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Title: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0-446-69129-1 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.37 (27 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: not Bloom's best
Comment: Harold Bloom loves--LOVES--reading, books, the written word. That comes through in all of his recent books and adds an extra something to them. And this work has that something, which is enough to recommend reading it, despite its flaws and pretensions.
Bloom assembles his 100 geniuses according to Kabbalah, the old Jewish form of speculation, which is difficult to penetrate. Still, while I was initially put off by this method, it did occasionally bear fruit in the juxtaposition of not often compared geniuses: John Donne and Lady Murasaki, for example. Bloom's obsessions come through, as well, for better or worse (depending on one's own): the Gnosticism surely familiar to Bloom fans; his Bardolatry; his loathing for T.S. Eliot (although he does include him, justifiably, as a genius). This is a very personal book, in which Bloom offers his own reflections on these writers and on the world. We find out, for example, that Bloom does not accept the legitimacy of George W. Bush and (twice) that he laments the fact that an atheist can't be "elected dogcatcher" in the US (both times with the same phrase). He puts forth interesting thoughts on each writer, but his readings (misreadings?) of Flannery O'Connor and Dostoevsky are particularly grating: he understates the Christian faith of both, and even goes so far as to suggest that Dostoevsky was at his worst when writing about spiritual matters.
All that aside, the book still has its merits. These geniuses are lovingly and passionately collected, and their words are frequently excerpted. Many--probably most--of these quotations are absolutely fascinating, riveting; more than a few of which are worth copying down for future reference. A published review somewhere, I now forget where, suggested that this is not a book to read straight through, and it is not, indeed. Rather, it yields the most pleasure when jumping from person to person, from one's favorite writers to those one doesn't know so well--and back again. Despite its flaws and Bloom's obsessions, it is still a book to be savored.
Rating: 4
Summary: Professor Bloom's will to impose system is overdetermined.
Comment: A student once asked an Oxford University don, "What is the philosophy of Bertrand Russell?" The professor replied, "Which year?"
One might well say the same of Harold Bloom.
A protean writer, Bloom resembles a chameleon whose shade of criticism shifts periodically to blend with his current obsession.
Bloom has undergone at least four critical metamorphoses: from arch-Romantic (during his "Blakean period"), to a strict Freudian phase (as shown in his legendary "anxiety of influence" theory), to Postmodernist guru (jumping onto the Francophile bandwagon with such force that he nearly overturned it), to cultural magus (as is his current state, exemplified by Genius, in which he issues edicts that display the fury of a fundamentalist preacher and the stern pronouncements of draconian law.
Bloom has changed his mind so many times that those who attempt to plot the course of his views become vertiginous.
In Genius, Bloom has written what he calls "A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds." The mosaic is of the geniuses of language, meaning that one will not find chapters on Newton, Einstein, Darwin, da Vinci, Edison, Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach.
Bloom confesses that his choice is wholly arbitrary and idiosyncratic. "No two souls," he writes, "ever agree upon what is most relevant to them."
To be fair, Bloom's elitist valuations are often on target. What serious book lover would disagree with his celebration of writers such as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Milton, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Goethe, Freud, Nietzsche, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Frost, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Twain, Faulkner, Whitman, Hugo, Dickens, and Dostoevsky?
All of Bloom's one hundred literary geniuses are dead, and most of them are male. However, he does include a few female writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and the only Asian in the book, Lady Murasaki. He also includes a dozen Latin American writers, most of whom are unknown to me.
Some of my favorite writers, alas, are missing from Bloom's pantheon: Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck.
An omnivorous reader and prolific writer, Bloom has enjoyed a publishing career that spans more than four decades. Although his erudition is beyond dispute, his pontifical and pretentious pronouncements often annoy, as if he were delivering the law from Mount Sinai or an oracle from Mount Olympus.
The essays in this 814-page tome average eight pages in length. This would be a better book if Bloom had limited his selection to forty or fifty literary geniuses, thus allowing him to devote longer critiques to each writer.
"The question we need to put to any writer," says Bloom, must be: does she or he augment our consciousness? I find this a rough but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified? If not, then I have encountered talent, not genius."
Bloom's more insightful revelations are the parallels he draws between writers in different centuries and the influence one creative spirit has had on another.
The structure of the book is ludicrous. Bloom employs a highly dubious Kabbalistic grid in the arrangement of his selected geniuses. His ambition to impose system is arbitrary and overdetermined.
Bloom has talent, but he does not have genius.
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 of Poetry at Harvard. His more than 25 books include The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Western Canon (1994), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and studies of William Blake, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He lives in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.
Rating: 1
Summary: read the books yourselve's people
Comment: You don't need some pretentious ass telling you what's great. I agree with the reviews sick of the shakespeare reference. Shakespeare was good, but many of the writers on here are alot better. In responsoe to one of the reviewers
"Science for Bloom (and that other Bloom, too) is anthropology - psychology, the social stuff that may strive to apply scientific methods but is far from natural science; and he (they) show, in their proclivity for cabalism and antipathy for imperial, dull and wrong "science", that they have, like the majority of Americans, never taken a single course in biology, evolution, geology, physics, cosmology; never read, say, Wilson, Darwin, Dennett, Lyle, Hawking, Weinberg, Sagan. Their "gnosticism" is a cheesy wriggling out of of both religion and science. If he/they want to make any reference to dogmas of science, he/they need to understand it a little. Science is not what they think it is."
I agree that social sciences are almost pseudo sciences. All the good stuff in psych is just common sense. And yes, I have taken several courses in math, Physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry.(I even made it to state for biology in hs). I have also taken courses in philosophy and theology. I feel, unlike bloom, that science ad religion are very important. Science is not perfect though. Many of the great scientists you listed had atheistic agendas. Men such as Hawking are uncomfortable with the creational notions of the big bang, so they are always devising some ridiculous way to get around it. I think Hawking is probably overrated anyway because of his wheelchair condition.
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Title: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom ISBN: 1573225142 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0684859076 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 25 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322233X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322751X Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0684868733 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 25 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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