NP Harold Bloom

[jbor]

review of his latest book:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/27/1040511174498.html

Excerpts:

GENIUS: A Mosaic Of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
By Harold Bloom
HarperCollins, 832pp, $70.95

Harold Bloom is the only literary critic alive who commands the attention of
a world that has started to lose its faith in literature. Bloom is Sterling
professor of humanities at Yale, and he also teaches at New York University
but the reason he sells books in their tens of thousands is that he has set
himself against the tendency of universities to talk in relativist terms
about literature, to promote cultural studies and to analyse books as part
of a progressivist political project.

Bloom loathes all this and in the past few years has done everything he can
to reclaim the classics of literature for the general reader. This has
involved a paradoxical restatement of the need for tradition and literary
evaluation.

[...]

Of course, the academic world quails in the presence of Bloom even when it
is inclined to agree with him grudgingly, because he is so much of a ham.
This is the man who looks and sounds like Zero Mostel and calls people "My
dear" while also flying off into personal asides that the unadoring can find
self-regarding, who blatantly identifies with Shakespeare's Falstaff to the
point of making his stage debut as Shakespeare's Fat Knight at the age of 70
and who is perfectly happy to contain multitudes and to contradict himself
like one of his great poetic heroes, Walt Whitman. Bloom has learned that
you might as well project a persona if you have something serious to say and
that being a somewhat hammy character is probably the best defence against
being too narrowly understood.

_Genius_, which in the end is a marvellous book, is an attack on the various
forms of barbarism that threaten literature and literary value.

[...]

best