro too is a bestselling author, and quite simply perhaps the first major commercially successful Canadian writer working only in short stories.
Either way, I think I'm as vocal a critic of Bloom as King - both are mediocre mass-market American creations, with American agendas. If we take your view, then whoever sells the most copies would be deemed the most powerful, and important author, and by that reckoning, I think The Davinci Code wins as the greatest example of fiction in the past 10 years.
Yeah right.
I trust you've read academic criticism outside of Bloom however (though many on these boards, it would seem, have not, and take his word for granted). If so, you would note the variance in perspective amongst critics of all different fields.
The notion of the ivory tower seems if anything, to not hurt academia, but to hurt the reader, as it acts as a justification for the ignoring of any form of critical inquiry into textual composition and stylistics.
Either way though, I'm not a novel reader, and don't pretend to be. My specialty is, most definitely, in poetry, and my interests lie in contemporary Canadian verse (most English). Name one poet since Tennyson/Browning who has been a major economic success in the English world, from writing poetry alone. Certainly one can name novelists, but even if you take the most achieved poets, they usually have a day job. Eliot had to edit books for publication, and write journalism and introductions in order to stay afloat. Are you suggesting that poetry should be ignored, because it isn't a commercial success?
That King is better than most commercial writers isn't the point. The point is, he isn't better than many writers, and he uses the strength of his publisher, and name, in order to penetrate Canadian, and international bookstores. The myth of the elitism in the ivory tower, in this case, makes him immune from criticism, because if one criticizes him, instantly they are labeled "elitist" or a snob. Yet at the same time, ironically, the King came down from up high to dub Stephanie Meyer as a mediocre author - is he an elitist now?
And by the way, everyone discusses the politics within T. S. Eliot's poetry. If King doesn't speak about his politics, or political stances, his novels certainly do. We know very little about Eliot than what is within his poetry (to date there has never been an authorized biography of him), yet we know much from his poetry. It is the same with King.
