Harold Bloom

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Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930 in New York City ; died October 14, 2019 in New Haven , Connecticut ) was an American literary scholar and critic . He achieved international fame in the course of the canon debates that took place in the 1980s .

Life

Bloom was born in 1930 to Yiddish- speaking Orthodox Jews who emigrated to the United States from Russia. His parents never learned to read English , according to the New York Times . Bloom studied first at Cornell University , then at Yale University , where he has also taught since 1955. Since 1988 he has also held a professorship at NYU, also a professorship at Harvard University . He was married and has two sons, one of whom is severely disabled. From 1984 Bloom has been the publisher of literary anthologies for the Chelsea House publishing house , in which capacity he has written more than 400 introductions to the work of the authors discussed.

At the beginning of his career he turned against the predominant literary approach at American universities, the so-called New Criticism . In particular, he defended the writers of English romanticism such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge against the disdain for their works, which had been widespread since TS Eliot . In the 1970s, he briefly flirted with deconstructivism , which at that time became the dominant discourse , especially at Yale University , but later rejected it. From the beginning he was unable to gain anything from the New Historicism , which grew stronger in the 1980s .

In his band The Anxiety of Influence (dt. Influence fear ), he developed the idea that a writer is constantly trying in his quest for originality, to break away from his models and influences. Bloom compared this paradoxical situation with the Oedipus complex of psychoanalysis: the poet tries to kill his "spiritual father". According to Bloom, the quality or originality of a poem can be measured by the force with which it is able to displace a previous poem; this is particularly successful if the new poem appears to be “more original” than the previous poem.

Bloom elaborated this thesis in several books of the 1970s by showing the defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis dealt with by Anna Freud in detail in the relationship between poets and between poems. He found analogous ideas in Gnosticism and Kabbalah ; In his opinion, these currents are essentially about dealing with the problem of poetic originality and creativity.

Since then, an idealistic-religious tone has been decisive in his writings. In Bloom's eyes, good literature deals with the basic questions of human existence and reveals the pursuit of perfection and immortality.

With this view, Bloom came into conflict with more recent currents, when the curricula of American schools and universities were changed in many places since the 1970s and, increasingly, the literature that was written by women, blacks, immigrants or authors of the third world , to the disadvantage of the works “dead white European men ”( dwems ) was preferred. Bloom saw in this development an unheard of politicization of the literary business and now braced himself in numerous books, lectures and interviews against the alleged decline of Western culture.

Bloom's self-image as guardian of the Grail of Western culture earned him the admiration of conservative circles against his intention, but later also a lot of criticism and ridicule. In 2000, a dispute escalated with the Marxist literature professor Terry Eagleton , who accused Bloom of pathetic moralizing.

Awards

In 1979, Harold Bloom, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1990 the American Academy of Arts and Letters received, in 1985 he received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation , also referred to as the Genius Award . From 1995 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Fear of influence and the revision of the poetic forerunner

The fearful, catastrophic confrontation with the poetic forerunner takes place, according to Bloom, in several stages, for which he puts together names from very different areas in The Anxiety of Influence . These are the following six revision ratios or methods of revision:

  1. Clinamen , the original deviation, based on the model of the atomic movement in the teaching of Democritus and Lucretius .
  2. Tessera , the complementary fragment after the identification mark in the ancient mysteries , the meaningful "addition" of the predecessor.
  3. Kenosis , the “discontinuity with the predecessor” based on the model of Paul in Philippians .
  4. Demonization , the establishment of a “counter- sublime ”: Bloom refers to Neoplatonism here .
  5. Askesis , a deliberate self- restriction in the tradition of old ecstasy techniques .
  6. Apophrades after the ominous days of the Athenian calendar when the dead return to their old abode: The work is now kept open to the influence of its predecessor, but it seems to produce it itself.

In A Map of Misreading (dt. A Topography of incorrect reading ) Bloom adds these categories by the classical rhetoric , by the defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis and by ideas from the Kabbalah Isaac Luria . Like Luria the cosmic creation process, so he imagines the poetic one: the poet's retreat, his contraction ( Tzimtzum ) leads to the emergence, to the restoration (Tiqūn) of his work; the mentioned "revisionary ratios" are clearly divided into those of the "limitation", the limitation (the 1st, 3rd and 5th) and those of the "representation" (the 2nd, 4th and 6th).

In the rhetorical tradition, too, he finds a distinction between the tropes of limitation and those of representation. To the four main tropes of metaphor (to 5.), metonymy (to 3.), synekdoche (to 2.) and irony (to 1.), which have been distinguished by Giambattista Vico , he adds two more, hyperbola (to 4.) and metalepsis (to 6.), so that each ratio is characterized by the priority of a trope. Likewise, the defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis mentioned variously by Sigmund Freud and codified by Anna Freud , combined into six groups, are anchored in this scheme.

A complete revision of the previous text requires running through all six ratios, but less complete forms are also possible.

Bloom's canon

Harold Bloom held that any literary work must face "the competitor's ancient and relentless three-fold question," with possible answers "better than, worse than, as good as," and he kept the current state of this contest regularly in books and interviews.

In 1975 he named Robert Penn Warren , James Merrill , John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop as the greatest living American poets. He later added AR Ammons and Henri Cole to this list .

