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The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry & Belief from the Bible to the Present
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.
Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.
214 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
11 people are currently reading
325 people want to read
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,717 books2,024 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 6, 2023
Between Truth and Meaning
To call Harold Bloom’s aesthetic theory complex is a fatuous understatement (he probably would call it a litotes). Whatever might be said about it is probably wrong. Therefore I feel emboldened to give my errant opinion with minimal embarrassment. Here goes:
One plus one equals two: a truth without meaning. Marriage is an eternal union of a man and a woman: a proposition with meaning whose truth is intrinsically uncertain and ultimately irrelevant. This distinction truth/meaning is important. Hannah Arendt made it the central concept of her The Life of the Mind in 1971 but I don’t know if she was influenced by Bloom or vice versa.
There are criteria for determining truth found in logic, science, and what is generally called common sense. But naked truth has no necessarily reactive effect on the mind. Meaning is more or less immune to truth. The blatant lies of Trump have positive meaning for his followers who know they are lies; and are equally meaningful for his opponents who recognise the man’s mendacity.
According to Bloom, between these two realms of truth and meaning there is another distinct literary axis which ultimately determines the constitution of truth and the direction of meaning. This is the domain of poetry and belief. These are opposing aesthetic categories that are employed in various combinations to support/generate/justify both truth and meaning.
Belief has confidence in language, a presumption that it can be ‘held’ and ‘fixed’ consciously by a mind (as in religious doctrine), and that it endures by a concerted, even stubborn, act of will. Poetry actively resists the tenets of belief. Its explicit intention is the undermining of linguistic certainty by breaking the conventions of language from vocabulary to grammar. Poetry may be memorised but it is never ‘held’ in any certain way. Rather poetry generates more poetry, largely through its influence on the unconscious mind.
Both belief and poetry dominate our intellectual lives no matter what the subject. So, for example the criteria of scientific truth are clearly unscientific as confirmed by their evolution over time and their differences among scientific disciplines. Ultimately the criterion employed in any discipline depends upon both a rather poetic feel of rightness, and the beliefs of scientists about the fundamental purpose of their work. In other words what constitutes meaningful truth.
Similarly, the work of writers of fiction, although hardly conforming to a novelistic template, for example, do adhere to some sort of structure in narrative development in order to convey some degree of facticity (to use Bloom’s term for context). Yet what they write is largely judged upon their ability to innovate the mundane, prosaic, static character of life, language, and the merely obvious into something original, perhaps even strange. Thus producing meaningful truth.
It is in terms of poetics and beliefs, therefore, that Bloom conducts his criticism. Both categories are in some sense divine, that is, their source lies outside of what we can determine or control as human beings. They arrive, as it were, from elsewhere. Whether they are God-given or a product of the Collective Unconscious is irrelevant. They come to us, usually embedded in a culture so that they appear as ‘already there,’ that is, as effectively eternal.
For Bloom our inheritance of poetics and beliefs is a challenge as well as a blessing. If we take them seriously, we are bound to fight them, to strive beyond blind acceptance to further interpretations and combinations that express ourselves. In a sense we honour tradition by overcoming it, by creating a new tradition in which the old is visible but only as the old. We have a drive to transcend and replace but not to destroy.
Such transcendence of culture, even merely linguistic culture, is no easy task. Success requires a profound understanding of our existing culture. This implies an exceptional talent and experience with symbolic manipulation - with language, music, material art, narrative themes and development, etc. But success also demands an ability to withstand what Bloom calls the ‘anxiety of influence,’ the fear and distress involved in presuming to attempt to surpass one’s forebears.
Bloom’s aesthetic theory is remarkable in many ways. For example, he has ‘tested’ it repeatedly in individual cases in every era and with every genre from Ancient Greek philosophy to modern graphic novels. But what I find most remarkable is his application of his concept to literally all of Western literature as he does in this volume. Whether one agrees with Bloom or not, his insights about the sources and subsequent trajectory of Western literature are as unforgettable as they are bold - perhaps because these characteristics imply one another.
In the aesthetic playground of the poetic and the believed it is sometimes difficult to tell which is the actor and which is the acted upon. Even more disconcerting, they sometimes imitate or even become the other as they seek to create new truths and new meanings. Therefore any definitive statement about their respective roles is suspect because the two act in conjunction.
Nevertheless it is possible to at least conceptually isolate the two in a kind of literary differential calculus in which other things are held equal for the purpose of analysis. So Bloom identifies two primary sources for our literary culture.
