Harold Bloom Born ( 1930-07-11) July 11, 1930 (age 88), Occupation, writer, professor Education (B.A.) (PhD) Literary movement, Spouse Jeanne Gould (m. 1958; 2 children) Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and of at. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than forty books, including twenty books of, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the literary of the early 1990s. He was educated at,. Contents. Early life Bloom was born in New York City, the son of Paula (Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the at 1410. He was raised as an in a -speaking household, where he learned literary; he learned English at the age of six. Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in and his mother, a homemaker, near in what is today.
Shakespeare: the invention of the human I Harold Bloom. ISBN 1-57322-120-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Characters.
Harold had three older sisters and an older brother of whom he is the sole survivor. As a boy, Bloom read 's Collected Poems, a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry. Bloom went to the (where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high), and subsequently received a B.A. In from in 1951, where he was a student of English literary critic, and a PhD from in 1955. In 1954-55 Bloom was a at. Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty of including. Several years later, Bloom dedicated his first major book, to Wimsatt.
Teaching career Bloom has been a member of the Yale English Department since 1955. He received a in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English at while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of, a new institution in, that focuses on primary texts. Personal life Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958.
In a 2005 interview his wife said that she regarded him and herself as both atheists while he denied being an atheist saying 'No, no I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist.' Writing career Defense of Romanticism Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on ( Shelley's Myth-making, originally Bloom's doctoral dissertation), ( Yeats, ), and, ( Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, ). In these, he defended the High Romantics against critics influenced by such writers as, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet. Influence theory After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Emerson, and the ancient mystic traditions of,.
In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham, the book editor for, writes that Bloom has long referred to himself as a 'Jewish Gnostic'. Bloom explains: 'I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish. I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia.'
Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write. The first of these books, Yeats, a magisterial examination of, challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: 'Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle.' A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say. The poet becomes disappointed because he 'cannot be early in the morning.
There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything.' The agon, strong and weak misreadings In order to evade this psychological obstacle, the new poet must convince himself that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that he may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poet's love for his heroes turns into antagonism towards them: 'Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible.' The book that followed Yeats, which Bloom had started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of 's The Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which a poet broke free from his precursors to achieve his own poetic vision.
He drew a sharp distinction between 'strong poets' who perform 'strong misreadings' of their precursors, and 'weak poets' who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of 'revisionary ratios,' through which each strong poet passes in the course of his career. Addenda and developments of his theory A Map of Misreading picked up where The Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism attempted to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the, as explicated by scholar, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his 'influence' books. Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, and he has written little since that does not invoke his ideas about influence. Novel experiment Bloom's fascination with the fantasy novel by led him to take a brief break from criticism in order to compose a sequel to Lindsay's novel.
This novel, remains Bloom's only work of fiction. Religious criticism Bloom then entered a phase of what he called 'religious criticism', beginning in 1989 with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present. In The Book of J (1990), he and (who translated the Biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the bible (see ) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a religious work (see ). They further envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings and —a piece of speculation which drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations didn't go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the Biblical.
In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he revisits some of the territory he covered in The Book of J in discussing the significance of and as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility of. In (1992), Bloom surveyed the major varieties of and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most shared more in common with than with historical Christianity. The exception was the, whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that the and strains of would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades. In Omens of Millennium (1996), Bloom identifies these American religious elements as on the periphery of an old – and not inherently Christian – gnostic, religious tradition which invokes a complex of ideas and experiences concerning, interpretation of dreams as,.
In his essay in The Gospel of Thomas, Bloom states that none of Thomas' Aramaic sayings have survived to this day in the original language. Generally agreed and further confirmed that the earlier versions of that text were likely written in either Aramaic or Greek. Meyer ends his introduction with an endorsement of much of Bloom's essay. Bloom notes the other-worldliness of the Jesus in the Thomas sayings by making reference to 'the paradox also of the American Jesus.' The Western Canon In 1994, Bloom published, a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focusing on 26 works he considered sublime and representative of their nations and of the. Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, the major concern of the volume is reclaiming literature from those he refers to as the ', the mostly academic critics who espouse a social purpose in reading.
Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal held by 'forces of resentment' 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 is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.' His position is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a or reading of would tell us something about feminism and Marxism, he says, but probably nothing about Hamlet itself. In addition to considering how much influence a writer has had on later writers, Bloom proposed the concept of 'canonical strangeness' (cf. ) as a benchmark of a literary work's merit.
The Western Canon also included a list—which aroused more widespread interest than anything else in the volume—of all the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or (among more recent works) candidates for that status. Bloom has said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he does not stand by it. Work on Shakespeare Bloom has a deep appreciation for Shakespeare and considers him to be the supreme center of the Western canon. The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom considered, at the time, barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, adds a long preface that mostly expounds on Shakespeare's debt to and, and his with his contemporary, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.
In his 1998 survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, 'twenty-four of which are masterpieces.' Written as a companion to the general reader and theatergoer, Bloom declares that 'ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is.' He also contends in the work (as in the title) that Shakespeare 'invented' humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of 'overhearing' ourselves, which drives our changes.
The two paragons of his theory are of and, whom Bloom sees as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Throughout Shakespeare, characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other; this has been decried by numerous contemporary academics and critics as hearkening back to the out of fashion character criticism of and others, who happen to gather explicit praise in the book. As in The Western Canon, Bloom criticizes what he calls the 'School of Resentment' for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and instead the study of literature through various multicultural and departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaims him as the only multicultural author, and rather than the 'social energies' historicists ascribe Shakespeare's authorship to, Bloom pronounces his modern academic foes – and indeed, all of society – to be 'a parody of Shakespearian energies.'
2000s Bloom consolidated his work on the western canon with the publication of How to Read and Why in 2000 and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds in 2003. In the same year, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited was published, an amendment to Shakespeare: Invention of the Human written after he decided the chapter on Hamlet in that earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of the to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself.
Some elements of religious criticism were combined with his secular criticism in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (2004), and a more complete return to religious criticism was marked by the publication of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine in 2005. Throughout the decade he also compiled, edited and introduced several major anthologies of poetry. In 2006, Bloom took part in the documentary, the, made. This documentary centered on many individuals's reactions to hearing, for the first time, the renowned piece for organ, the, of. Bloom began a book under the working title of Living Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare and Whitman, which was published in 2011 as The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.
In July 2011, after the publication of The Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom was working on three further projects:. Achievement in the Evening Land from Emerson to Faulkner, a history of American literature following the canonical model, which ultimately developed into his 2015 book The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind: A Literary Memoir. a play with the working title Walt Whitman: A Musical Pageant. By November 2011, Bloom had changed the title of the play to To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman. Influence In 1986, Bloom credited as his nearest precursor. He told in 1986: 'In terms of my own theorizations.
The precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr., who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye.' However, in his 2011 Anatomy of Influence, he wrote 'I no longer have the patience to read anything by Frye' and nominated Angus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his 'critical guide and conscience' and elsewhere that year recommended Fletcher's Colors of the Mind and The Mirror and the Lamp by M.
In this latter phase of his career, Bloom has also emphasized the tradition of earlier critics such as, and, describing Johnson in The Western Canon as 'unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him'. In his 2012 Foreword to the book The Fourth Dimension of a Poem (WW Norton, 2012), Bloom indicated the influence which had upon him in his years at Cornell University. Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of as a process of borrowing and misreading.
Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers in order to develop a poetic voice of their own; however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably 'misread' their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.
Observers often identified Bloom with in the past, but he himself never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with the deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, 'What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through.
There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do.' Bloom's association with the has provoked a substantial interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: 'Probably the most powerful living Western writer is. He's certainly the most authentic.'
After Beckett's death in 1989, Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon. Concerning British writers: ' is the strongest British poet now active', and 'no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of 's eminence'.
Since Murdoch's death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as,. In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named the writer and Nobel Prize winner as 'the most gifted novelist alive in the world today', and as 'one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre'. Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 that 'there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise'. He claimed that 'they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works,' and he identified them as,.
He named their strongest works as, respectively, and; and;;. He has added to this estimate the work of, with special interest in his and novel saying that 'only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets.
Only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level'. In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified, and as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian poets, particularly her Autobiography of Red, and, whom Bloom calls 'a true poet.' Bloom also lists as one of only a handful of major living poets. Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1986) features his canon of the 'twentieth-century American Sublime', the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright sees Bloom as an important influence on his work.
Reception For many years, Bloom's writings have drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars. Bloom has been called 'probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States' and 'America's best-known man of letters'. A article in 1994 said that many younger critics understand Bloom as an 'outdated oddity,' whereas a 1998 New York Times article called him 'one of the most gifted of contemporary critics.' Has described Bloom as 'Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own—a kind of campiness, in fact—Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant.'
Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: 'There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away. There's nothing to the man.
I don't want to talk about him'. In the early 21st century, Bloom has often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as,. In the pages of the, he criticized the -leaning, saying: 'It is the death of art.' When was awarded the, he bemoaned the 'pure political correctness' of the award to an author of 'fourth-rate science fiction.' In 2004 author wrote an article for accusing Harold Bloom of a sexual 'encroachment' more than two decades earlier, by touching her thigh. She said that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and she did not think herself a 'victim', but that she had harbored this secret for 21 years.
Explaining why she had finally gone public with the charges, Wolf wrote, 'I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge.'
When asked about the allegations in 2015, Bloom stated, 'I refuse to even use the name of this person. I call her Dracula's daughter, because her father was a Dracula scholar.
I have never in my life been indoors with Dracula's daughter. When she came to the door of my house unbidden, my youngest son turned her away. Once, I was walking up to campus, and she fell in with me and said, 'May I walk with you, Professor Bloom?' I said nothing.' MormonVoices, a group associated with, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for stating 'The current head of the Mormon Church, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator,' is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy'.
Selected bibliography Books.; Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. By Helen Hennessy Vendler, (Review), The New York Times, October 5, 1969. 'Poets' meeting in the heyday of their youth; A Single Summer With Lord Byron', The New York Times, February 15, 1970. 'An angel's spirit in a decaying (and active) body', The New York Times, November 22, 1970.
'The Use of Poetry', The New York Times, November 12, 1975. 'Northrop Frye exalting the designs of romance; The Secular Scripture', The New York Times, April 18, 1976. 'On Solitude in America', The New York Times, August 4, 1977. 'The Critic/Poet', The New York Times, February 5, 1978. 'A Fusion of Traditions; Rosenberg', The New York Times, July 22, 1979. 'Straight Forth Out of Self', The New York Times, June 22, 1980. 'The Heavy Burden of the Past; Poets', The New York Times, January 4, 1981.
'The Pictures of the Poet; The Painting and Drawings of William Blake,. II, Plates', (Review) The New York Times, January 3, 1982. 'A Novelist's Bible; The Story of the Stories, The Chosen People and Its God. By Dan Jacobson', (Review) The New York Times, October 17, 1982. 'Isaac Bashevis Singer's Jeremiad; The Penitent, By Isaac Bashevis Singer', (Review) The New York Times, September 25, 1983.
'Domestic Derangements; A Late Divorce, By A. Yehoshua Translated by Hillel Halkin', (Review) The New York Times, February 19, 1984. 'War Within the Walls; In the Freud Archives, By Janet Malcolm', (Review) The New York Times, May 27, 1984.
'His Long Ordeal by Laughter; Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy and Epilogue. By Philip Roth', (Review) The New York Times, May 19, 1985. 'A Comedy of Worldly Salvation; The Good Apprentice, By Iris Murdoch', (Review) The New York Times, January 12, 1986. 'Freud, the Greatest Modern Writer' (Review) The New York Times, March 23, 1986. 'Passionate Beholder of America in Trouble; Look Homeward, A Life of Thomas Wolfe. By David Herbert Donald', (Review) The New York Times, February 8, 1987.
'The Book of the Father; The Messiah of Stockholm, By Cynthia Ozick', (Review) The New York Times, March 22, 1987. ', (Review) The New York Times, January 31, 1988., The New York Times, April 26, 1992. 'A Jew Among the Cossacks; The first English translation of Isaac Babel's journal about his service with the Russian cavalry. 1920 Diary, By Isaac Babel', (Review) The New York Times, June 4, 1995. 'Kaddish; By Leon Wieseltier', (Review) The New York Times, October 4, 1998. 'View; On First Looking into Gates's Crichton', The New York Times, June 4, 2000. '; The election, as Shakespeare might have seen it', The New York Times, December 6, 2000.
'Macbush', (play) Vanity Fair, April 2004. 54/11 (June 28, 2007): 44–47 reviews The Dreams of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, translated, edited, and with an introduction by. 55/17 (November 6, 2008) reviews History of the Yiddish Language, by, edited by, translated from the Yiddish by with the assistance of. ', 56/19 (December 3, 2009) reviews The Book of Genesis, illustrated by., November 12, 2011., February 11, 2013., Talbet, January 21, 2014. See also.
Retrieved March 27, 2018. Miller, Mary Alice. Retrieved March 27, 2018. Romano, Carlin (April 24, 2011). Retrieved June 25, 2013.
The New York Times. Marc Redfield (2003). 'Literature, Incorporated'. Collins, Glenn (January 16, 2006). The New York Times.
Retrieved February 23, 2010. Retrieved March 27, 2018. Collins, Glenn (January 16, 2006). The New York Times.
Bloom, Harold (2004). The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost. Retrieved March 27, 2018. (19th ed.).
Harold Bloom, 'Introduction' in Harold Bloom (ed.) C.S. Lewis (New York: Chelsea House, 2006), p. 1. Tanenhaus, Sam (20 May 2011).
