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Biographical note:  Roy Sellars is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding; in 2005-06 he is in residence at the Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, Minnesota. A graduate of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he discovered Bloom thanks to his tutor Ann Wordsworth, he has also worked at Marburg University, the University of Geneva, Cornell University and the National University of Singapore. He has published on topics in literature and theory, and is completing a book on Milton; he is also co-editor, with Per Krogh Hansen, of Glossing Glas (Nebraska, forthcoming). He welcomes notice of any relevant writings for a complete bibliography of Bloom in progress.

Biographical note:  Graham Allen is Senior Lecturer in Modern English, University College Cork. He is the editor of the cultural and critical theory sections of The Literary Encyclopedia, and has published widely in literary theory and Romantic studies. He is the author of Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (Harvester, 1994), Intertextuality (Routledge, 2000) and Roland Barthes (Routledge, 2003), editor of The pupils of the university, parallax 40 (2006) and is currently working on a monograph on Mary Shelley (to be published by Palgrave in 2007) and a book on Frankenstein (to be published by Continuum in 2007).

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EAN13:  9781876857202
ISBN:  9781876857202
Author:  Roy Sellars
Title:  The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-07
Extent:  536pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  30 mm
Weight:  804 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 24.99
Price:  USD 34.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom is a major event in literary criticism. Edited by Graham Allen (University College Cork) and Roy Sellars (University of Southern Denmark, Kolding), the collection includes important essays on The Book of J, The Western Canon, and a host of new perspectives on Bloom’s influence on poetry, the novel, canon-formation, institutional politics and political correctness, Biblical interpretation, post-colonialism, criticism and evaluation, literary theory and philosophy, and many other subjects. Never one to court favour with the latest literary or critical fad, Harold Bloom has been a towering figure in the study of literature and culture for over 45 years. He has only rarely, however, received due acknowledgement for the importance of his work within the increasingly professionalised and fractured world of academic literary criticism. Today Bloom defiantly writes against institutionalised criticism and for a popular, non-academic audience, whose positive reception of books such as The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, How to Read and Why and Genius marks Bloom out as perhaps the only living academic critic to have reached out so effectively to mass culture. This collection of essays, by younger academics alongside more established names, demonstrates that there are many inside and outside the academy who do value the work of the greatest reader of the last fifty years.

Table of contents:
Cover art: original work by Gregory Botts
Key to Abbreviations
Preface: Graham Allen and Roy Sellars, "Harold Bloom and Critical Responsibility"
1
Graham Allen, "Passage"
Norman Finkelstein, "Aliyah"
John Hollander, "A Merrie Melody for Harold"
Geoffrey Hartman, "The Song of Solomon's Daughter in the Paradise of Poets, Exulting that She Exists"
Peter Abbs, "Voyaging Out"
Paolo Valesio, Three Poems
Kevin Hart, "The Trader's Wife"
John Kinsella, "Field Notes from Mount Bakewell"
Nicholas Royle, "The Slide"
2
Roger Gilbert, "Acts of Reading, Acts of Loving: Harold Bloom and the Art of Appreciation"
Graham Allen, "The Anxiety of Choice, the Western Canon and the Future of Literature"
R. Clifton Spargo, "Toward an Ethics of Literary Revisionism"
Heidi Sylvester, "Sublime Theorist: Harold Bloom's Catastrophic Theory of Literature"
Barnard Turner, "Bloom and the School of Resentment: An Interrogation of the ‘Preface and Prelude’ to The Western Canon"
Christopher Rollason, "On the Stone Raft: Harold Bloom in Catalonia and Portugal"
T. J. Cribb, "Anxieties of Influence in the Theatre of Memory: Harold Bloom, Marlowe and Henry V"
Gregory Machacek, "Conceptions of Origins and Their Consequences: Bloom and Milton"
Milton L. Welch, "The Poet as Poet: Misreading Harold Bloom's Theory of Influence"
John W. P. Phillips, "To Execute a Clinamen"
Martin McQuillan, "Is Deconstruction Really a Jewish Science? Bloom, Freud and Derrida"
Roy Sellars, "Harold Bloom, (Comic) Critic"
Anders H. Klitgaard, "Bloom, Kierkegaard, and the Problem of Misreading"
Nicholas Birns, "Placing the Jar Properly: The Religious and the Secular in the Criticism of Harold Bloom"
Gwee Li Sui, "I, J, K"
Leslie Brisman, "Bloom upon Her Mountain: Unclouding the Heights of Modern Biblical Criticism"
Moshe Idel, "Enoch and Elijah: Some Remarks on Apotheosis, Theophany and Jewish Mysticism"
Sinead Murphy, "'From Blank to Blank:’ Harold Bloom and Woman Writers"
Stephen Da Silva, "A Queer Touch and the Bloomian Model of Authorial Influence"
Peter Morris, "Harold Bloom, Parody, and the ‘Other Tradition'"
Maria Rosa Menocal, "How I Learned to Write Without Footnotes"
Afterword: Harold Bloom
Notes on Contributors
Index: Milton L. Welch

