BIOGRAPHY
Harold Bloom (1930)
was born in New York City, earned his B.A. at Cornell, received his Ph.D. from
Yale in 1955, and has been a member of the Yale faculty since then. Bloom's
theories of poetic misprision and anxiety have changed how critics think about
literary tradition. After shaking up traditional notions of literary history in
his "revision" tetralogy, Bloom defended the objects of traditional history in
The Western Canon (1994).
Then he turned to
studying the Bible and religion. In The Book of J (1990), Bloom
identifies the author of the J-text, the oldest strand of narrative in Genesis,
Exodus, and Numbers, as a woman. The book has sold millions of copies but has
been scorned by biblical scholars, less for its wild speculations than its
defective understanding of Hebrew text. Bloom's latest pronouncements on
religion are contained in The American Religion: The Emergence of the
Post-Christian Nation (1992) and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of
Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996).
Beginning with The Book of
J in 1990, Bloom began a series of miscellaneous works that reached out to
a more popular audience. The publicity surrounding The Western Canon turned him
into something of a celebrity. His critical work is often associated with
Camille Paglia's.
The latter formulation enabled
Bloom to "transume" deconstruction and the work of his colleagues in the Yale
school as a belated reading of his own criticism. Bloom having become earlier
than the latest form of postmodernity, other forms of postmodernist criticism
perforce repress his critical contemporaneity. Having thus become both
contemporaneous and anterior, Bloom returned in Ruin the Sacred Truths
(1989) to his original topic, the poetic imagination. Having interpreted the
entire post-Enlightenment tradition, from Blake and the Romantics to Franz Kafka
and Freud, as a process akin to the secondary repression of primary drives,
Bloom went on to a new project that entailed the construction of a critical
medium capable of enabling the return of these primary sources. The Hebrew
Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, Bloom explained, constituted modes of
representations out ahead of any interpretive power to contain them and
therefore predicted Blake's theory of the Imagination and Freud's theory of
repression as more or less equivalent gestures of interpretive accommodation.
Original texts on:
www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/critical/bloom.htm