The first is the so-called Jahwist of the Hebrew Bible, the unknown interpolator to the Torah (the first five books). It is the Jahwist who is responsible for the second creation story in Genesis in which Adam is created from red clay and the breath of God (a poetic joke amidst an aesthetic dominated by belief: Adam is the name, adamah is what he’s made from). Bloom calls the Jahwist eccentric because his speciality is irony, a sort of pained belief which permeates the rest of the Bible and erupts periodically, perhaps most explicitly in the books of the prophet Jeremiah, Job, and Qoholeth (Ecclesiastes).*
The second source of Western literature is poetic, that of the equally unknown contributor to the Greek myths of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer. Like the Bible, these myths were transmitted orally for some extended but indeterminate period before they were written. They are also the product of a process of redaction, addition, and transcendence similar to that of the Bible. While it is a work of historical fiction, it also communicates an enormous amount of what can be called the belief system of the ancient Greeks - among others, their psychology, conception of the body, human purpose, and virtue, all very different from that of the Bible. But there is a peculiar congruence between the Bible and the Iliad: irony. The irony of the Jahwist is matched by that of Homer in the latter’s portrayal of the fate of his heroes and their gods.
These two works, according to Bloom, establish the tradition of Western literature. At its best this literature shares in their ironic character regardless of how any particular work plays with poetry and belief. For Bloom, literary playfulness as well as artistry, that is to say originality, reaches its English apotheosis in Shakespeare, whose masterful irony is simply unmatched by any other writer. He thus almost miraculously is able to create meaningful truths like no other.
I don’t think it is, therefore, too much to conclude that Bloom’s critical aesthetic criterion is essentially creative irony, which through its very innovation is subtle and startling in equal measure. He takes his title from Marvel’s remark about Milton’s Paradise Lost. Marvell feared that Milton would taint established Christian conventions in his poem. When Milton’s work was finished, he was glad to see that Milton had not contradicted church doctrine. What he failed to notice however was that Milton had transformed the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible into himself. An irony tough to top.
I share Bloom’s view of irony, whether because I have assimilated it progressively from reading Bloom or because he confirms something I have felt from childhood. At a fairly early age I made an explicit decision to devote myself to a life of the mind, that is to say, language. But as I matured it became clear that I had entered a sort of contract with the devil that made me vulnerable to scientific rationality on the one hand and the literalism of the humanities on the other. What I experienced in the enclosure of poetry and belief was not normal, or at least not all that common among people I knew.
I suspect that Bloom perceived the same irony as I, namely that the playground of poetry and belief ultimately had only the most tenuous connection with what most folk think of as the realities of truth and meaning in the working world, and it provides no defences for itself. It is simply not possible to construct a theory that reliably connects language with what is not language. Engaging in the attempt is useless. Or said a rather different way: language is the ultimate irony, a blessing and a curse from which we cannot escape. Apparently this is frightening to many.
* In light of this it is easy to understand Jesus as the ultimate irony extending from the mind of the Jahwist: the crucified king, the suffering God, the beloved but abandoned son etc.
To call Harold Bloom’s aesthetic theory complex is a fatuous understatement (he probably would call it a litotes). Whatever might be said about it is probably wrong. Therefore I feel emboldened to give my errant opinion with minimal embarrassment. Here goes:
One plus one equals two: a truth without meaning. Marriage is an eternal union of a man and a woman: a proposition with meaning whose truth is intrinsically uncertain and ultimately irrelevant. This distinction truth/meaning is important. Hannah Arendt made it the central concept of her The Life of the Mind in 1971 but I don’t know if she was influenced by Bloom or vice versa.
There are criteria for determining truth found in logic, science, and what is generally called common sense. But naked truth has no necessarily reactive effect on the mind. Meaning is more or less immune to truth. The blatant lies of Trump have positive meaning for his followers who know they are lies; and are equally meaningful for his opponents who recognise the man’s mendacity.
According to Bloom, between these two realms of truth and meaning there is another distinct literary axis which ultimately determines the constitution of truth and the direction of meaning. This is the domain of poetry and belief. These are opposing aesthetic categories that are employed in various combinations to support/generate/justify both truth and meaning.
Belief has confidence in language, a presumption that it can be ‘held’ and ‘fixed’ consciously by a mind (as in religious doctrine), and that it endures by a concerted, even stubborn, act of will. Poetry actively resists the tenets of belief. Its explicit intention is the undermining of linguistic certainty by breaking the conventions of language from vocabulary to grammar. Poetry may be memorised but it is never ‘held’ in any certain way. Rather poetry generates more poetry, largely through its influence on the unconscious mind.
