Лучшие книги Харольда Блума

«Западный канон» — самая известная и, наверное, самая полемическая книга Гарольда Блума (р. 1930), Стерлингского профессора Йельского университета, знаменитого американского критика и литературоведа. Блум страстно защищает автономность эстетической ценности и необходимость канона перед лицом «Школы ресентимента» — тех культурных тенденций, которые со времен первой публикации книги (1994) стали практически непререкаемыми. Развивая сформулированные в других своих книгах концепции «страха влияния» и «творческого искажения», Блум рассказывает о двадцати шести главных авторах Западного мира (от Данте до Толстого, от Гёте до Беккета, от Дикинсон…

Издание является первым полным русским переводом двух книг американского литературоведа Хэролда Блума, представляющих собой изложение оснований созданной им теории поэзии, в соответствии с которой развитие поэзии происходит вследствие борьбы поэтов со своими предшественниками.

Shakespeare's seven great tragedies contain unmistakable elements that set them apart from any other plays ever written.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare embodied in the character of Juliet the world's most impressive representation ever of a woman in love. With Julius Caesar, the great playwright produced a drama of astonishing and perpetual relevance. In Hamlet, Shakespeare created a character with the most brilliant mind in all of literature. And the character of Iago in Othello has been the very archetype of the villain ever since. King Lear presents audiences with unparalleled emotional and intellectual demands. Macbeth is a play of ruthless economy in which Shakespeare forces his audience into intimate sympathy with a man not far from being a mass murderer. Finally, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare created something entirely new: a vast political and historical conspectus involving the whole world.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he…

Harold Bloom, whose provocative The Western Canon changed the way we look at the classics, now seeks to define the particular genius of 100 great minds, ranging from Socrates and St. Paul to Hart Crane and Federico García Lorca. Clustering these literary thinkers in groups of five (e.g., Dickens, Dostoevsky, Babel, Celan, Ellison), Bloom illuminates his subjects without historicizing them. His insights into writers and individual works reveal Bloom's own critical genius at work. The essay on Franz Kafka, for example, evidences Bloom's half-century-long encounter with the Czech author's oeuvre. Bloom enthusiasts will be pleased, too, by his spirited digressions on the blight of academic Groupthink and the distortions of postmodern cultural studies.

Harold Bloom suggests The Waste Land is an American self-elegy masking as a mythological romance, a Romantic crisis poem pretending to be an exercise in Christian irony. Eight other critical views of Eliot's text are offered here.

The title, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on T.S. Eliot, a chronology of the author's life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.

-- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature
-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism
-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

"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…

Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" climaxes in the very first line - the protagonist has indeed been transformed. The critical questions lie in the interpretation of the transformation. Kafka has been said to have offered everything from a psychological parable of the Oedipal struggle to a caricature of psychological readings. In this collection of new critical essays, Kafka's life and other works are featured as well as notes on the essay contributors.

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This controversial, bestselling collaboration is a translation of and critical look at text within Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy written by an ostensibly female author known only as "J."

New Ed edition

Book DescriptionIn print for twenty-seven years, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion volume to Bloom's other seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence. In this finely crafted text, Bloom offers instruction in how to read a poem, using his theory

A critical overview of the work features the writings of Terry Southern, William S. Doxey, Jerome Klinkowitz, Richard Giannone, John L. Simons, James Lundquist, and other scholars.

"The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer." -Geoffrey O'Brien, "New York Review of Books" A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human "is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, and 'The Secret Sharer.' Following Harold Bloom's introduction, there appears a detailed biography of the author, discussing the major events in his life and his important literary works. Then follows a thematic and structural analysis of the works, in which significant themes, patterns, and motifs are traced. An annotated list of characters supplies brief information on the chief characters in the works.

Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.

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Bloom's fascination with David Lindsay's philosophical fantasy led him to compose a sequel in 1979. The Flight to Lucifer, his only work of fiction. Though reviews were positive, he disowned it. His self-conscious theoretical interest in the nature of fantasy literature weighed it down too heavily. He's said he'd remove every copy of the book from every library if he could.Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, supplied the concept of a voyage thru space to a planet created by a demiurge & other incidental features of the book. However, most of its content derives fairly directly from gnosticism. In Lindsay, the passionate giant Maskull & the thin, intense Nightspore, are taken from Earth to the planet Tormance by Krag, a mysterious figure who's a residue of the true godhead, Muspel, unassimilated by the false creations of Tormance's demiurge, Crystalman. Bloom's novel reproduces this formula with names drawn directly from gnostic history & cosmology. Maskull becomes Thomas Perscors, "thru fire", identified as an incarnation of Primal Man. Nightspore's correlate is Seth Valentinus, a reincarnation of the theologian. Their guide is an Aeon, Olam, an emanation of the true god. Lucifer is controlled by "Saklas", gnostic name for the false creator. Olam has brought Perscors to Lucifer to fight Saklas, & has brought Valentinus so he can remember his true self. This is also drawn from Lindsay. However, the details of their adventures differ & in the end Perscors cripples Saklas & changes the order of things on Lucifer, whereas Nightspore's victory is to escape Crystalman's clutches & see reality as it is, tho vowing to return to Earth to free others.