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proximoception) wrote2006-06-15 02:08 pm
proximoception) wrote2006-06-15 02:08 pm
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Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
Harold Bloom's next book, THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE, will be divided into three parts—the Ancients through Dante; the Renaissance on to Shakespeare and Cervantes; and the 17th-century Enlightenment to 21st-century "modernisms." It will cover much of Western imaginative literature, providing a comprehensive theory of influence: what it is and how it works. Bloom's now classic THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE, published in 1973, has been translated into more than thirty languages.
THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE seeks to revise the customary history of Western consciousness from the Greeks and Hebrews to Shakespeare and Descartes until American self-consciousness reached its summit in Emerson and degraded in the mind-negating Information Age. No one has been able to tell us the complete story of the self. For almost forty years Bloom has struggled with the idea of influence as a means to interpret it. In this book, he will illuminate the process through ages of literature, in the belief that a theory of influence can aid greatly in our understanding of the self.
He's decided to finally pull it all together, I guess, or anyway attempt to translate his main theory into plainer English. I hope he's okay. People worrying about their legacy often aren't. Also his ability to explain, though unparalleled, has almost never been able to catch up with his wild surmisings. But I wait more in hope than skepticism: who'd have expected The Visionary Company, The Anxiety of Influence, and The Western Canon out of the same man? Also Yeats, Poems of Our Climate, Invention of the Human etc.? There's masterpieces rattling around in there yet.
Harold Bloom's next book, THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE, will be divided into three parts—the Ancients through Dante; the Renaissance on to Shakespeare and Cervantes; and the 17th-century Enlightenment to 21st-century "modernisms." It will cover much of Western imaginative literature, providing a comprehensive theory of influence: what it is and how it works. Bloom's now classic THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE, published in 1973, has been translated into more than thirty languages.
THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE seeks to revise the customary history of Western consciousness from the Greeks and Hebrews to Shakespeare and Descartes until American self-consciousness reached its summit in Emerson and degraded in the mind-negating Information Age. No one has been able to tell us the complete story of the self. For almost forty years Bloom has struggled with the idea of influence as a means to interpret it. In this book, he will illuminate the process through ages of literature, in the belief that a theory of influence can aid greatly in our understanding of the self.
He's decided to finally pull it all together, I guess, or anyway attempt to translate his main theory into plainer English. I hope he's okay. People worrying about their legacy often aren't. Also his ability to explain, though unparalleled, has almost never been able to catch up with his wild surmisings. But I wait more in hope than skepticism: who'd have expected The Visionary Company, The Anxiety of Influence, and The Western Canon out of the same man? Also Yeats, Poems of Our Climate, Invention of the Human etc.? There's masterpieces rattling around in there yet.