Both belief and poetry dominate our intellectual lives no matter what the subject. So, for example the criteria of scientific truth are clearly unscientific as confirmed by their evolution over time and their differences among scientific disciplines. Ultimately the criterion employed in any discipline depends upon both a rather poetic feel of rightness, and the beliefs of scientists about the fundamental purpose of their work. In other words what constitutes meaningful truth.
Similarly, the work of writers of fiction, although hardly conforming to a novelistic template, for example, do adhere to some sort of structure in narrative development in order to convey some degree of facticity (to use Bloom’s term for context). Yet what they write is largely judged upon their ability to innovate the mundane, prosaic, static character of life, language, and the merely obvious into something original, perhaps even strange. Thus producing meaningful truth.
It is in terms of poetics and beliefs, therefore, that Bloom conducts his criticism. Both categories are in some sense divine, that is, their source lies outside of what we can determine or control as human beings. They arrive, as it were, from elsewhere. Whether they are God-given or a product of the Collective Unconscious is irrelevant. They come to us, usually embedded in a culture so that they appear as ‘already there,’ that is, as effectively eternal.
For Bloom our inheritance of poetics and beliefs is a challenge as well as a blessing. If we take them seriously, we are bound to fight them, to strive beyond blind acceptance to further interpretations and combinations that express ourselves. In a sense we honour tradition by overcoming it, by creating a new tradition in which the old is visible but only as the old. We have a drive to transcend and replace but not to destroy.
Such transcendence of culture, even merely linguistic culture, is no easy task. Success requires a profound understanding of our existing culture. This implies an exceptional talent and experience with symbolic manipulation - with language, music, material art, narrative themes and development, etc. But success also demands an ability to withstand what Bloom calls the ‘anxiety of influence,’ the fear and distress involved in presuming to attempt to surpass one’s forebears.
Bloom’s aesthetic theory is remarkable in many ways. For example, he has ‘tested’ it repeatedly in individual cases in every era and with every genre from Ancient Greek philosophy to modern graphic novels. But what I find most remarkable is his application of his concept to literally all of Western literature as he does in this volume. Whether one agrees with Bloom or not, his insights about the sources and subsequent trajectory of Western literature are as unforgettable as they are bold - perhaps because these characteristics imply one another.
In the aesthetic playground of the poetic and the believed it is sometimes difficult to tell which is the actor and which is the acted upon. Even more disconcerting, they sometimes imitate or even become the other as they seek to create new truths and new meanings. Therefore any definitive statement about their respective roles is suspect because the two act in conjunction.
Nevertheless it is possible to at least conceptually isolate the two in a kind of literary differential calculus in which other things are held equal for the purpose of analysis. So Bloom identifies two primary sources for our literary culture.
The first is the so-called Jahwist of the Hebrew Bible, the unknown interpolator to the Torah (the first five books). It is the Jahwist who is responsible for the second creation story in Genesis in which Adam is created from red clay and the breath of God (a poetic joke amidst an aesthetic dominated by belief: Adam is the name, adamah is what he’s made from). Bloom calls the Jahwist eccentric because his speciality is irony, a sort of pained belief which permeates the rest of the Bible and erupts periodically, perhaps most explicitly in the books of the prophet Jeremiah, Job, and Qoholeth (Ecclesiastes).*
The second source of Western literature is poetic, that of the equally unknown contributor to the Greek myths of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer. Like the Bible, these myths were transmitted orally for some extended but indeterminate period before they were written. They are also the product of a process of redaction, addition, and transcendence similar to that of the Bible. While it is a work of historical fiction, it also communicates an enormous amount of what can be called the belief system of the ancient Greeks - among others, their psychology, conception of the body, human purpose, and virtue, all very different from that of the Bible. But there is a peculiar congruence between the Bible and the Iliad: irony. The irony of the Jahwist is matched by that of Homer in the latter’s portrayal of the fate of his heroes and their gods.
These two works, according to Bloom, establish the tradition of Western literature. At its best this literature shares in their ironic character regardless of how any particular work plays with poetry and belief. For Bloom, literary playfulness as well as artistry, that is to say originality, reaches its English apotheosis in Shakespeare, whose masterful irony is simply unmatched by any other writer. He thus almost miraculously is able to create meaningful truths like no other.
