How To Read and Why - Hardcover

Bloom, Harold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684859068 ISBN 13: 9780684859064

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

At a time when faster and easier electronic media threaten to eclipse reading and literature, the renowned literary critic explores reasons for reading, offering inspirational analyses of seminal works of literature, and demonstrates the aesthetic pleasure reading can bring. 150,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

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 at Harvard. His more than twenty books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The Book of J and The Anxiety of Influence. He is a MacArthur Prize fellow; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the recipient of many awards, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Criticism, and he holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Rome and Bologna.

Reviews

This aesthetic self-help manual is a reliably idiosyncratic guide to what Yale literary critic Bloom calls "the most healing of pleasures"A reading well. In chapters that focus on short stories, poems, novels and plays, Bloom takes readers on a swift but satisfying joyride through the West's most outrageous, original and exuberant textsAclassics by Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Borges, Dickinson, Proust, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, among others. Unconventionally organized by literary genre, his text is passionately anecdotal and observant. By asking great questionsA"Why does Lady Bracknell delight us so much?"; "How does one read a short story?"ABloom hopes to influence our reading lists and habits. He gives some texts, such as Moby-Dick, almost cursory treatment; others he discusses at length. Fans of his bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) will find the lengthy discussion of Hamlet here to be a kind of coda. Overall, this book is a testament to Bloom's view that reading is above all a pleasurably therapeutic event. "Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness," he notes, reminding us of what's inexhaustible about writers such as Whitman and Borges and attesting to the satisfaction that literary texts offer our solitary selves. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The prolific critic Bloom (Shakespeare, 1998, etc.) has courted controversy in the last few years with his denunciations of the politically correct School of Resentment that now dominates most universities--and he has not been discreet in his attacks on many of the writers (such as Toni Morrison) that this school holds in highest esteem. Here, he carries his arguments to an even more fundamental level, demanding that we consider what the point and purpose of literature can be in an age where information has gone far beyond the verbal forms in which literature subsides. Information is endlessly available to us, he points out, where shall wisdom be found? Naturally, Bloom finds it in the great writers of the Western tradition, and he proceeds to tell us just how great they (i.e., Hemingway, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austen, Dickens, Chekhov, Cervantes, etc.) are--and why. As with most of Bloom's more recent works, the great controversy here is not what he says, but whom he chooses to say it about, and the many debates that he will set off are likely not to get past his table of contents. Which will be a pity, frankly, because Bloom's insights into just about anything can be worth all of his postures. A molehill of old lectures--some of them brilliant, all of them at least worth skimming through--that will probably get made into a mountain of academic politics. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the tradition of Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book and Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan, the indefatigable and irascible Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) offers his apologia for the art of reading well. Greatly saddened by contemporary academic criticism, where the "appreciation of Victorian women's underwear has replaced the appreciation of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning," Bloom stridently argues that "we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests." For Bloom, as for his critical forbears Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading is a solitary act that fills life with zest and insight. He suggests five guiding principles for the restoration of reading and applies these principles to short stories, poems, plays, and novels. Each brief analysis is a finely crafted meditation on the power of great literature, and Bloom's assiduous interpretations of the works of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and Stendhal, among others, will send readers running to the books themselves. Although Bloom's use of Shakespeare as a touchstone for his "canon" of great literature is sure to be controversial, his book presents a forceful argument for the power and delight of reading deeply. Highly recommended.
---Henry Carrigan, Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bloom, the best-known literary critic of our time, shares his extensive knowledge of and profound joy in the works of a constellation of major writers, including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Austen, Dickinson, Melville, Wilde, and O'Connor in this eloquent invitation to readers to read and read well. Why read? Because "reading is the most healing of pleasures." How to read? Bloom offers a set of cogent principles, which includes the all-important reminder to free the mind of all ideology and cant and experience each literary creation on its own terms. He then lights the way in expert and passionate interpretations of short stories--grouping them in two schools: the Chekhovian (impressionistic) and the Borgesian (phantasmagorical)--poetry, "the crown of imaginative literature"; plays; and novels. Every analytical performance is exhilarating, and his essay on Proust is one of the most beautiful and insightful tributes to the restorative powers of literature ever written. Bloom's clear vision and abiding humanity support his belief that "only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684859068
• ISBN 13: 9780684859064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288