In a late 1980s interview, he said Samuel Beckett was "probably the greatest living writer in the Western world." In the introduction to the volume Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon (1987) he presented his canon The American Sublime , which contains what he considers to be the most important achievements of American culture of the 20th century. They are:

In his book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages in 1994 Bloom introduced a total of 26 authors (22 men and four women) whom he considered to be central writers of the Western world and thus, in his view, the backbone of Western culture make up: William Shakespeare (in front of the other authors), Dante Alighieri , Geoffrey Chaucer , Miguel de Cervantes , Michel de Montaigne , Molière , John Milton , Samuel Johnson , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , William Wordsworth , Jane Austen , Walt Whitman , Emily Dickinson , Charles Dickens , George Eliot , Lew Tolstoy , Henrik Ibsen , Sigmund Freud , Marcel Proust , James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , Franz Kafka , Jorge Luis Borges , Pablo Neruda , Fernando Pessoa and Samuel Beckett .

In autumn 2003, he announced in the Los Angeles Times in a polemic against the awarding of the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters of the National Book Award to Stephen King , there were "four American writers who are still at work and deserve our appreciation" namely Thomas Pynchon , Philip Roth , Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo .

He identified the poet Geoffrey Hill and the novelist Iris Murdoch as the most important contemporary British authors .

Works

  • Shelley's Mythmaking . Yale University Press, New Haven 1959.
  • The Visionary Company. A Reading of English Romantic Poetry . University Press, Ithaca, NY 1993, ISBN 0-8014-9117-7 (EA New York 1961).
  • Blake's Apocalypse. A Study in Poetic Argument. University Press, New York 1970, ISBN 0-8014-0568-8 (EA New York 1963).
  • Yeats . Oxford University Press, London 1972, ISBN 0-19-501603-3 (EA NEw York 1970).
  • The Ringers in the Tower. Studies in Romantic Tradition. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1973, ISBN 0-226-06048-9 (EA Chicago 1971).
  • The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press, New York 1997, ISBN 0-19-511221-0 (EA New York 1973).
    • Fear of Influence (Nexus; Vol. 4). Publishing house Stroemfeld, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-86109-104-6 .
  • A map of misreading. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-19-516221-8 (EA New York 1975)
  • Kabbalah and Criticism . Continuum Books, London 2005, ISBN 0-8264-1737-X (EA New York 1975).
    • Kabbalah. Poetry and Criticism (Nexus; Vol. 17). Publishing house Stroemfeld, Frankfurt / M. 2002, ISBN 3-86109-117-8 .
  • Poetry and Repression. Revisionism from Blake to Stevens . Yale University Press, New Haven 1976, ISBN 0-300-01923-8 .
  • Figures of Capable Imagination. Seabury Press, New York 1976, ISBN 0-8164-9277-8 .
  • The Flight to Lucifer. A Gnostic Fantasy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York 1979, ISBN 0-374-15644-1 (novel).
  • Wallace Stevens. The Poems of our Climate. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1993, ISBN 0-8014-0840-7 (EA Ithaca 1977).
  • Deconstruction and Criticism. Continuum Books, London 1995, ISBN 0-8264-0010-8 (together with Paul de Man , Jacques Derrida , Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller; EA New York 1979).
  • The Breaking of the Vessels. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1982, ISBN 0-226-06043-8 .
    • The rupture of the vessels . Publishing house Stroemfeld, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-86109-120-8 .
  • The Book of J . Grove Weidenfeld, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8021-1050-9 (former title: The Book of Job . New York 1988).
  • Ruin the Sacred Truths. Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1991, ISBN 0-674-78027-2 (EA Cambridge 1989).
    • Overthrow the holy truths. Interpretation and Belief from the Bible to the Present . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-518-58086-8 .
  • The American Religion. The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. C. Hartley Publ., New York 2006, ISBN 978-0-9787210-0-8 (EA New York 1992).
  • Agon. Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1983, ISBN 0-19-502945-3 (EA New York 1982).
  • The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages. Macmillan, London 2006, ISBN 0-333-69915-7 (EA New York 1994).
  • Omens of Millennium. The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. Riverhead Books, New York 1996. ISBN 1-57322-045-0 .
  • William Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, New York 1998, ISBN 1-57322-120-1 .
    • Shakespeare. The invention of the human . Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-8270-0325-3 .
  • How to Read and Why. Scribner, New York 2000, ISBN 0-684-85906-8 .
    • The art of reading. How and why we should read . Bertelsmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-570-00334-5
  • Genius. A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. Warner Books, New York 2002, ISBN 0-446-52717-3 .
    • Genius. The hundred most important authors of world literature . Knaus, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8135-0243-0 .
  • Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. Riverhead Books, New York 2003, ISBN 1-57322-233-X .
  • Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Riverhead Books, New York 2004, ISBN 1-57322-284-4 .
  • An Anatomy of Influence. Literature as a Way of Life . Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 2011, ISBN 978-0-300-16760-3 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 10, 2019 .
  2. ^ Member History: Harold Bloom. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 6, 2018 (English, with short biography).
  3. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/2003/sep/19/opinion/oe-bloom19
  4. ↑ Based on the translation from Hebrew by David Rosenberg.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bloom, Harold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar and critic
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 2019
Place of death New Haven , Connecticut