I don’t think it is, therefore, too much to conclude that Bloom’s critical aesthetic criterion is essentially creative irony, which through its very innovation is subtle and startling in equal measure. He takes his title from Marvel’s remark about Milton’s Paradise Lost. Marvell feared that Milton would taint established Christian conventions in his poem. When Milton’s work was finished, he was glad to see that Milton had not contradicted church doctrine. What he failed to notice however was that Milton had transformed the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible into himself. An irony tough to top.
I share Bloom’s view of irony, whether because I have assimilated it progressively from reading Bloom or because he confirms something I have felt from childhood. At a fairly early age I made an explicit decision to devote myself to a life of the mind, that is to say, language. But as I matured it became clear that I had entered a sort of contract with the devil that made me vulnerable to scientific rationality on the one hand and the literalism of the humanities on the other. What I experienced in the enclosure of poetry and belief was not normal, or at least not all that common among people I knew.
I suspect that Bloom perceived the same irony as I, namely that the playground of poetry and belief ultimately had only the most tenuous connection with what most folk think of as the realities of truth and meaning in the working world, and it provides no defences for itself. It is simply not possible to construct a theory that reliably connects language with what is not language. Engaging in the attempt is useless. Or said a rather different way: language is the ultimate irony, a blessing and a curse from which we cannot escape. Apparently this is frightening to many.
* In light of this it is easy to understand Jesus as the ultimate irony extending from the mind of the Jahwist: the crucified king, the suffering God, the beloved but abandoned son etc.
May 30, 2016
Ruin the Sacred Truths sits equidistant between Bloom’s trademark theory The Anxiety of Influence and his self-described more exoteric works beginning with The Western Canon. While Ruin is firmly entrenched in the esoteric (which I’ll briefly summarize as a level of criticism so far beyond – or beneath – a mere study of plot devices and style that a Bloomian reading of any particular author becomes akin to reading philosophy), we can see the beginnings of Bloom heading toward the more mainstream and accessible works of the 90s. (I say mainstream and accessible with a hint of sarcasm, but without pretension: To read Bloom with any level of seriousness one must have read the books he speaks of thoroughly; I only claim to have some apprehension in this way of the authors I’ve read and enjoyed most.)
The Hebrew Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Freud and Kafka are the principle characters in this study. I’ve read all of them, but with an incompleteness that is almost embarrassing to admit. I must say for writers like Freud and Kafka that can be dauntingly opaque, whose worlds are often tortuous and brutally dense, Bloom’s analysis can serve as a gateway, or at the very least an explanation of why they should be read instead of avoided. He sees things in them that one must constantly wonder as to whether the authors themselves intended or saw, and it is this trait, among many others, that makes Bloom so fascinating. I can understand why some readers are instantly turned off by Bloom too; he makes no attempt to explain these occurrences in terms of a preface, as if he is writing as fast as he can and has no time to explain himself thus. Countless allusions to authors, scholars, and terms (“normative Judaism” for example) are dealt with at length without prior explanation. I’ve seen readers quibble that Bloom doesn’t cite enough examples of what he exegizes, which is wholly incorrect. It’s the era of Google people, if you don’t know something, look it up.
I’ll end with a couple takeaways. Bloom likens the poetic drive in writers to the Eros and Thanatos drives, or the Love and Death drives that Freud speaks of (apparently, again I haven’t delved into Freud hardly at all, and what I have read has been punishing). Bloom says the poetic drive is rooted in ambivalence, which he describes as the inherently paradoxical, and goes on to say it is as primordial as our need to love and our longing for death. This is a significant insight if one chooses to believe it. The idea that our greatest writers (and even the worst) have an unconscious need to describe the paradoxical I find very exciting. I believe Bloom when he says that, intuitively. It is those kinds of agreements, the ones I feel physically that have been the hallmarks of my reading experiences with all of my personal favorites, McCarthy, Bolaño, Homer, Sophocles. This idea alone makes the book for me.
Elsewhere, Bloom’s use of Gnosticism as a framework for interpretation is interesting and informative. Briefly, the gnostic world, the physical world we live in, is one created out of the abyss and ruled over by the Demiurge, a kind of evil God. Our attempts to unite the spark of godliness in each of us with the Creator, an alien spirit infinitely far away in space and time and indifferent to good and evil, are met with resistance by Archons, demons that imprison our truest selves the way Freud’s drives do. In light of this, the works of Kafka and Beckett become more comprehensible, and in Bloom’s use of this trope he has given us a startlingly clear map of an incomprehensible labyrinth.