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Preface: Harold Bloom and Critical Responsibility

Graham Allen and Roy Sellars

It is difficult to read. The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.
– Stevens, “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light”

Opposition is true Friendship.
– Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 20

Harold Bloom is the most famous living literary critic in the English-speaking world. Such a statement is easy enough to make in terms of its truth-value; however, it also brings with it a host of paradoxes and complications. For a long time now, Bloom has been presenting himself as a solitary voice, ignored by an academic audience who should – but never will – listen. The role sounds like a painful one; but is it anything more than a role, played with a mask? Bloom’s customary self-presentation does not sit neatly with our opening statement. Writing in 1988, Peter de Bolla began his study of Bloom with a confirmation of Bloom’s self-figuring: “while Bloom’s notion of ‘influence’ is probably one of the most widely disseminated concepts at work in literary critical practice today, the books in which this idea is conceptually formulated are little read or commented upon” (8). De Bolla goes on to suggest that there is within Bloom’s work itself a resistance to critical imitation and extension, to generating disciples and schools. Indeed, Bloom has forcefully confirmed this resistance to emulation. To take one example, from his essay “Agon: Revisionism and Critical Personality:” “I want first to suggest that on a pragmatic view there is no language of criticism but only of an individual critic, because … a theory of strong misreading denies that there is or should be any common vocabulary in terms of which critics can argue with one another” (Agon 21). While it may be true that Bloom’s work is difficult to adopt as a methodology, and that it presents itself as a kind of literature, its unrepeatability does not, on its own, explain the lack of academic dialogue to which De Bolla refers. Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida and De Man are equally unrepeatable, for example, and yet their works, unlike those of Bloom, have been subject to a widespread and intensive (if not always successful) incorporation into academic discourse.

Academic and other worlds have changed significantly since the mid-1980s, and now is a good time to reassess the reception of Bloom’s ever-increasing corpus. The first and most remarkable change has been in Bloom’s own critical focus. De Bolla refers inevitably to Bloom’s famous theory of the anxiety of influence and the idea of literary and indeed critical writing as miswriting. However, if we had to characterise Bloom’s work since the mid-1980s, it would be in terms of freedom from influence, originality, authors who are influencers rather than influenced, movers rather than moved. As a number of contributors to this volume explain, Bloom has dramatically altered his orientation in the last twenty years, ceasing to describe and in some ways embody those who are belated and, instead, focusing on that small circle of authors who, as he now likes to put it, have made us all possible, whoever ‘we’ may be. That reorientation may seem unremarkable; but to many readers who have closely followed Bloom’s career, richly and diversely assembled in the current volume, the change of perspective is immense and does not come without a certain sense of loss. Graham Allen, for example, pivots his essay on this commonly expressed regret, foregrounding the ironic fact that, in moving away from the anxiety of influence and the struggle against the poetic burden of the past, Bloom may have temporarily lost sight of the future-orientation of the most vital forms of literature.

