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“... Throne. Then the taciturn little Canaanite idols call him, in the language of the spheres, kike. Harold Bloom, no less, has described this story and ‘Envy’ as ‘novellas unequalled in her generation’. And there is, doubtless, much to be admired: the manic wit, the deft rhetoric, the play of recondite ideas. It’s also interesting to see ...”

“... literary works are made up of recycled bits and pieces of other works, so that, in the words of Harold Bloom, ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ This doctrine of intertextuality is not to be confused with good old-fashioned literary influence. Such influences are mostly conscious and generally sporadic, whereas for Postmodernism it is ...”

“... As the realisation gradually dawned that it wasn’t going to happen in reality, the era of Harold Bloom and Hélène Cixous gave way to postmodernism, a streetwise culture for which theory is altogether too mandarin an affair. Postmodernists have no great relish for abstractions, think pragmatically rather than historically and are obsessed by ...”

“... has the force to understand force from within itself.’ Blurring differences, Gribble treats Harold Bloom as an adept of Deconstruction, for no reason except that Bloom took part, a few years ago, in a bizarre exercise published as Deconstruction and Criticism. Structuralism, Deconstruction and ...”

“... comes back to life – of his technique. But ‘I hope’ is a token of some viewers’ doubts. Harold Bloom, at the beginning of his Blake’s Apocalypse (still a marvellous guide), has this disarming aside: I have slighted Blake’s illustrations to his engraved poems, though to do so is to go against Blake’s intentions … Blake’s ...”

“... historian may not have intended. Donald surely did not stand Wolfe upon his wobbly legs so that Harold Bloom could knock him down again in the New York Times Book Review. No more are Hart’s thematic parallels among the characters of Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt, or among the statist designs of the New Deal, the New York World’s Fair, Nazi ...”

“... book is very much of its time. Since the enthusiastic re-evaluation of Emerson by Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom and, most importantly, Richard Poirier, Emerson’s stock has probably never stood higher. He seems, temporarily, to have moved into a privileged place beyond criticism. But I wonder if that is good for him. In 1887 Henry James reviewed a Memoir ...”

“... down with his pen to ‘the first stratum of the language’ and appropriated his birthright. As Harold Bloom might less decorously put it, the belated bastard offspring has now installed himself as the founding patriarch. It might be argued that Heaney’s anxious need for this move to be legitimated is a sign of the cultural colonisation it aims to ...”

“... on his Fulbright trip to Germany; about his relationships with women, and with the spectres of Harold Bloom and Pynchon. He writes about envy, and how it encourages productivity, and how it limits productivity, and about the folly of the very notion of artistic productivity. He writes against blogs, yet allows a comparison between Die Fackel and ...”

“... literary world’. He even wrote, and cancelled, a knowingly grotesque first stanza, which Harold Bloom maintained gave the Ode its proper tone. But there is no proper tone here, any more than there is in the other Odes – only the ‘human and fictive’, interchanging in their typically and unmisgivingly Keatsian manner: real girls and marble ...”

“... true spiritual revolution after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either ...”

“... the (distant) past. This is a posture, less projective than retroactive, that T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom ascribed to the ‘strong’ poet. It is also the approach of such strong theorists as Althusser, Lacan and Foucault when they returned to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche to read them anew. Nagel and Powell think they perform this kind of critical ...”

“... occasioning a formal elegy in which Pushkin parodies conventional literary lachrymosity (‘the bloom has withered on the bough’ etc etc) only to follow it with a passage in which, having mourned the death to poetry that Lensky’s untimely snatch may represent, he revises his judgment, adding that it is more likely that Lensky would have become an idle ...”

“... to reconcile? Can a poet of the later 20th century still convincingly align him or herself to what Harold Bloom, writing of the canonical English Romantics, called the Visionary Company? How do you write what Gascoyne calls ‘post-Auschwitz theology’? Why did his precocious gifts fizzle out after the publication of A Vagrant in 1951? Indeed, why did so ...”

“... of our cultural insularity that it has taken so long for Pessoa’s work to become known. When Harold Bloom recently listed him among the 26 authors who comprise, for him, the fabled Western Canon, Time magazine implied that this was a symptom of Bloom’s pretentious interest in ‘academic obscurities’. It will ...”