The Hebrew Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Freud and Kafka are the principle characters in this study. I’ve read all of them, but with an incompleteness that is almost embarrassing to admit. I must say for writers like Freud and Kafka that can be dauntingly opaque, whose worlds are often tortuous and brutally dense, Bloom’s analysis can serve as a gateway, or at the very least an explanation of why they should be read instead of avoided. He sees things in them that one must constantly wonder as to whether the authors themselves intended or saw, and it is this trait, among many others, that makes Bloom so fascinating. I can understand why some readers are instantly turned off by Bloom too; he makes no attempt to explain these occurrences in terms of a preface, as if he is writing as fast as he can and has no time to explain himself thus. Countless allusions to authors, scholars, and terms (“normative Judaism” for example) are dealt with at length without prior explanation. I’ve seen readers quibble that Bloom doesn’t cite enough examples of what he exegizes, which is wholly incorrect. It’s the era of Google people, if you don’t know something, look it up.
I’ll end with a couple takeaways. Bloom likens the poetic drive in writers to the Eros and Thanatos drives, or the Love and Death drives that Freud speaks of (apparently, again I haven’t delved into Freud hardly at all, and what I have read has been punishing). Bloom says the poetic drive is rooted in ambivalence, which he describes as the inherently paradoxical, and goes on to say it is as primordial as our need to love and our longing for death. This is a significant insight if one chooses to believe it. The idea that our greatest writers (and even the worst) have an unconscious need to describe the paradoxical I find very exciting. I believe Bloom when he says that, intuitively. It is those kinds of agreements, the ones I feel physically that have been the hallmarks of my reading experiences with all of my personal favorites, McCarthy, Bolaño, Homer, Sophocles. This idea alone makes the book for me.
Elsewhere, Bloom’s use of Gnosticism as a framework for interpretation is interesting and informative. Briefly, the gnostic world, the physical world we live in, is one created out of the abyss and ruled over by the Demiurge, a kind of evil God. Our attempts to unite the spark of godliness in each of us with the Creator, an alien spirit infinitely far away in space and time and indifferent to good and evil, are met with resistance by Archons, demons that imprison our truest selves the way Freud’s drives do. In light of this, the works of Kafka and Beckett become more comprehensible, and in Bloom’s use of this trope he has given us a startlingly clear map of an incomprehensible labyrinth.
June 10, 2023
Bloom gives undue historical and even philosophical significance to similarities he finds among texts. It’s a fun game but don’t take it too seriously.
August 25, 2025
Intellectual, insightful, and thought provoking, but with a very high bar to entry. I am fortunate enough to have read most of the primary works Bloom references by Shakespeare, Milton, Proust, Kafka, Freud, and even some Wordsworth and Blake, but his work is best considered if you also have knowledge of critical examinations of those work, which is, as I said, a pretty high bar.
That said, Bloom's reputation as an insightful critic and powerful thinker is well deserved and demostrated here.
That said, Bloom's reputation as an insightful critic and powerful thinker is well deserved and demostrated here.
October 22, 2023
"In [Shakespeare's Macbeth and Milton's Satan] we find the self-obsessiveness that always makes us more interesting to ourselves than anyone else can be except for those brief periods of what Freud calls overestimations of the object, or being in love." Thanks, Bloom, for summing up your whole problem.
February 11, 2013
I had a friend tell me to be leery of people like Harold Bloom -- so intelligent, such a broad ranging intellect and holding a comprehensive vision of the world, that their ideas and philosophies are intoxicating and easily subsumed even when they are incorrect.
With that caveat, Bloom's criticism is stunning, thought provoking and pushes you into areas you would have never considered, such as Dante as the representative of Catholicism, Milton of Protestantism and Kafka for the Jews. Yet Kafka wasn't a poet.
Bloom makes a nice review of the Western Canon from J to Beckett, via Freud. Be awed, be impressed, but don't completely swallow everything.
With that caveat, Bloom's criticism is stunning, thought provoking and pushes you into areas you would have never considered, such as Dante as the representative of Catholicism, Milton of Protestantism and Kafka for the Jews. Yet Kafka wasn't a poet.
Bloom makes a nice review of the Western Canon from J to Beckett, via Freud. Be awed, be impressed, but don't completely swallow everything.
