Tag: Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom has a valid gripe with the “School of Resentment” as he calls it–i.e. the group of academics who are actively destroying the notion of a canon of great works, of classics. The real virtue of this book, however, is in Bloom’s wise and warm-hearted discussions of the art of the great works themselves. … Read More
On September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka stayed up all night writing a highly autobiographical, somewhat fantastical, short story called “The Judgment.” Twelve years later he was dead. He had published little, but what he’d written in that decade—including “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” and The Trial—was a thunderbolt staked in the heart of literature … Read More
“Hamlet is the finest of all the plays in the English revenge tradition,” says Roma Gill, editor of the Oxford School Shakespeare edition of Hamlet. Some would call that an understatement, since Hamlet is frequently invoked as the greatest play in any tradition. (Flaubert said, “The three finest things God ever made are the sea, … Read More
Harold Bloom on Paradise Lost:
“What makes Paradise Lost unique is its startling blend of Shakespearean tragedy, Virgilian epic, and Biblical prophecy. The terrible pathos of Macbeth joins itself to the Aeneid‘s sense of nightmare and to the Hebrew Bible’s assertion of authority. That combination should have sunk any literary work nine fathoms deep, but John … Read More
Harold Bloom says that Freud learned all his psychology from Shakespeare. Would it be radical to suggest that Shakespeare learned half of his psychology from the Romans and the other half from the Hebrew Bible?
Robert Alter says of the Bible’s authors, “[T]he Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of … lifelike characters … Read More
A certain movie star will soon finish his run as Hamlet at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater. Polonius and Laertes will again be safe from nightly perforation at the end of this actor’s sword, and Shakespeare’s play will also be safely out of his reach. It isn’t the first time that an accomplished movie star has entered … Read More