time I reread this, I become more dissatisfied with Bloom's central thesis about the poet's necessary "misprision" in order to clear the way for creative expression, "Misreading," to me assumes a correct reading, and I've had it up to here with professorially mandated "correct" readings decades ago in college, Age and experience has convinced me that every reader's engagement with a text is "correct" for that reader, the question is the ability to convey our ideas of the text.
I also believe that all literature is a constant conversation, so in that sense there shouldn't be an anxiety of influence at all,
That aside, the prologue to the new edition, basically a love letter to Shakespeare, is sheer pleasure to read, Videoreview: sitelink youtube. com/watchvULzb
Amazingly dicky on several different levels, there is much to admire in the scope and amibitions underlying this theory of poetry, It might look oldschool to the point of outdatedness, but it can still make any dedicated reader feel like they know way less then they should about the subject of their passion, which all things considered is always a great thing.
It works to woo the ladies, ''All modern schools believe that metaphor, or figurative language of any kind, is founded upon a pattern of error, whether you ascribe an element of will or intentionality to it, as I do in my belief that writers creatively misunderstand one another, or whether you ascribe it, as deconstructionists do, to the nature of language.
But when fallacy is universal, it doesn't seem to make much sense any more to talk about specific fallacies affective, pathetic, intentional, or whatever, They have vanished in the general fog of what might be called error, As soon as you emphasize rhetoric to the point where rhetoric is a kind of quicksand, then the fallacies vanish, '' HB
And would it were with the cases of affective phallacy on this site,
Love this informative, well written work that makes you bend your mind to get out of that box you don't know you're in, "When he was, Harold Bloom fell into a deep depression, and in the midst of that depression he had a terrible nightmare that a giant winged creature was pressing down on his chest.
He woke up gasping for breath, and the next day he began writing a book that would become The Anxiety of Influence, in which he argues that all great writers are obsessed with breaking away from the great writers of the past.
The book made him famous, even though few people could understand it, A year after it was published, Bloom reread it himself, and found that he couldn't understand it either, "
Thus far I am not understanding it either, Will keep you posted. Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its long shadow of influence since it was first published in, Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between precursors and the individual artist, His argument that all literary texts are a strong misreading of those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of criticism and poststructuralist literary theory, The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature,
Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorable quotations,
this second edition of Bloom's classic work maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics.
A new introduction, centering upon Shakespeare and Marlowe explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking, and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past quarter of a century.
There are moments when you may find yourself setting aside this slim volume for a moment in order to ponder how such an exhilaratingly batshit work of antithetical literary criticism came to be published in the first place.
A bit of context: It is, America is in thrall to Quaaludes, Schoolhouse Rock!, the AMC Gremlin and Secretariat, Everything is molded of orange or brown polymers, the closest thing we have to the Internet is CB radio, and our collective lust for folly is insatiable,
All that said, Bloom keeps the blood supply flowing to his thesis until he reaches the fourth chapter, where a sort of vascular insufficiency attends his musings on daemonization or the countersublime.
This is the point at which Bloom goes fullon Jim MorrisonRIDE THE SNAKE THE ANCIENT SNAKEand he doesn't really recover until the final chapter, which may only make sense by virtue of the fact that the reader knows that this will all be over soon.
If his argument amounts to an embrace of parthenogenesis and a sort of astral fuckery, it must be said that Bloom presents an original and thoughtprovoking if wildly indefensible thesis here.
In relation to the sort of splenetic rancor and magisterial scorn he'd spray from his glands when in his dotage, Bloom's early peevishness is almost benign,
in old age, Bloom's disdain for T, S. Eliot was so vociferous that a charitable reader could only take comfort in the thought that, well, at least ghosts can't read
that said, if there is an afterlife in which spirits cavort and gambol, I'd like to think that the spectral Bloom has watched thetheatrical Cats at least once, and he's so pissed off that the protoplasmic version of Eliot, a la Casper the Friendly Ghost, finds him/itself having to hide behind the radiator or inside the walls of his "living place" whenever SpectreBloom comes around, lest he be drawn into an eternal dressingdown for his role in birthing the source material bloom is so in love with shakespeare i kid you not Harold Bloom cast a long shadow on the state of English literature with his publications, the boldest in name at least being The Western Canon, published in.
He championed writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, setting them as exemplars of what literature was, and denigrated other forms of literary criticism which he saw as politically motivated, such as feminist or Marxist schools of thought.
Bloom envisioned literature as a battle for attention and priority, with books competing for the eyes of readers, A critic's job is to separate and valorize those deserving of attention, their judgements grounded in a set of aesthetic concerns,
My use of 'battle' is deliberate, because Bloom presents literature in particular poetry as a form of Freudian struggle between poets and their predecessors he uses precursors, The Anxiety of Influenceis the first book where Bloom sets out his argument for poetic canonization, It is followed by The Map of Misreadingand The Anatomy of Influence, each refining and expanding on the statements made in the first, Drawing on Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, Bloom posits that literature is animated by a tension between generations, one where the latter generation struggles to either emerge from the shadows or to eclipse the former, or risk imaginative death:
"Ideas and images belong to discursiveness and to history, and are scarcely unique to poetry.
Yet a poet's stance, his Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being, must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish, as a poet, if ever even he has managed his rebirth into poetic incarnation.
"
Bloom argues that the way for poets to successfully defeat their antecedents is by the act of "misprison", a deliberate misreading of the prior poet's intentions so as to carve out imaginative space to operate.
This is characterized as a way to escape the influence of the earlier poet's voice and words, He sets out six methods of misprison which he terms as revisionary ratios clinamen to sweve, tessera to complete, kenosis to empty, daemonization to counter, askesis to curtail, and apophrades to open.
In six chapters, he discusses each of the six methods while suggesting poet who make use of them, The first and sixth chapters may be the easiest to read, while those interested in literary criticism may fine the interlude portion which separates partsandof value,
Bloom writes in an elaborate style, He drops the names of critics, thinkers and poets with ease, leaving the reader to map these writers and make sense of his words, Sometimes, his terminology is obscure for example: a young poet is an "ephebe", a Greek term for a young warrior in training, Without some grounding or understanding of British literature, this will be a difficult book to get through, Some people may consider Bloom's writing incoherent or difficult, I imagine the former accusation would be dismissed, the latter sneered at, Criticisms of difficulty suggest that the criticizer does not 'really' understand what is being said, They are not taken seriously, But to take that line of thought to its logical conclusion is to believe that serious engagement with Bloom requires an education in literature on Bloom's terms, It would have to come from inside the ivory tower, It advantages those with the resources to read and digest all this literature, and to speak it convincingly: a form of capital in itself,
The seductiveness of Bloom's argument is, taken at face value, literature sorts itself neatly into greater and lesser works, This is untrue. Great literature can and often will fall into obscurity, Minor works can be published and marketed as prize winners, The Anxiety of Influence presents an argument for inserting a framework for meritocracy into discussions of literary value, While I don't believe Bloom sees his arguments as sacrosanct, his influence on the norms of what we find good or bad in literature is vast, Once centered, once institutionalized, once capital and power is accrued, it is difficult to dismantle or move away from, .