December 14, 2019
Uma leitura verdadeiramente interessante que põe em perspetiva obras universais. Leitura algo densa mas que não deixa de surpreender e atrair.
July 27, 2021
Bloom faz uma sismografia das réplicas das maiores obras da literatura (cânones bíblicos, Homero, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Iluminismo e Romantismo, Freud e adiante) e explica a reacção dos efebos aos precursores como um atraso—a esse atraso em relação às grandes obras, chama-lhe facticidade: Milton e Dante lidam com a facticidade dos cânones bíblicos ao conceberem as suas obras. Neste esquema de atrasos, é interessante a análise de Falstaff, no capítulo acerca de Shakespeare, "Falstaff is not how meaning is renewed, but rather how meaning gets started". É também deste livro que vem um dos mais famosos pedaços de prosa de Bloom, acerca do Paradise Lost: "Milton's Satan is surprising enough to be a universal prodigal son; puzzling enough to force criticism beyond its limits; sublime enough to usurp the sublime forever; near enough to our desires to be wholly true, when our desires flower in the phantasmagoria of nightmare".
February 21, 2021
This is a hit-and-miss book. On the hit spectrum is the author and his style, absolutely genius. There's also a lot to be gained from the content within the book, however this is where the hits and the misses begin to merge (or blur).
August 4, 2013
Harold Bloom being Harold Bloom. Enjoy it for what it is.
August 26, 2019
أخذت ما أريده منه. إن هارولد بلوم ملحاظ.
August 26, 2023
Ainda que já tenha lido várias obras ou autores mencionados ou analisados nesse livro (alguns pobremente, como A divina comedia), confesso não possuir a erudição ou conhecimento suficiente para analisar a fundo o que é proposto pelo autor.
No fim, é como a letra dos Titãs: Que não é o que não pode ser que não é o que não pode ser que não é o que não pode ser que não é. O que não é, mais uma vez, necessariamente algo negativo, pois lê-se como se fosse um quadro, tentando apreender ou apreciar o que se crê mais interessante.
E para mim, o mais interessante foi a sua leitura da obra de Freud sob a influência da Bíblia hebraica. Faz sentido, mas será que é? Bom, o mesmo pode ser dito sobre a obra de Freud, então...
Mas tem mais. Tem Shakespeare, Kafka, Beckett, fé e poesia, verdade e significado, e como esses conceitos se relacionam na literatura. Influências literárias através de diferentes eras e como cada autor lida, mesmo inconscientemente, com o trabalho e a influência de seus percursores.
Não é uma leitura fácil. Bloom não perde tempo explicando conceitos, obras ou fatos mencionados (faça por você mesmo e encontre a informação, o que é muito fácil hoje em dia). Mas é definitivamente uma leitura gratificante.
No fim, é como a letra dos Titãs: Que não é o que não pode ser que não é o que não pode ser que não é o que não pode ser que não é. O que não é, mais uma vez, necessariamente algo negativo, pois lê-se como se fosse um quadro, tentando apreender ou apreciar o que se crê mais interessante.
E para mim, o mais interessante foi a sua leitura da obra de Freud sob a influência da Bíblia hebraica. Faz sentido, mas será que é? Bom, o mesmo pode ser dito sobre a obra de Freud, então...
Mas tem mais. Tem Shakespeare, Kafka, Beckett, fé e poesia, verdade e significado, e como esses conceitos se relacionam na literatura. Influências literárias através de diferentes eras e como cada autor lida, mesmo inconscientemente, com o trabalho e a influência de seus percursores.
Não é uma leitura fácil. Bloom não perde tempo explicando conceitos, obras ou fatos mencionados (faça por você mesmo e encontre a informação, o que é muito fácil hoje em dia). Mas é definitivamente uma leitura gratificante.
December 5, 2024
Libro visionario e poetico, che racchiude una serie di lezioni sulla letteratura occidentale dal Genesi a Beckett. Di ardua lettura ma ricco di spunti memorabili. Da segnalare un tremendo errore di traduzione: “repressione”, termine freudiano che significa “rimozione”, viene reso erroneamente con “repressione” (in inglese, nel linguaggio psicoanalitico, “suppression”). Il che rende vari passaggi, già complessi, del tutto ininettellegibili.
April 26, 2022
Bloom is excellent as always here. This expresses some interesting ideas in typical Bloomian fashion.
June 12, 2023
Bloom diverte-se, e o perigo o ronda: há pressuposto um evolucionismo em que o ethos grego é inferior ao cristão.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews