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Title: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0-446-52717-3 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.44 (25 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: If I see one more Shakespeare reference...
Comment: The good news is that this book contains a wealth of knowledge, and you'll definitely feel like you've learned a lot upon completing it. Harold Bloom is extremely knowledgeable and has to be one of the most well-read people alive (at least as far as the Western canon is concerned).
The bad news is that this book is really tough to read. Bloom often goes off into little tangents (about G.W. Bush, the collapse of modern culture, his religion, etc.) that distract from his overall message. I also found it especially annoying that he seemingly can't go more than a page without mentioning Shakespeare (however irrelevant he may be to the topic at hand) or without using the word 'daemon'. Overall, I'm glad that I read this book, but mostly I'm just glad that I've finally finished it.
Rating: 4
Summary: Professor Bloom's will to impose system is overdetermined.
Comment: A student once asked an Oxford University don, "What is the philosophy of Bertrand Russell?" The professor replied, "Which year?"
One might well say the same of Harold Bloom.
A protean writer, Bloom resembles a chameleon whose shade of criticism shifts periodically to blend with his current obsession.
Bloom has undergone at least four critical metamorphoses: from arch-Romantic (during his "Blakean period"), to a strict Freudian phase (as shown in his legendary "anxiety of influence" theory), to Postmodernist guru (jumping onto the Francophile bandwagon with such force that he nearly overturned it), to cultural magus (as is his current state, exemplified by Genius, in which he issues edicts that display the fury of a fundamentalist preacher and the stern pronouncements of draconian law.
Bloom has changed his mind so many times that those who attempt to plot the course of his views become vertiginous.
In Genius, Bloom has written what he calls "A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds." The mosaic is of the geniuses of language, meaning that one will not find chapters on Newton, Einstein, Darwin, da Vinci, Edison, Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach.
Bloom confesses that his choice is wholly arbitrary and idiosyncratic. "No two souls," he writes, "ever agree upon what is most relevant to them."
To be fair, Bloom's elitist valuations are often on target. What serious book lover would disagree with his celebration of writers such as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Milton, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Goethe, Freud, Nietzsche, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Frost, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Twain, Faulkner, Whitman, Hugo, Dickens, and Dostoevsky?
All of Bloom's one hundred literary geniuses are dead, and most of them are male. However, he does include a few female writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and the only Asian in the book, Lady Murasaki. He also includes a dozen Latin American writers, most of whom are unknown to me.
Some of my favorite writers, alas, are missing from Bloom's pantheon: Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck.
An omnivorous reader and prolific writer, Bloom has enjoyed a publishing career that spans more than four decades. Although his erudition is beyond dispute, his pontifical and pretentious pronouncements often annoy, as if he were delivering the law from Mount Sinai or an oracle from Mount Olympus.
The essays in this 814-page tome average eight pages in length. This would be a better book if Bloom had limited his selection to forty or fifty literary geniuses, thus allowing him to devote longer critiques to each writer.
"The question we need to put to any writer," says Bloom, must be: does she or he augment our consciousness? I find this a rough but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified? If not, then I have encountered talent, not genius."
Bloom's more insightful revelations are the parallels he draws between writers in different centuries and the influence one creative spirit has had on another.
The structure of the book is ludicrous. Bloom employs a highly dubious Kabbalistic grid in the arrangement of his selected geniuses. His ambition to impose system is arbitrary and overdetermined.
Bloom has talent, but he does not have genius.
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. His more than 25 books include The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Western Canon (1994), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and studies of William Blake, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He lives in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.
Rating: 2
Summary: A conservative view
Comment: OK, for him only The Great Classics who speak of Death, Doom and Misery are worth reading. Well, let's bow to his critical skill, but I think I'll follow my own path and I'll decide what is worth reading.For humble me,Joe Keenan and Armistead Maupin are worth a dozen Cunningham. And give me Robertson Davies and Tom Robbins over Thomas Pynchon any time.
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Title: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom ISBN: 1573225142 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0684859076 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 25 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0684868733 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 25 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322233X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322751X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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