New York Times. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
Fish, Stanley (November 8, 2010). The New York Times. February 23, 2012. Retrieved June 25, 2013. Harold, Quinney, Laura, Bloom. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
Pakenham, Michael (March 23, 2003). Retrieved September 15, 2016. Map of Misreading p. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon. The Books and Schools of the Ages, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York 1994, p. Bloom (1996), p. Bloom, Harold. 'A Reading' The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus. English translation and critical edition of the Coptic text by Marvin W.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Mayer, Marvin. The Gospel of Thomas.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. Bloom 1994, pg. 2. Bloom 1994, pg. 11.; October 14, 2013, at the. Bloom 1994, pp. 2–3. Bloom 1994, pp. 24–5.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998, p. Retrieved March 27, 2018., November 12, 2011. Retrieved March 27, 2018. The Fourth Dimension of a Poem (WW Norton, 2012).
Antonio Weiss (Spring 1991). Paris Review. Lecture 14 – Influence. Open Yale lectures on the influence of Bloom and Eliot. Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts.
Stanford University. Retrieved March 15, 2014. Excerpted from 'Interview: Harold Bloom interviewed by Robert Moynihan' Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism v13, #3 (Fall, 1983) PAGES 57–68.; March 15, 2014, at the.
Bloom, Harold (2002). Genius: a mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds. New York: Warner Books. There are a few affinities, except perhaps with the admirable Antonia Byatt, in the generation after: novelists I also now admire, like Will Self, Peter Ackroyd, and John Banville.
June 17, 2006, at the. Bloom, Harold (2003). Canton, OH: Cosmos Books. (2002), 'Enriching Shadow: A. Moritz's Early Poems', in Moritz, A. F., Toronto: Insomniac Press, p. 17.
Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. (October 12, 2002). ^ Books, Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's.
Retrieved March 27, 2018. (September 24, 1994). Shapiro, James (November 1, 1998). (December 2, 2008). Retrieved June 25, 2013.
Archived from on September 25, 2015. Retrieved September 23, 2015. CS1 maint: Archived copy as title. 'Miss cannot write her way out of a paper bag!'
Kenton Robinson, 'Foe To Those Who Would Shape Literature To Their Own End Dissent in Bloom' October 4, 1994 E.1. Koski, Lorna (April 26, 2011). Retrieved October 19, 2012. October 11, 2007. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
Wolf, Naomi (March 1, 2004). Retrieved May 19, 2010. D'addario, Daniel (May 11, 2015). '10 Questions with Harold lBloom'. Walker, Joseph (January 8, 2012). Further reading.
Allen, Graham (1994). Harold Bloom: Poetics of Conflict.
New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World. New York: HarperCollins. Bielik-Robson, Agata (2011). Bloom, Harold (May 24, 2003).
The Guardian. Bloom, Harold. 'Article on Ralph Waldo Emerson'. Bloom, Harold. The Stanford Presidential Lecture Series. Bloom, Harold (September 24, 2003).
Bloom, Harold (July 11, 2000). 'Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? The Wall Street Journal. His famous criticism of the series.
Bloom, Harold (October 12, 2008). The New York Times. Bloom, Harold. The New York Times. 'Harold Bloom 1930–'. Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Contemporary Literary Criticism Series. Detroit: Gale. De Bolla, Peter (1988). Harold Bloom: Toward Historical Rhetorics. New York, NY: Routledge. 'Modern American Critics since 1955'. Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Fite, David (1985). Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Moynihan, Robert (1986). A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J.
Hillis Miller, Paul De Man. Saurberg, Lars Ole (1997). Versions of the Past—Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T.S. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press. Scherr, Barry J.
Lawrence's Response to: A Bloomian Interpretation. New York, NY: P. Sellars, Roy; Allen, Graham, eds. The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom. Claremont Review. Archived from on October 8, 2006.
Lesinska, Ieva (October 26, 2004). Lydon, Christopher (September 3, 2003). Harvard Law Weblogs. Rothenberg, Jennie (July 16, 2003). The Atlantic. Wood, James (May 1, 2006).
The New Republic. External links Wikiquote has quotations related to:.
at. on. on. Epstein, Joseph I. (May 4, 2003). in libraries ( catalog). at.
Lamb, Brian (September 3, 2000). Archived from on October 4, 2012. Retrieved December 27, 2011. Oventile, Robert Savino (Aug 8, 2015). Sobriquet Magazine.
'The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer.' -Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books. A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the wester 'The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer.' -Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books.
A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today. I probably should try to like Harold Bloom better, since he seems to bring people to Shakespeare who wouldn't normally read him. But I just can't. I have to say I found this book one of the silliest things I've ever read. Bloom's suppositions that Shakespeare invented the human personality are just ludicrous.
Mostly, I think he gets away with some of his more grandiose theorems because he's either preaching to the choir or to those not informed enough to know better. But really, people didn't sel I probably should try to like Harold Bloom better, since he seems to bring people to Shakespeare who wouldn't normally read him. But I just can't. I have to say I found this book one of the silliest things I've ever read. Bloom's suppositions that Shakespeare invented the human personality are just ludicrous.
Mostly, I think he gets away with some of his more grandiose theorems because he's either preaching to the choir or to those not informed enough to know better. But really, people didn't self-reflect prior to Shakespeare? There wasn't self-talk?
One only has to read the letters written by Roman soldiers in Britian to their families, to see how absolutely unchanging the basic personalities of human beings are. Or read ancient Indian philosophers to learn about the capabilities of those who came before Shakespeare to self-reflect. And the idea that wit didn't exist before Falstaff, well that just plain crazy.
I love Shakespeare, but Bloom is more like the crazy teen-aged lover who thinks his girlfriend has the beauty to rival Helen, brains to match Einstein and the sex appeal of the greatest screen goddesses. A dose of reality and logic would benefit the book a great deal. Bloom doesn't seem to recognize Shakespeare as the rather savvy business man that he was. He doesn't understand anything of the practicalities of performance or audience, two things that Shakespeare never could have forgotten.
I guarantee you, no play works if the audience doesn't recognize themselves in the characters - self talking, self reflective, witty buggers they must have been. I dimly remember when this book came out (1998) how big and important and controversial it was supposed to be. Given Harold Bloom’s prodigious reputation, I was afraid of the thing, and so avoided it, figuring it to be fraught with lit theory of the densest sort. A couple years ago I found a copy dirt-cheap at some thrift store or another and its fat binding has glowered at me from the shelves since. A few weeks ago I decided to give it a try and found it to be a piece o’ cake, mostly. To be fai I dimly remember when this book came out (1998) how big and important and controversial it was supposed to be.
Given Harold Bloom’s prodigious reputation, I was afraid of the thing, and so avoided it, figuring it to be fraught with lit theory of the densest sort. A couple years ago I found a copy dirt-cheap at some thrift store or another and its fat binding has glowered at me from the shelves since.
