Comrades

Before we go down this path, I must confess that I have always been the solitary sort, more likely to ponder archetypes in my office than hold court about Judeo-Christian myths at the local Starbucks. I have also never been a joiner; as I once put it: "I neither want nor trust disciples, at least as that term is generally understood. I should be horrified to hear of anyone proposing to make his own work revolve around mine […] and if I have no disciples, I have no school" (source).

Being the sort who keeps to himself, I haven't really made rivals, though a few fellow critics have questioned some of my conclusions.

Harold Bloom

This big burrito of literary criticism was not a very close, very personal friend, but he had my back big time. He was over the moon about The Anatomy of Criticism, dubbing me "the foremost living student of Western literature" (source), to which I said, "No, no. You're the man!" But he insisted, so I just took the compliment.

Carl F. Klinck

Not everyone thinks Canadian literature is cool, but Carl and I got together and said—hey, there's a meaningful literary tradition going down in the other part of North America. Carl wrote The Literary History of Canada (I'm sure there are a few copies left on Amazon), for which I wrote the scintillating conclusion. It's in this work with Carl that I conceptualized the theory of "garrison mentality," which I get into down yonder under "Buzzwords." We worked as one trying to develop a nifty homage and legacy to Canadian literary production.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret has written some great novels (have you read The Handmaid's Tale? or Surfacing?). I can't take all the credit for that, even though she was one of my pet students at Victoria College (she was known as Peggy then). Apparently, my class on Milton rocked her world, and she always claimed to have been hugely influenced by yours truly—for example by my theory of "garrison mentality." She also got really down with my idea of a "mythological subculture."

Rivals

Marshall McLuhan

As fellow professors at the University of Toronto, Marshall and I shared a few opinions and had some mutual respect, but we still managed to be enemies. That's what happens when you have two really smart guys—even though Marshall was a philosopher of communication theory, and I was an English professor, we still managed to be rivals. Basically, I think this dude just felt threatened by my all-encompassing theories and wild self-confidence about my own work. No simpering academic, I.

Ted Carpenter

People long associated me with Ted, even though he wasn't always a sweetheart to me. Now, Ted was an anthropologist who wrote about Eskimos, so I'm not sure why my systems theories irked him so much, but it looks like they did. Apparently we both belonged to a group called The Toronto School of Communication Theory, which was primarily focused on the importance of communication; it also had a special place in its heart for the works of the Ancient Greeks.

I don't remember attending many of these meetings, but academics like to group other academics according to schools of thought and movements. (Academics just love to categorize.) He may have seen me as a rival, but I certainly didn't see him as one.