Authors: Harold Bloom
ISBN-13: 9780684859071, ISBN-10: 0684859076
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Date Published: September 2001
Edition: 1 TOUCHSTO
One of our most popular, respected, and controversial literary critics, Yale University professor Harold Bloom s books about, variously, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the classic literature are as erudite as they are accessible.
America's wisest, most prolific readerand the New York Times best-selling author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human draws on his more than 40 years as a college professor and critic to help readers attain a truly profound engagement with great literature.
This aesthetic self-help manual is a reliably idiosyncratic guide to what Yale literary critic Bloom calls "the most healing of pleasures"-- reading well. In chapters that focus on short stories, poems, novels and plays, Bloom takes readers on a swift but satisfying joyride through the West's most outrageous, original and exuberant texts--classics by Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Borges, Dickinson, Proust, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, among others. Unconventionally organized by literary genre, his text is passionately anecdotal and observant. By asking great questions--"Why does Lady Bracknell delight us so much?"; "How does one read a short story?"--Bloom hopes to influence our reading lists and habits. He gives some texts, such as Moby-Dick, almost cursory treatment; others he discusses at length. Fans of his bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) will find the lengthy discussion of Hamlet here to be a kind of coda. Overall, this book is a testament to Bloom's view that reading is above all a pleasurably therapeutic event. "Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness," he notes, reminding us of what's inexhaustible about writers such as Whitman and Borges and attesting to the satisfaction that literary texts offer our solitary selves. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Preface | 19 | |
Prologue: Why Read? | 21 | |
I. | Short Stories | |
Introduction | 31 | |
32 | ||
"Bezhin Lea" | 32 | |
"Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands" | 34 | |
36 | ||
"The Kiss" | 37 | |
"The Student" | 39 | |
"The Lady with the Dog" | 40 | |
42 | ||
"Madame Tellier's Establishment" | 43 | |
"The Horla" | 44 | |
46 | ||
"Hills Like White Elephants" | 46 | |
"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" | 47 | |
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" | 48 | |
"A Sea Change" | 50 | |
51 | ||
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" | 52 | |
"Good Country People" | 52 | |
"A View of the Woods" | 53 | |
54 | ||
"The Vane Sisters" | 54 | |
56 | ||
"Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius" | 58 | |
60 | ||
"Gogol's Wife" | 61 | |
62 | ||
Invisible Cities | 62 | |
Summary Observations | 65 | |
II. | Poems | |
Introduction | 69 | |
Housman, Blake, Landor, and Tennyson | 70 | |
71 | ||
"Into My Heart an Air That Kills" | 71 | |
71 | ||
"The Sick Rose" | 71 | |
72 | ||
"On His Seventy-fifth Birthday" | 72 | |
73 | ||
"The Eagle" | 73 | |
"Ulysses" | 74 | |
79 | ||
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" | 79 | |
88 | ||
Song of Myself | 89 | |
Dickinson, Bronte, Popular Ballads, and "Tom O'Bedlam" | 94 | |
94 | ||
Poem 1260, "Because That You Are Going" | 95 | |
97 | ||
"Stanzas: Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning" | 97 | |
99 | ||
"Sir Patrick Spence" | 99 | |
"The Unquiet Grave" | 102 | |
dAnonymous | 104 | |
"Tom O'Bedlam" | 104 | |
110 | ||
Sonnet 121, "'Tis Better to Be Vile Than Vile Esteemed" | 111 | |
Sonnet 129, "Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame" | 113 | |
Sonnet 144, "Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair" | 114 | |
116 | ||
Paradise Lost | 116 | |
120 | ||
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" | 121 | |
"My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold" | 123 | |
124 | ||
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | 124 | |
Shelley and Keats | 129 | |
129 | ||
The Triumph of Life | 129 | |
134 | ||
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" | 134 | |
Summary Observations | 138 | |
III. | Novels, Part I | |
Introduction | 143 | |
Don Quixote | 145 | |
The Charterhouse of Parma | 150 | |
Emma | 156 | |
Great Expectations | 162 | |
Crime and Punishment | 166 | |
The Portrait of a Lady | 173 | |
In Search of Lost Time | 181 | |
The Magic Mountain | 187 | |
Summary Observations | 193 | |
IV. | Plays | |
Introduction | 199 | |
Hamlet | 201 | |
Hedda Gabler | 218 | |
The Importance of Being Earnest | 224 | |
Summary Observations | 231 | |
V. | Novels, Part II | |
Moby-Dick | 235 | |
As I Lay Dying | 239 | |
Miss Lonelyhearts | 245 | |
The Crying of Lot 49 | 249 | |
Blood Meridian | 254 | |
Invisible Man | 263 | |
Song of Solomon | 269 | |
Summary Observations | 272 | |
Epilogue: Completing the Work | 277 |