How to Read and Why - Softcover

Bloom, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841150398 ISBN 13: 9781841150390

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2001

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date :2001-09-03 Pages: 288 Language: English Publisher:. Fourth Estate A new book by Americas leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading Practical. inspirational and learned. How to Read and Why is Blooms manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.In the vastly influential The Western Canon. Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand a greater depth of the individual self. How to Read and Why continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain . deeper self-awareness Poems. stories. novels. plays and parables are all analysed as forms of writing as immersion. the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeares sonnets. the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes. the novels of Proust and Calvino. Sophocless Oedipus Rex and Marks Gospel Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of ??why we read:. in...

About this title

Review:

Harold Bloom's urgency in How to Read and Why may have much to do with his age. He brackets his combative, inspiring manual with the news that he is nearing 70 and hasn't time for the mediocre. (One doubts that he ever did.) Nor will he countenance such fashionable notions as the death of the author or abide "the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism" let alone "ideological cheerleading." Successively exploring the short story, poetry, the novel, and drama, Bloom illuminates both the how and why of his title and points us in all the right directions: toward the Romantics because they "startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life"; toward Austen, James, Proust; toward Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy; toward Cervantes and Shakespeare (but of course!), Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.

How should we read? Slowly, with love, openness, and with our inner ear cocked. Then we should reread, reread, reread, and do so aloud as often as possible. "As a boy of eight," he tells us, "I would walk about chanting Housman's and William Blake's lyrics to myself, and I still do, less frequently yet with undiminished fervor." And why should we engage in this apparently solitary activity? To increase our wit and imagination, our sense of intimacy--in short, our entire consciousness--and also to heal our pain. "Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others." So much for reading as an escape from the self!

Still, many of this volume's pleasures may indeed be selfish. The author is at his best when he is thinking aloud and anew, and his material offers him--and therefore us--endless opportunities for discovery. Bloom cherishes poetry because it is "a prophetic mode" and fiction for its wisdom. Intriguingly, he fears more for the fate of the latter: "Novels require more readers than poems do, a statement so odd that it puzzles me, even as I agree with it." We must, he adjures, crusade against its possible extinction and read novels "in the coming years of the third millennium, as they were read in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: for aesthetic pleasure and for spiritual insight."

Bloom is never heavy, since his vision quest contains a healthy love of irony--Jedediah Purdy, take note: "Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise." And this supreme critic makes us want to equal his reading prowess because he writes as well as he reads; his epigrams are equal to his opinions. He is also a master allusionist and quoter. His section on Hedda Gabler is preceded by three extraordinary statements, two from Ibsen, who insists, "There must be a troll in what I write." Who would not want to proceed? Of course, Bloom can also accomplish his goal by sheer obstinacy. As far as he is concerned, Don Quixote may have been the first novel but it remains to this day the best one. Is he perhaps tweaking us into reading this gigantic masterwork by such bald overstatement? Bloom knows full well that a prophet should stop at nothing to get his belief and love across, and throughout How to Read and Why he is as unstinting as the visionary company he adores. --Kerry Fried

About the Author:

Described in the New York Times as ` a colossus among critics ... [with] an encyclopedic intellect, exuberant eccentricity, a massive love of literature. The legend of his genius spans four decades' , Harold Bloom was born to a Yiddish-speaking family and learnt to speak English by reading the works of William Blake. He studied at Cornell, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Yale, and is Professor of Humanities at Yale and Professor of English at New York Universities, a regular contributor to literary journals and the recipient of many prizes and awards.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841150398
• ISBN 13: 9781841150390
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288