Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds - Hardcover

Bloom, Harold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446527173 ISBN 13: 9780446527170

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

From the Bible to Ralph Ellison, America's most prominent and bestselling literary critic takes an enlightening look at the concept of genius through the ages in a celebration of the greatest creative writers of all time. 50 photos.

About this title

About the Author

Harold Bloom lives in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut. Widely recognized as America's leading literary critic, he teaches at Yale and NYU.

Reviews

With The Western Canon, Yale-based critical eminence Bloom tapped into a strain of the cultural zeitgeist looking for authoritative takes on what to read. Bloom here follows up with 6-10 pages each on 100 "geniuses" of literature (all deceased) pointing to the major works, outlining the major achievements therein, showing us how to recognize them for ourselves. Despite the book's length, Bloom's mostly male geniuses are, as he notes "certainly not `the top one hundred' in anyone's judgement, my own included. I wanted to write about these." Bloom backs up his choices with such effortless and engaging erudition that their idiosyncrasy and casualness become strengths. While organized under the rubric of the 10 Kabalistic Sefirot, "attributes at once of God and of Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's Image," Bloom's chosen figures are associated by his own brilliant (and sometimes jabbingly provocative) forms of attention, from a linkage of Dr. Johnson, Goethe and Freud to one of Dickens, Celan and Ellison (with a few others in between them). A pleasant surprise is the plethora of lesser-known Latin American authors, from Luz Vaz de Camoes to Jos‚ Maria E‡a de Queiroz and Alejo Carpentier. Many familiar greats are here, too, as is a definition of genius. "This book is not a work of analysis or of close reading, but of surmise and juxtaposition," Bloom writes, and as such readers will find it appropriately enthusiastic and wild.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Bloom's great distinction and power as a literary critic, and a best-selling one at that, is the union of his extraordinary erudition and his profound love for literature. A gifted reader, teacher, and writer, he has celebrated literature's munificence in such influential books as The Western Canon (1994) and How to Read and Why (2000), and now conducts a magnificent inquiry into that elusive quality called genius. Bloom strictly profiles "geniuses of language"--poets, dramatists, novelists, philosophers, and religious writers--and, except for a core group that includes Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Milton, and Tolstoy, has selected his 100 (all deceased, including the most contemporary: Octavio Paz, Ralph Ellison, Iris Murdoch) not because they're the top geniuses, but because their quests were in some measure cosmic, their language transcendent, and their lives intriguing. Literature is a spiritual calling for Bloom and his geniuses, so he has organized this bountiful volume according to the Kabbalah's 10 divine attributes or emanations, the Sefirot, which chart "the process of creation." This makes for some wonderfully fresh and provocative juxtapositions, and for an elevating concentration on how each writer extends the path toward wisdom. Personal heroes such as Dr. Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson receive particularly incisive readings, as do Victor Hugo, Isaac Babel, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens--well, one could go on. Bloom's mission in this stupendous yet intimate compendium of succinct yet sophisticated essays is "to activate the genius of appreciation" in his readers for one of humanity's finest callings, and that he does with ardor, art, wit, and deep knowledge. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Bloom, a distinguished and often controversial literary critic and best-selling author of numerous books about literature (e.g., How To Read and Why), explores the concept of literary genius through the ages by examining 100 writers. Aside from such "must includes" as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, and Plato, Bloom offers some perhaps less well known to American readers, such as Lady Murasaki and Octavio Paz, acknowledging that his selections are idiosyncratic and were chosen because he wanted to write about certain authors, not because they were necessarily in "the top one hundred." In the introduction, Bloom posits a definition of genius that is fleshed out in his discussion of each writer. Authors are clustered into Lustres, or groups of five, while a brief introduction to each section explains why the writers in the section are associated with one another. (Each of the Lustres is based on one of the common names for the Kabbalistic Sefirot, which Bloom describes as representing God's creativity or genius.) Although the book is a delight to read, its real value lies in the author's ability to provoke the reader into thinking about literature, genius, and related topics. No similar work discusses literary genius in this way or covers this many writers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. Lib., Zanesville
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446527173
• ISBN 13: 9780446527170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 832