A few weeks ago I decided to give it a try and found it to be a piece o’ cake, mostly. To be fair about it, I am somewhat prejudiced against Bloom. There was always something of the legacy-monger about him, as follows: Once upon a time, an ambitious non-creative man of letters established himself in the literary firmament with a vast and complicated body of theory, the “anxiety of influence,” a quasi-Freudian concept whereby writers are primarily motivated by a frantic, anxious desire to overcome their elders (no doubt I am grossly oversimplifying a theory of terrifying complexity – I spent about seven minutes with the book in question about fifteen years ago, so I do not know much about it). This theory was elaborated from the late-1950s to the early-1970s, when a Freudian reading of literature was pretty much ala mode in American letters. By the 1970s, his “anxiety of influence” theory had made Bloom’s reputation, and Bloom probably thought he had the culture by the balls. But as it turns out, by the 1980s, the French and the feminists and the post-structuralists were deconstructing and whatnot while Freud became increasingly debunked. Bloom had secured Ivy League tenure by then, but intellectually he’d backed the wrong horse – his Freudian reading of literature had about as much relevance as phrenology.
Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” had become part of the academic mold from whence sprang far fresher toadstools of theory. Or, to wax Shakespearian, the “anxiety of influence” is but one of lit crit’s “whoreson dead bodies” in the academic graveyard, fit only to be mocked by a clown like me. Which brings us to Bloom’s sea change: apparently realizing the sterility of a purely academic approach to literature, coupled with the fact his own theory-mongering was no longer of much importance, Bloom decided to try and turn himself into a real man of letters. And to his credit, Bloom resisted the siren wail of the theorists, what he calls The School of Resentment. And yet I find his later man o’ letters manifestations to be suspect.
For one thing, in order to stay intellectually spooky, he refers to himself as a “Jewish Gnostic” (according to Wikipedia). I thought this was a little sad, sort of like those Loonie Toons episodes where we see Wile E. Coyote’s mailbox with “GENIUS” scrawled across it. Bloom’s gnosticism gained him some fans, and he even wrote a sci-fi novel along Gnostic lines (again, Wikipedia – I had no idea!).
As Robert Frost said, one should never refer to oneself as a “poet,” just as you would never call yourself a “hero.” Other people can call you “poet” or “hero,” but never call yourself those things. Perhaps “Gnostic” should be added to the list. And yet Harold Bloom is the gnostic professor who came in from the cold: it seems Bloom craved a broad, cultural relevance. My guess is that the other Bloom – Allan – and his c.
1987 astonishing success with “Closing of the American Mind” goaded H. Bloom into engaging directly with America’s “pocky corse” of a decaying culture. His first descent from the skyey firmament academia was his book “The Western Canon” and its controversial list of what books are worth bothering with. A few years later came this book, which tells us how important Shakespeare is in a startling new and exciting way. Now of course Shakespeare has been picked over more than any writer in existence, so Bloom had to come up with an angle. And so Shakespeare is now not only the greatest writer of all time, or even the most remarkable all-round genius, he also actually invented “the human.” Thus the kerfluffles and the tiny furrowed brows of woe that descended upon the culture back in 1998. Now on to the book.
First off, as far as it goes, the title of the book is indeed controversial: to state any writer (or anybody at all) invented “the human” still strikes me as preposterous. As for this being a theory coherently developed by Harold Bloom, Shakespeare’s “invention of the human” consists almost entirely of Harold Bloom telling us, again and again, that, well, Shakespeare invented the human. This passage, from the “Othello” section, is pretty much how it goes, over and over and over: “A.
Bradley, an admirable critic always, named Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s “most wonderful” characters. If I could add Rosalind and Macbeth to make a sixfold wonder, then I would agree with Bradley, for these are Shakespeare’s greatest inventions, and all of them take human nature to some of its limits, without violating these limits.
Falstaff’s wit, Hamlet’s ambivalent yet charismatic intensity, Cleopatra’s mobility of spirit find their rivals in Macbeth’s proleptic imagination, Rosalind’s control of all perspectives, and Iago’s genius for improvisation” (p. 439) There it is, most of the Falstaffian bulk of this book, bounded in a nutshell – at least the theoretical part, if this can be called a theory: to suggest Shakespeare took “human nature to some of its limits” is hardly controversial or much beyond a bright eighth-grader’s book report on “Macbeth.” What I thought the book was going to be an elaborate lit crit exercise in proof-mongering is little more than this kind of tub-thumping. Throughout the book you’ll find variations of this passage: the recitation of the “sixfold wonder” and sketchily-supported claims of human nature to “its limits.” A. Bradley is frequently invoked with approval, as is Dr. Johnson, Nietzsche and William Hazlett.
Shaw coming in for periodic drubbings. To say Shakespeare “invented the human” makes him paradoxically less than human. It reminds me of those people who say Hitler was a “monster.” Adolph Hitler was not a monster, he was a human being, which makes him all that much worse. William Shakespeare was a human being with serious sexual jealousy issues and a real genius for language that developed over the course of his career – which makes him all that much morehuman.
Throughout the book are frequent references Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” although he never quite calls it that. But little reminders of this Bloomsian anxiety are salted throughout the text; you’ll nose them as you go through the book whenever you encounter the adjective “Marlovean,” which refers to Shakespeare’s anxiety and terror of Christopher Marlowe’s reputation; it is only until Shakespeare throws off Marlowe’s influence (around the time of “Romeo and Juliet” or the “Henry IV’s”) that Shakespeare truly becomes Shakespeare, so we’re told, again and again. Although spends considerable time, in fits and starts, on this Marlovean theme, it never really goes anywhere. It's as if Bloom wants to keep a claim staked for his earliest theoretical works without drawing too much attention to its rather creaky claims of Freudian relevance.
To further distance himself from his roots, every fifty pages or so he ungraciously mentions Sigmund Freud with arch disapproval. Sometimes Bloom’s academic roots show; decades of theory-mongering has seemingly warped his prose. When he tries to write like a man o’ letters, his prose is far too pedestrian, while his academic stuff is too academic. To illustrate, here is an academic bit from his “Richard II” discussion: “Shakespeare did not invent the dignity of men and women, despite Renaissance enhancements, some of them Hermetic, that vision had developed across millennia. But aesthetic dignity, though not itself a Shakespearean phrase, is certainly as Shakespearean invention, as it the double nature of such dignity. It either coheres with human dignity, or survives isolated when the greater dignity is lost (p.
269) An example of “Renaissance enhancements” would be helpful, Hermetic or otherwise. We are told Shakespeare invented the human, but not human dignity, which has a double nature of some sort. Perhaps something profound is being said here, but I’ll be buggered if I can figure it out. We are “knock’d about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade” of abstraction, but not provided with enough to incorporate it into the rest of the discussion.