We need to avoid premature assumptions about the overall character of Bloom’s work. Contributors to this volume often remind us that there exists what we might call an alternative Bloom, or alternative Blooms. Like any culturally central controversialist, he is not quite the figure that public opinion imagines. There is a Bloom who fiercely defends the art of reading and a dynamic but central canon of strong literary texts. There is also a Bloom who is a highly respected contributor to Biblical studies and religious studies more generally. Nicholas Birns, in this volume, comments that “The Book of J seems one of the most ‘primary’ of Harold Bloom’s works.” In his “Foreword” to Moshe Idel’s Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation, Bloom styles himself a “literary critic and not a Kabbalistic scholar” (x). But his evident ability, in a few pages, magisterially to evaluate the relationship between Idel, the great scholar of Kabbalah in our generation, and the great precursor in that field, Gershom Scholem – added to the very fact that it is he, Bloom, who is prefacing what he calls Idel’s “most important volume so far” (x) – runs against his own self-humbling characterisation. The enormous influence that Bloom has had in Biblical studies and related disciplines of reading cannot be ignored if we hope to take full measure of his life-long achievement. The fact that so many of the contributors to this volume, including Geoffrey Hartman and Moshe Idel himself, focus on this aspect demonstrates its importance for Bloom’s thought. Many of these contributions attempt to link Bloom’s work on Kabbalah and the Bible with his theories of literary influence and poetic (or critical) agonism. This move is on one level an obvious one, and it is clear that Bloom sees in the realms of religious writing a ‘poetics of conflict’ similar to the one he has so memorably marked out in the realms of poetry and imaginative literature (see Allen, Harold Bloom, esp. ch. 2). Whether Bloom’s interventions in different fields can ultimately be reconciled is not for us to judge; the purpose of this heterogeneous collection was never to create a synthetically unified Bloom. Of the many precursors to whom Bloom refers in his moving “Afterword” to this volume, the over-riding presence is that of Walt Whitman. Bloom here states that “[t]he politics of pre-civil war America scarcely illuminate Leaves of Grass (1855),” and much the same could be said of the eras of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush père, Clinton, or Bush fils (“Benito Bush,” as Bloom calls him) in relation to Bloom’s own major writings on literature. However, since the Reagan years another Bloom has emerged who, like Whitman and Emerson before him, is quite prepared to leave the realms of poetic agon in order to address the political follies of the day. This Bloom – perhaps more ephemeral, but hardly minor – is still little known to academic readers, for it is a Bloom one will mainly find in the mass media. In the American university system to which he remains attached, he has often been castigated as an elitist or reactionary, but the American university system is not the world, and it is the world, increasingly, that is Bloom’s audience. Scourge of Newt Gingrich and other right-wing ideologues, defender of abortion rights, analyst of religious fundamentalisms, Bloom has become one of those American critics who can most help readers outside the US to read the text that the American empire has been writing on minds and bodies around the world. The diversity of his interventions makes Stanley Fish’s claim, in 1995, that Bloom is not a “public intellectual” look out of date (Professional 118). Much as Bloom likes to mock academic pretensions and pseudo-politics, one cannot survey his work without registering its own political dimension or, if a trope is required, face.

Harold Bloom has many faces, and like his favourite literary character, Sir John Falstaff, or like Whitman, these faces do not amount to a totality. There is a passage in Whitman which is so obvious in this context that many sophisticated critics, fearful of repetition, would no doubt avoid it. The passage comes to us in such a familiar guise that it already reads like a quotation or even cliché. But some clichés are quotations whose apparent staleness can be refreshed, being thus transformed back into moments of literature; and for demonstrating this quickening power, we owe gratitude to Bloom, a critic never anxious about repeating (from memory, naturally) the texts which have, as he puts it, helped him to live his life. Here it is:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) (Song of Myself 51)

The planet Bloom contains multitudes; we say it here because we know enough about him to know that he might say it himself, smiling at the ironies that such a statement would contain. This reminds us of another Bloom, another face often missed by the multitude of critics and journalists who have pronounced on, or denounced, his work. This Bloom is nowhere better represented than in his own “Afterword” here, a text written on the morning of his seventy-fifth birthday in 2005. This is a Bloom who, as Roy Sellars, alongside a number of others collected here, reminds us, is a comic genius – a man for whom literary life allows for constant irony and pastiche; a man for whom Oscar Wilde is a giant precursor. Bloom deals in tropes and roles, not identities; and he writes aphoristically, at his best, rather than magisterially. One of the principles for “the restoration of reading” that he outlines in the provocative Prologue to How to Read and Why is “the recovery of the ironic” (25). The Wildean role is hard to sustain, though, in any context, and sometimes it seems as if Bloom is verging on self-parody. It’s hard to tell. Bloom’s humour is certainly lost on academics trained to be bureaucrats rather than readers, professionalised to the point where vast ironies can go unseen and unmarked. If opposition is true friendship, then the hostile non-reception of Bloom suggests that one can have too much of a good thing. We return, then, to Bloom’s readers, whom we hope this collection will create as well as reach.

