| The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction Subjects: Bloom Harold; Criticism -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Literature -- History and criticism -- Theory etc.; Deconstruction; Romanticism; Jews -- Intellectual life; Harold Bloom is our greatest living literary critic. His wide-ranging critical writings have plumbed the depths of Romanticism ( The Visionary Company ), explored the anxiety caused by the influence of one generation of poets on another ( Agon, The Anxiety of Influence ), wrestled with the idea of a literary canon ( The Western Canon ), introduced Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to America ( Deconstruction and Criticism ), and explored the relationship between religion, especially Judaism, and literature ( Kabbalah and Criticism, The Book of J ). Bloom is indeed a party of one, a truly strong poet of his own mode of religious-literary criticism, who, in a typically Emersonian manner, makes his own circumstances and sheds influences by incorporating them into his idiosyncratic theory.In this unprecedented full-length study on Harold Bloom, Agata Bielik-Robson explores the many facets of Bloom's critical writings and career. In his work, she argues, Bloom draws on a variety of disparate traditions--Judaism, gnosis, Romanticism, American pragmatism, and Freudianism, but also, especially recently, Victorian aestheticism--that comprise a dialectical, difficult whole in a constant quarrel with itself. Yet, this is precisely the image of "life-in-antithesis," which constitutes Bloom's highest speculative achievement, she observes. The Saving Lie brings all these "Blooms" together and, despite their own tendencies toward dissociation, lets them speak unisono: in one almost harmonious voice that will clearly utter the principles of a new speculative position--Bloom's antithetical vitalism. This study of Bloom and his contributions will not soon be surpassed. Agata Bielik-Robson is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and at the Center for American Studies at the University of Warsaw. |