Synopses & Reviews
In this lovely gift book published for the holiday season, Harold Bloom again combines his lifelong interests in religion and literature. He begins by observing our present-day obsession with angels, which reached its greatest intensity as the current millennium approached. For the most part, these popular angels are banal, even insipid. Bloom is especially concerned with a particular subspecies of angels: fallen angels. He proceeds to examine representations of fallen angels from Zoroastrian texts and the Bible to Miltons Paradise Lost to Tony Kushners Angels in America, arguing that familiarity with this rich literary tradition improves our reading and spiritual lives. Blooms text is accompanied by more than a dozen original watercolors, line drawings, and illuminated letters by award-winning artist Mark Podwal.
Every angel is terrifying, Rilke wrote. For Bloom, too, this is true in one sense, since he maintains that all angels are fallen angels. The image of Satan, the greatest of fallen angels, retains the ability to fascinate and frighten us, he argues, because we share a close kinship with him. Indeed, from a human perspective, we must agree that we are fallen angels. Fallenness is ultimately a human condition: the recognition of our own mortality. Throughout world literature angels have always served as metaphors for death. We may take consolation, however, in our double awareness that angels also represent love and the celebration of human possibilities.
Review
"Bloom . . . has many arresting things to say and says them, often, with exquisite precision. He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century - and one of the most protean, a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer."—Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times Book Review
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“Bloom reveals his own magisterial, sometimes mischievous, self in his meditations on the masters with whom he connects.”—Iain Finlayson, The Times
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“Ah, then theres Harold Bloom, Americas giant of a literary critic. . . . In The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, Bloom pulls off a masterly connecting of the dots through the literary canon and his own life with his usual breathtaking eloquence.”—Publishers Weekly
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"Blooms erudite mix of acerbic judgments (e.g., the New Testament's literary ugliness) and awed delight ('the biblical David is an incarnate poem') offers readers a fresh take on an old book."—Publishers Weekly
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“Bloom moves adroitly between the KJB and the earlier translations of Tyndale and Coverdale....Readers also benefit from illuminating comparisons with the Geneva Bible (which the KJB supplanted), with the Tanakh (or Hebrew Bible), and with the Greek New Testament, so acquiring a deep appreciation for the compelling narrative the KJB delivers....Bloom yields to the KJBs literary splendor—and invites readers to join in his surrender.”—Booklist, starred review Publishers Weekly
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“Bloom yields to the KJBs literary splendor—and invites readers to join in his surrender.”—Booklist, starred review
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“Just fascinating, brilliant, and reliably Bloomsian.”— Mark Sarvas, The Elegant Variation
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“The greatest strength of Bloom's volume comes in helping the reader navigate to, and through, the finest literary passages of the Bible; explaining how the ancient verses have influenced the past four centuries of Western literature.”—Deseret News
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Booklist, named A Top 10 Book in Religion and Spirituality, 11/15/2011
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“Exhilarating, provocative. . . . Bloom [enriches] his remarks with l Nick Owchar
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“A fascinating, intellectually nimble tour de force.”—Yvonne Zipp, Washington Post
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“Exhilarating, provocative." —Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times Nick Owchar
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“[A] product of decades of thought, this is an old mans book - wise while verging on the sentimental, pared down yet also self-indulgent, sometimes belligerent or desperate - whose overarching message should resonate nevertheless with readers of all generations.”—Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times Deseret News
Review
“The book is invigorated by a passion. Bloom is evangelical on the genius of the King James Bible. He is excellent on the contribution of William Tyndale, “the authentic genius of English Bible Translation”. He can be brilliantly perceptive on the “erotic magnetism” of Esther or flawed heroism of David. His brisk run through the prophets is fun and often convincing. “Jonah is a sulking, unwilling prophet, cowardly and petulant,” he writes. “Elijah and Elisha are savage, Jeremiah is a bipolar depressive, Ezekiel a madman.”—Hugh MacDonald, Sunday Herald (Scotland) Jackie Wullschlager - Financial Times
Synopsis
Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic, essays to explain the meaning of angels in world literature
Synopsis
"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in
The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."
For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is "a critical self-portrait," a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?
Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poetsShakespeare, Whitman, and Craneas well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters. Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on a scale that the author will not again attempt, The Anatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with a sense of something ever more about to be.
Synopsis
A richly insightful reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterwork, published for the text's 400-year anniversary
Synopsis
The King James Bible stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English," sharing the honor only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing "all my long life," a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece.
Bloom calls it an "inexplicable wonder" that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon—or, in some cases, diminished—the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value.
About the Author
From the Introduction:
The largest aesthetic paradox of the KJB is its gorgeous exfoliation of the Hebrew original. Evidently the KJB men knew just enough Hebrew to catch the words but not the original music. Their relative ignorance transmuted into splendor because they shared a sense of literary decorum that all subsequent translators seem to lack. Miles Coverdale, bare both of Hebrew and of Greek, set a pattern that Miles Smith perfected. It is another of the many paradoxes of the KJB that its elaborate prose harmonies essentially were inaugurated by Coverdales intuitive journey into the poems and prophecies his master Tyndale did not live to translate. We have Tyndales Jonah and a medley of prophetic passages, eleven from Isaiah, in the Epistle Taken out of the Old Testament. How wonderful it would be to have Job, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah from the hand of Tyndale, though probably that would have prevented Coverdales astonishing flair for style and rhythm from manifesting itself. This flair was unsteady, yet at its best it gave us something of the sonority we associate with KJB.
Tyndale, Coverdale, and the Geneva translators (including their best Hebraist, Gilby) all possessed the gift of literary authority. Their revisionist, Miles Smith, explicitly displays his sense of style in the 1611 preface, “The Translators to the Reader,” and implicitly stands forth by his editorial responsibility for the ways in which the KJB men handle their inheritance from previous English Bibles. Again paradox intervenes: from Tyndale through KJB the quest is to get closer to the literal sense of the Hebrew, while the consequence is to increase a cognitive music farther and farther away in regard to the Hebrew Bibles relative freedom from metaphors. Since all metaphor is a kind of mistake anyway, even the plain errors of the KJB sometimes add to the resultant splendor.