The shift from the anxiety of influence to the celebration of Shakespearean originality might seem to have confirmed Bloom’s academic marginalisation. But then we ask: whose margins? Our contributors are geographically diverse, our publisher is not based in the US, and we question the tendency of the US academy to take for granted its own frames of reference. Furthermore, and again appropriately in our view, our publisher is not a university press – for academics are not the only readers. In the past fifteen years or so, Bloom has gained a worldwide audience who purchase books such as How to Read and Why (2000), Genius (2002), The Art of Reading Poetry (2004), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004) or Jesus and Yahweh (2005). This has happened not just in English but also in translation (another aspect of his work that has been little studied). Bloom has become good copy, and each of his new publications is heralded by a degree of media coverage unrivalled by any other living critic. The current foundation stone of this presence in popular culture is his Bardolatry, his uncompromising (and professionally thankless) defence of Shakespeare as the central author in Western and indeed world literature. Herbert Weil, in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, states that Bloom “has managed to capture the curiosity and attention of readers whom professional specialists have failed to reach” (Weil 126). Linda Charnes, in the same book, states that Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999) has made him “the literary critic of the educated, nonacademic middle class” (Charnes 262). Richard Levin adds: “I think that [the] striking difference between the book’s reception inside and outside the academy should concern us, since it marks the extent to which our vanguard critics have separated themselves from, and alienated, a significant part of the public that used to be included in our audience and our constituency” (Levin 77). In a period in which literary critics increasingly diversify and apply their techniques to analysis of the productions of popular culture, it is Bloom, staunch defender of more traditional ideals of canonicity and close reading, who has himself become both a subject and an object of that culture. The cultural capital of Bloom has probably never been higher. The irony is not lost on him – is irony ever lost on Bloom? – and is part of what allows for his confident and joyfully vengeful prophetic stance, as adopted here at the opening of The Western Canon:

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs[;] they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside. Every teaching institution will have its department of cultural studies, an ox not to be gored, and an aesthetic underground will flourish, restoring something of the romance of reading. (Canon 15)

Beyond any other contemporary critic, Bloom stands for a fierce love of literature. Nowhere is this fact better attested to than in María Rosa Menocal’s amusing and moving “How I Learned to Write Without Footnotes,” below. If this love of literature can only be kept burning outside the techno-bureaucratic university – and that remains a large if – then so be it. Bloom’s critical desire to honour literature, and the passion with which he pursues it, has won him a readership on a scale unimaginable to other critics, and those who have followed and cared about his work can only rejoice at such a situation in all its irony. Martin McQuillan expresses this response memorably at the beginning of his contribution: “Thank goodness for Harold Bloom. There is no literary critic writing today who is more encyclopaedic, more prolific, more outrageous, or more camp than Harold Bloom.” John Phillips’s wonderfully provocative Bloomian treatment of the word ‘bloom,’ in this volume, is also indicative of the intellectual affection and critical regard Bloom still inspires in many, even in the academy.

Bloom is the most remarkable literary critic today. In an age of apparently irresistible professionalisation, with its concomitant stress on specialisation, his range over world literature appears sublime, beyond reason. This fact is frequently celebrated in the pages which follow. In the various discussions of the sublime in this volume (Heidi Sylvester’s being the most sustained), we find a resounding testament to the fact that in our age, the sublime cannot be thought about critically without reference to Bloom. He is, as many in this volume argue, an example of the sublime. In his huge body of critical monographs, and in his prefaces for the innumerable Chelsea House volumes of criticism (addressed not only to an undergraduate but also a high-school audience), Bloom has introduced more texts than any other critic now or in the recent past. It would be an interesting exercise to attempt to name a handful of authors, of any note whatsoever, about whom he has not written at all. Many of the essays below may surprise readers who solely associate him with the canonical works of British and American literature. Christopher Rollason, for example, gives us a Bloom who is a champion of literatures from the Iberian, Ibero-American and Luso-Hispanic worlds, while Stephen Da Silva and Peter Morris, in their quite different ways, give us a Bloom relevant to the complex discussion of homoerotic literatures in English. More important than Bloom’s sheer range is the astonishing amount of seminal interpretations that he has gifted us. Intertextually complex and original, these readings will remain a vast testament to the importance of literary interpretation and what Bloom above calls “the romance of reading.”