You might notice in the passage above, the word “proleptic,” which is one of Bloom’s favorites, and it is used, especially in the “King Lear” section, with alarming, almost Tourette’s Syndromesque, frequency. “Proleptic” means either “the representation or assumption of a future act or development as being presently existing or accomplished” or “a figure by which by which objections are anticipated in order to weaken their force,” or “a conception or belief derived from sense perception and therefore regarded as not necessarily true.” There are a couple other definitions as well; I never was able to tell just which one Bloom had in mind and grew weary, finally, of trying to figure it out. The book is riddled with such theoretical dry rot and proleptic verbal tics. When he is not formulating academic abstractions, Bloom awkwardly stoops. And so in the stuff he tries to conjure up for us middlebrows, Bloom will toss off stuff like this: “Johnson was massively right; something inhibited Shakespeare.” (p. Here’s another random example, which I found after exactly four seconds of randomly searching for a good example: “Critics regularly have called Sir John one of the lords of language, which beggars him: he is the veritable monarch of language, unmatched whether elsewhere in Shakespeare or in all of Western literature. His superbly supple and copious prose is astonishingly attractive” (p.
What serious critic in the past 40 years would call anyone a “lord of language”? This is just silly, and it demonstrates how Bloom always has to have an adversary, and the book is loaded with this kind of huffing and puffing against his dimwitted, often unnamed and perhaps imaginary, adversaries. Then there is the Bloomsian hyperbole – I mean, heck, somebody somewhere might suggest James Joyce or Goethe are “veritable monarchs of language.” Or are they merely “lords of language”? This isn’t literary criticism so much as it is rhetorical afflatus masquerading as criticism and far too much of the book is made up of the stuff. As for “supple and copious prose” I sort of understand the “supple” bit, but “copious” is hardly a virtue.
This is blurb-writing, and Shakespeare doesn’t need any blurbs these days. It’s the kind of slack crap found in my Goodreads reviews.
Hardly fit stuff for an actual work of criticism from a real critic. Along the same lines, Bloom’s traumatic theatrical experiences are given a lot of space in this book. He tells us again and again how crushed he is by the thousands of Shakespearean stagings he has seen over the past 60 years – apparently Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff is the only competent Bard on the Boards he has ever seen. As for movie versions, forget it – he hates ‘em all, pretty much. Nowadays, even on stage, Shakespeare is acted and directed so poorly that, alas, Bloom finds it best just to read ‘em on the page. Again and again he tells us this.
It is, after all, a very fat book. Bloom has a few Shakespearean quirks which tend to undermine his authority.
He seems to be one of the few people who believe Shakespeare actually wrote the third-rate “A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter,” the authorship of which was supposedly “proven” by linguistic forensic “scientist” Donald Foster (who apparantly has since rejected his own findings). Bloom also thinks Cormac McCarthy’s character Judge Holden from “Blood Meridian” is the only literary character as terrifying as Iago. See my review of “Blood Meridian” for what I think of that particular bit of nonsense. The theoretical Old Testament writer “J” is constantly brought forth as one of Shakespeare’s few fellow geniuses, this “J” being, of course, the basis of one of Bloom’s books (gotta keep that legacy out there so nobody forgets!). Bloom also believes that the mysterious “Ur-Hamlet” was actually written by Shakespeare (rather than some hack such as Thomas Kyd) – it might perhaps even be Shakespeare’s very first play, a failure which he rewrote (successfully, I might add) some years later.
Actually, I find this theory kind of compelling, although as with so many other things in this book, Bloom merely asserts it (over and over again) rather than trying really to prove it. I am happy to report Bloom doesn’t think the Earl of Oxford really wrote the plays. Far more annoying are those times Bloom insists on telling us how much he suffers for his appreciation of Shakespeare, and how he is assailed by a sea of knuckleheads: “As perhaps the last High Romantic Bardolator” (p.
79) he’ll say, referring to his beleaguered self, the term “Bardolator” and “Bardolatry” apparently having once struck him as screamingly clever. Here is one that will make you throw up in your mouth a little bit: “As Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics, I do not hesitate to find an immense personal bitterness in “Timon of Athens” (p. These “bardolator” claims struck me as sad, pathetic attempts to establish a legacy for himself as the last of the humanists. Can you imagine Lionel Trilling making such claims? For all of Bloom’s agonies over our debased culture, his own ostensibly high-culture book too often descends to this kind of cheap self-satisfaction and advertising. “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human,” despite the bombast of its title, is primarily one of those old-fashioned readers guides to the Bard that used to get issued from the eggheads at the university for the vast Time-magazine-reading middlebrows who once belonged to the Book of the Month Club. It just so happens I came across a copy of one such effort, “Shakespeare” by Mark Van Doren (1939, in a c.
1950s Doubleday Anchor paperback reprint) which is pretty much doing the same thing Bloom is, with more economy. As one of the Last of the Muddled Middlebrows (that’s my legacy!), I appreciate the effort – I love Shakespeare, but often find myself lost or baffled by the language and those awful overly-elaborate plots. And so I unapologetically read footnotes, cribs, guides, etc. Just out of curiosity, I read Bloom on “As You Like It,” then I reread the play itself, then I read Van Doren’s take.
Both were competent guides to the overall action and themes of the play. To be sure, Bloom is windier (pp.
202-225) than Van Doren (pp. Van Doren had, I thought, more penetrating things to say about Touchstone; Bloom seemed to me rather incoherent on the clown. Van Doren’s prose is old-fashioned and florid (making it an unlikely candidate for a reissue), but Bloom’s regular-guy approach is awkward, often pointlessly prolix when not obfuscated by habitual academic abstractions and blatant advertisements for his own brilliance. And yetBy the time I got to the end of the book, despite its flaws, I had warmed up to it considerably. For all his self-aggrandizement and academic harrumphing, Bloom’s book does have its virtues. If nothing else, Bloom’s quotes from other sources are generally quite interesting and to-the-point – I especially admired the Hazlett, Dr.
Johnson, and Nietzsche quotes (I did not realize Nietzsche took such notice of Shakespeare). To some extent these quotes unintentionally show up the banality of Bloom’s prose, but I am glad for my own edification Bloom included them. Bloom’s love of Shakespeare, despite the fact he feels compelled to explain it to us (okay, okay, you are a Bardolator), is obviously genuine. Bloom is a smart guy who has spent a lot of time with Shakespeare, and much of the book is a competent reader’s guide with a fair amount of competent historical and biographical backgrounding. There are a couple of plays that I either never read or particularly cared for on stage that Bloom changed my mind about (“Richard II” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in particular).
His take on the late plays (“Corolianus” and “Winter’s Tale” etc.) are sympathetic and convincing (the last sections of the book are less bombastic than the earlier bits). Still, I wish Bloom were a better writer. For all its Falstaffian bulk, this is a fairly light book and it made me pine for Jarrell, Frank Kermode, Eliot, Trilling and other pre-theory critics of the not-so-distant past. These guys knew how to write!
