Every deep reader is an Idiot Questioner (Harold Bloom)
Tagged: Arts, Criticism, Harold Bloom, Poetry, Reading, the anxiety of influence
View ArticleThe Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner’s Lenz Reviewed
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (detail), Francisco Goya Composed in 1836, Georg Büchner’s novella-fragment Lenz still seems ahead of its time. While Lenz’s themes of madness, art, and ennui can...
View ArticleBorges Riff/Borges Anxiety
Art by Roman Muradov 1. Jorge Luis Borges is 115 today. 2. I’ve shared clips from my scattered readings of Borges on this blog (receiving the occasional takedown notice as well)—but I’ve never mustered...
View ArticleReading the very best writers is not going to make us better citizens (Harold...
Reviewing bad books, W. H. Auden once remarked, is bad for the character. Like all gifted moralists, Auden idealized despite himself, and he should have survived into the present age, wherein the new...
View ArticleOne reads for oneself and for strangers (Harold Bloom)
The terms “power” and “authority” have pragmatically opposed meanings in the realms of politics and what we still ought to call “imaginative literature.” If we have difficulty in seeing the opposition,...
View ArticlePlastics and paranoia (Harold Bloom on Thomas Pynchon)
For Pynchon, ours is the age of plastics and paranoia, dominated by the System. No one is going to dispute such a conviction; reading the New York Times first thing every morning is sufficient to...
View ArticleThirty-point riff on Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fun entertainment that achieves its goals, one of which is not to transcend the confines of its brand-mythos. SW: TFA takes Star Wars itself (as brand-mythos) as its...
View ArticleAn interview with literary critic Daniel Green about his new book, Beyond the...
Daniel Green’s The Reading Experience was one of the first sites I started reading regularly when I first started blogging about literature on Biblioklept. If you regularly read literary criticism...
View ArticleThe Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner’s Lenz Reviewed
Composed in 1836, Georg Büchner’s novella-fragment Lenz still seems ahead of its time. While Lenz’s themes of madness, art, and ennui can be found throughout literature, Büchner’s strange, wonderful...
View ArticleA review of Leo Tolstoy’s final work, Hadji Murad
Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, 1901 by Ilya Repin Like many readers of Leo Tolstoy’s final work, Hadji Murad, I read the novella based on Harold Bloom’s praise in his work The Western Canon, where he declares...
View ArticleThirty-point riff on Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fun entertainment that achieves its goals, one of which is not to transcend the confines of its brand-mythos. SW: TFA takes Star Wars itself (as brand-mythos) as its...
View ArticleThe Last Jedi and the Anxiety of Influence
Let me start by erasing my own anxieties about “reviewing” The Last Jedi (2017, dir. Rian Johnson). I saw it over a month ago in a packed theater with my wife and two young children. We loved it. I...
View ArticleThe authentic American apocalyptic novel | Harold Bloom and Blood Meridian
The Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562 Harold Bloom’s esteem for Blood Meridian may have done much to advance the novel’s reputation since its publication, especially in pre-social...
View ArticleReading the very best writers is not going to make us better citizens (Harold...
Reviewing bad books, W. H. Auden once remarked, is bad for the character. Like all gifted moralists, Auden idealized despite himself, and he should have survived into the present age, wherein the new...
View ArticlePlastics and paranoia (Harold Bloom on Thomas Pynchon)
For Pynchon, ours is the age of plastics and paranoia, dominated by the System. No one is going to dispute such a conviction; reading the New York Times first thing every morning is sufficient to...
View ArticleI like to write uncanonical things | William H. Gass
I would worry about being on such a list, because I like to write uncanonical things, things that oppose the general flow of the culture. I would certainly be happy to believe that I could share the...
View ArticleTwo Blooms (William Gaddis)
Harold Bloom. Is he the one who wrote about the schools? The point is that there are two Blooms, and one of them is dead. [He is told he is confusing Harold with Allan.] Good—if he were the other one,...
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