Which is to say that perhaps the most damning thing I can say about it is that I never once felt compelled to single out and save any of Bloom’s passages. Some of his ideas were worth a folded-down corner, and some of the works he quotes, but nothing he actually composed rose to the level of the quotable.
My copies of Eliot’s “The Lives of the Poets” and all of Jarrell’s books of criticism, and Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination” are dogeared and underlined a lot. I think this was supposed to be canonical, or at least the anchor to some future folio called “The Workes of Harold Bloome, Agnostick Doctor,” and although it had potential for such status, given Bloom’s mind and his love for Shakespeare, it doesn’t make it.
It is too hasty, too repetitive, too herky-jerky in its academic vs. Middelbrow aims. To some extent, Bloom makes the same basic mistake Clive James made with his “Cultural Amnesia” (which I reviewed for GoodReads): he wants to complain about our culture and its declining standards, and yet he does it in a sketchy, poorly-written fashion that leads the reader to wonder if Bloom and James are part of the problem rather than staunch defenders of the faith during the sad dissolution of Western Civ. A few stray thoughts on the book’s overall organization and appearance: although the bulk of it is organized in a very straightforward play-by-play manner, on either end there are four separate bits of editorial Bloom: a “To the Reader” and “Shakespeare’s Universalism” at the front, then, after hundreds of pages of play-by-play discussion, two more pieces, “Coda: the Shakespearean Difference” and “A Word at the End: Foregrounding.” Why didn’t Bloom just compose a single large piece on his approach? Beats me, but the way it is here, he’s like a guy on the telephone who can’t quite hang up.
It also gave me the impression that this book was, like Gertrude’s wedding, o’er hasty. Furthermore, the fact “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human” lacks an index is inexcusable given its author’s pretensions.
The jacket illustration is Michaelangelo’s “Delphic Sibyl” for reasons I cannot fathom (Renaissance Hermeticism?). Finally, I hated the resolutely non-Renaissance san-serif type, which I found hard to read; I can’t tell you what exactly it is because books don’t carry those little dabs of font information anymore, apparently (“Buttefucco Bold is based on a late-15th century Renaissance font designed by Josephus Buttefucco for a folio edition of Virgil”).
Whatever it is, it sucks. Some fifteen years later, is “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human” still an “important” work? But probably nah.
Which means, I guess, that Harold Bloom should still be anxious. Brilliant, infuriating, dazzling, provocative, maddening, thrilling and explosive. This book is not wonderful because Bloom is always right but because he always excites and challenges.
Page after page after page he brashly, almost recklessly tosses out hypotheses, makes thundering assertions as though they just came down from Mount Sinai, dismisses entire populations of artists, assumes fantastic responsibilities in society not just for the artist but for the critic and generally makes Brilliant, infuriating, dazzling, provocative, maddening, thrilling and explosive. This book is not wonderful because Bloom is always right but because he always excites and challenges. Page after page after page he brashly, almost recklessly tosses out hypotheses, makes thundering assertions as though they just came down from Mount Sinai, dismisses entire populations of artists, assumes fantastic responsibilities in society not just for the artist but for the critic and generally makes a nuisance of himself. He's fantastic.
You can disagree with him but you'd better bring your A-game because he will be. He forces you to specifically delineate to yourself why you think what you think. His passion for art is palpable, intoxicating. He assigns to it an extraordinary, spiritual place in the human condition. In his view Shakespeare is nothing less than the Moses of a new testament, using poetry and theatre to re-create us in his own image.
Bloom's mind, warped by his ego and intransigence is nonetheless exhilarating. If you love art, ideas, discussion, debate, etc., read this book. You'll be up all night arguing with this guy. I think I like Harold Bloom even more now that you're not supposed to like him because he's a snob/misogynist/old white guy/whatever the reason is you're not supposed to like him, but this was the first book of literary theory I ever read (I was 15), so it holds a special place in my brainheart. It also holds a special place in my brainheart because Bloom is pretty much right on about everything he's saying in regards to Shahkespeare's invention of modern personality, and because he unabashedly p I think I like Harold Bloom even more now that you're not supposed to like him because he's a snob/misogynist/old white guy/whatever the reason is you're not supposed to like him, but this was the first book of literary theory I ever read (I was 15), so it holds a special place in my brainheart. It also holds a special place in my brainheart because Bloom is pretty much right on about everything he's saying in regards to Shahkespeare's invention of modern personality, and because he unabashedly plays favorites with the characters as though he knew them personally. The book reads like a long, deeply enjoyable uninterrupted conversation your irascible old genius grandfather.
And then you pretty much HAVE to play the 'Which Shakespeare Character Would I/You/All Our Friends Be' game, which is awesome. The subtitle deliberately goads anyone who came of age after 1960 to pull the Eurocentric card. And given the amount of time Bloom has spent of late on a personal crusade against the Harry Potter series, you almost wonder if Bloom has landed a few steps to the wrong side of the line between provocative and senile. (It is puzzling to say the least that such a brilliant critic feels the need to officially weigh in - vocally and repeatedly - on an already critically agreed-upon observation about The subtitle deliberately goads anyone who came of age after 1960 to pull the Eurocentric card. And given the amount of time Bloom has spent of late on a personal crusade against the Harry Potter series, you almost wonder if Bloom has landed a few steps to the wrong side of the line between provocative and senile. (It is puzzling to say the least that such a brilliant critic feels the need to officially weigh in - vocally and repeatedly - on an already critically agreed-upon observation about the literary value of the Potter stories. Of COURSE the writing is trite and repetitive, Bloomie.
Shouldn't you be writing more essays on Hamlet?) Well, postcolonialists looking for a winning fight should go back to dusty old Conrad works. Bloom's leviathan is just too good. And you don't have to buy into the idea that Shakespeare was the progenitor of limning the human consciousness in literature to find ye some beauty and truth in Bloom's essays about the myriad (and often quite surprising) ways in which the Bard explores the underpinnings of homo sapiens sapiens.
In other words, you don't need to think Shakespeare was the first writer to perform an autopsy on the human soul to concede how successful he perfected the procedure. I consult this book in the same way that I consult a dictionary or other large reference one can't imagine functioning without. Glad it's on my shelf.but depressed about it at the same time. A big hunk of what Bloom is trying pass off as revelatory is more like a response to younger literary critics and their beliefs. (And it's kind of charmingly ironic that Bloom attacks others for their blind devotion to narrow paradigms in a book where he spends a big glob of time psychologically fawning over Falstaff.) It's not really a book about Shakespeare; it's a book about what Harold Bloom wants us to know about Shakespeare a Glad it's on my shelf.but depressed about it at the same time.
A big hunk of what Bloom is trying pass off as revelatory is more like a response to younger literary critics and their beliefs. (And it's kind of charmingly ironic that Bloom attacks others for their blind devotion to narrow paradigms in a book where he spends a big glob of time psychologically fawning over Falstaff.) It's not really a book about Shakespeare; it's a book about what Harold Bloom wants us to know about Shakespeare and why he thinks we should know it. Which means a lot of the book is really about Harold Bloom; it would be better titled 'Harold Bloom's Stentorian Voiceover of Shakespeare (With Added Important Commentary).'
But you have to have balls like church bells to even try something so patently self-serving. I'm surprised Stanley Fish didn't get to it first. I hate to call any book worthless, but I'm having a hard time thinking of anything of value in this narcissistic bore of a tome. Bloom has done absolutely no research on Early Modern culture, has no concept of the current scholarly discussion in Shakespeare studies, and his readings of the plays amount-basically-to platitudinous gut-reactions. Sure,he has his insights here and there, but the layperson that thinks this is in any way a great contribution to Shakespeare studies is being hoodwinke I hate to call any book worthless, but I'm having a hard time thinking of anything of value in this narcissistic bore of a tome. Bloom has done absolutely no research on Early Modern culture, has no concept of the current scholarly discussion in Shakespeare studies, and his readings of the plays amount-basically-to platitudinous gut-reactions. Sure,he has his insights here and there, but the layperson that thinks this is in any way a great contribution to Shakespeare studies is being hoodwinked.
Try to find a single citation for this book in any serious books or articles on Early Modern literature. I've read this book a couple of times, and though my criticism of it has evolved over time, I still love it because, for me, it was the first book that made Shakespeare truly accessible. Along the way to earning my English degree, I came across some legitimate criticisms of the author, most of which came from professors teaching theory classes, and they aren't without merit. For one, the fact that Professor Bloom cites nothing, seemingly wishing the reader to believe every notion in the text is I've read this book a couple of times, and though my criticism of it has evolved over time, I still love it because, for me, it was the first book that made Shakespeare truly accessible. Along the way to earning my English degree, I came across some legitimate criticisms of the author, most of which came from professors teaching theory classes, and they aren't without merit. For one, the fact that Professor Bloom cites nothing, seemingly wishing the reader to believe every notion in the text is an original thought, is problematic.
He's too conservative for some, and when it comes to women, he's not exactly the most progressive of critics. That said, this was an amazing read, and the man is extraordinarily insightful and persuasive.
Bloom sheds ample light on the originality of Shakespeare, and does a wonderful job at showing the reader just how influential his works have been on the western canon. If you love Shakespeare, chances are that Harold Bloom will offer something in this book that will enhance that feeling. In his play-by-play commentary on the works of Shakespeare, Bloom avers that William Shakespeare is the one who invented us. Not that he is the created of the human race, but something close to it; he is, says Bloom, the one who introduced to us the idea of effecting change within ourselves by self-overhearing.
In addition, he argues that the most remarkable representatives of this invention of the human are Sir John Falstaff and Hamlet, the melancholy prince of Denmark. Both of them, he says, r In his play-by-play commentary on the works of Shakespeare, Bloom avers that William Shakespeare is the one who invented us. Not that he is the created of the human race, but something close to it; he is, says Bloom, the one who introduced to us the idea of effecting change within ourselves by self-overhearing. In addition, he argues that the most remarkable representatives of this invention of the human are Sir John Falstaff and Hamlet, the melancholy prince of Denmark. Both of them, he says, represent a sort of world-denial, but that of the latter is in a jolliness that sees through the facades and the other in a kind of weariness.
I do not find Bloom's argument entirely convincing. I also do not entirely agree with his choice of Shakespearean characters to emphasize. For my part, for example, I would choose Henry V well above Falstaff, though Bloom allows his solid preference for the latter, probably as a type of himself, to lead him to despise the former.
That said, in this work Bloom does contribute substantially to our understanding of where we, the modern man, comes from. The marks of St. Augustine's self-reflection and Martin Luther's internal struggles have both been duly documented; Shakespeare's contribution of self-overhearing deserves its due place in that chain of ideas that made modern man. In addition that addition to the anthropology of modern man, this book is also to be praised for its consistent stance of an honest dialogue with Shakespeare.
Bloom spurns the works of modern critics and directors who attempt to manipulate Shakespeare to make him fit the modern agendas of feminism, Marxism, queer theory, environmentalism, post-colonialism, etc. Instead, he allows the man to speak for himself and grants him, in return, the respect of speaking back to him. More than that, he allows Shakespeare to speak to and so through him, Shakespeare being far the superior mind not only to Bloom but to all of his interpreters. Although his book comes in at 745 pages, I was left wishing for more.
Not that Bloom's argument was incomplete; far from it, a chapter dedicated to each of Shakespeare's plays and an in depth analysis of each is more than sufficient to demonstrate Bloom's point to satisfaction. It was, however, such a joy to read that I would have read on for another 745 pages or more.
In particular, I think a commentary with the same emphasis (the invention of the human) on the Sonnets would have made for excellent and insightful reading. I recommend this book for anyone interested in Shakespeare, in literature, in modern philosophy, and/or in the idea of the human being. Where to even begin with Bloom? The guy is essentially a literary theory has-been who made his name by developing a style of literary criticism and theory based on Freudian principles and ideas that made him a big deal in the 80s but these days makes him seem like a massive joke. This book is essentially 700+ pages of Bloom trying to reclaim the spotlight through what amounts to a string of wild assertions, pseudo-intellectualist pandering, and some of the most blatant contributions to Holy crap. Where to even begin with Bloom?
The guy is essentially a literary theory has-been who made his name by developing a style of literary criticism and theory based on Freudian principles and ideas that made him a big deal in the 80s but these days makes him seem like a massive joke. This book is essentially 700+ pages of Bloom trying to reclaim the spotlight through what amounts to a string of wild assertions, pseudo-intellectualist pandering, and some of the most blatant contributions to the deification of Shakespeare and his works I have ever had the misfortune of reading. I'd be laughing if it wasn't so horrifyingly apparent that his plan worked - this has an average rating higher than 4 (ugh), so I guess he managed to grab the public's attention somehow. Furthermore, two things: 1) What the hell was with this guy's attempt at defending the disgusting sexism in 'The Taming Of The Shrew'? His arguments are absolute nonsense! 2) What's this guy's beef with Kit Marlow?
Sure, he wasn't perfect - but neither was Shakespeare, and that didn't stop him calling Shakespeare 'secular scripture' in a book that literally hinges on the assertion that Shakespeare invented the English language (which he did not, at least - not completely, anyway) and human nature itself (which he definitely did not). Am I convinced that Shakespeare invented human nature?
So forget about me being convinced that he invented human nature without the squiggly lines around the word invented. BUT did I still enjoy this book? I mean look; Harold Bloom just loves Shakespeare. I also love Shakespeare, although probably not as much as Harold Bloom does, because I think probably nobody ever has. I think he refers to like five different plays as his personal favourite/most-loved/most-enjoyed. Am I convinced that Shakespeare invented human nature?
So forget about me being convinced that he invented human nature without the squiggly lines around the word invented. BUT did I still enjoy this book? I mean look; Harold Bloom just loves Shakespeare.
I also love Shakespeare, although probably not as much as Harold Bloom does, because I think probably nobody ever has. I think he refers to like five different plays as his personal favourite/most-loved/most-enjoyed. But like, I do love Shakespeare a lot. And watching someone carefully go through EVERY SINGLE one of Shakespeare's plays full of love and (usually) interesting thoughts is wonderful. There's way too much that's said in an interesting way about way too many interesting plays to fit into a review. Some standouts to me though are his comments on Rosalind (. More notes from my Harold Bloom period: “In The Birth of Tragedy, (1873), Nietzsche memorably got Hamlet right, seeing him not as a man who thinks too much but rather as the man who thinks too well: ‘For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed.
This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian rea More notes from my Harold Bloom period: “In The Birth of Tragedy, (1873), Nietzsche memorably got Hamlet right, seeing him not as a man who thinks too much but rather as the man who thinks too well: ‘For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action.
Not reflection, no – true knowledge, and insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.’ Nietzsche’s Hamlet, who can not act because he thinks too well; a lethargic element because it is ridiculous to think that action can put the world into joint. Not reflection, not – true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.' Which I'm reeling from. Wish I'd written down a page number. I did for this last bit, which has echoed in my head ever since: “Elsinor’s disease is anywhere’s, any time’s. Something is rotten in every state, and if your sensibility is like Hamlet’s, then finally you will not tolerate it.
Claudius is merely an accident; Hamlet’s only persuasive enemy is Hamlet himself.” 431 I need to reread this. His premise, that Shakespeare around 1595 invented our entire modern understanding of psychology, personality, and identity, is a little farfetched. And also not very thoroughly explained. Yes, Shakespeare was the first-and very possibly the best-at representing life-sized, dynamic characters, but that doesn't mean that humans were drastically different before 1595, just as we weren't two-dimensional with limbs askew, mismatched shadows, and infants who looked like tiny adults prior to the Ita His premise, that Shakespeare around 1595 invented our entire modern understanding of psychology, personality, and identity, is a little farfetched. And also not very thoroughly explained. Yes, Shakespeare was the first-and very possibly the best-at representing life-sized, dynamic characters, but that doesn't mean that humans were drastically different before 1595, just as we weren't two-dimensional with limbs askew, mismatched shadows, and infants who looked like tiny adults prior to the Italian renaissance of figural painting.
Even the epic of Gilgamesh, as ancient as it is, has sentiments and emotions that are markedly those of human beings. Aside from that, Bloom's fascinating book is thoroughly enjoyable and an excellent recap for anyone looking for insights into the Bard's plays. While a few of the chapters may fail to impress-the chapter on Lear, for example, is surprisingly tedious in contrast to his high esteem of that play-many of them are very acute. His chapters on The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Othello, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and As You Like It stand out as chapters that particularly increased my understanding and/or appreciation of the plays. He also occasionally throws out some beautifully written insights into life itself that I have now cemented in my memory. A great book by a man of obvious genius, even if his personal opinions differ from my own.
(Merry Wives of Windsor, one of my favorites of the comedies, is contemptuously passed over with a couple pages that read like a footnote, while Love's Labour's Lost, which I find drab, dated, and inaccessible, receives an inordinate amount of attention. No accounting for taste.).
Harold Bloom's central thesis in this book is that Shakespeare invented the way we now think about being human. Shakespeare discovered 'much that was already there but to which we did not have access,' to use Bloom's words from a lecture he once gave. In my humble opinion and with all due respect, that does not seem to me to be a thesis that you argue in a work of literary criticism; it is a thesis that belongs in a textbook on the history of psychology or philosophy. How can you possibly argue Harold Bloom's central thesis in this book is that Shakespeare invented the way we now think about being human. Shakespeare discovered 'much that was already there but to which we did not have access,' to use Bloom's words from a lecture he once gave. In my humble opinion and with all due respect, that does not seem to me to be a thesis that you argue in a work of literary criticism; it is a thesis that belongs in a textbook on the history of psychology or philosophy. How can you possibly argue that point convincingly without also examining all of the works of literature from the rest of the world and from all of time (at least from all of time before Shakespeare) and somehow disproving that there is something to be found in Shakespeare that you cannot find anywhere in that whole huge and diverse crowd?
Making this argument would also require that you understand completely how we think about being human in the twenty-first century, when humanity is at least as diverse in culture and thought as it has ever been. Does that not seem presumptuous, even for someone as brilliant and widely read as Harold Bloom? That aside, however, I did thoroughly enjoy large parts of this book.
Bloom does make some fascinating assertions-such as the provocative hypothesis that Iago once idolized Othello, and that part of his hatred stems from a feeling of betrayal from his 'God of war'-and even when I disagree with them or do not see much evidence to support them, I found it to be a great intellectual exercise to grapple with them. There is certainly a lot on which he and I disagree-his assessment of Richard III not one of the least-but, again, I found the act of thinking through my own ideas of the plays in response to his analyses to be educating in its own way and most definitely stimulating. That being said, there are also large portions of this book that I could live without. For example, if you edited out every jibe he feels compelled to make against the 'School of Resentment' (feminist, Marxist, new historicist critics, among others, whom he claims to despise yet cannot seem to go five pages without mentioning)-none of which contributes meaningfully to his commentary on the play itself-you could probably shorten the book by at least forty pages and leave the reader none the worse.
Much of his commentary, moreover, is written in such bloated prose and uses such ambiguous terminology to describe characters and his ideas that I could sometimes stop at the end of a passage and think, What does any of what he just said even MEAN? Relatedly, I often found myself lost in the middle of a chapter, because Bloom sometimes has difficulty keeping the reader aware of the point he is trying to make (to the extent that the reader could discern it in the first place) at any point in a chapter. Bloom would often seem to be leading up to some important point he wanted to make about a play, and then would all of a sudden shift gears to a new topic without seeming to resolve it. That was most frustrating of all. It made me feel as though I was being cheated out of what could have been a great insight.
For what it's worth, I do not regret having read this book. There are parts of it that I think I will return to in the future, not least his chapters on the high tragedies and the Henry IV plays, which I get the sense are the plays that he really wanted to write about the whole time. However, in the end, I must disagree with one of the blurbs on the back of my edition: no, in my humble opinion, this should not be 'the one book you should read if you're going to read about Shakespeare.'
I'm hoping that I will read other books to which this one will be a worthy supplement, but by no means would this be the first book on the Bard that I would recommend.