Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American professor and literary critic.

Bloom's critical approach

Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably 'misread' their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.

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Though observers often identified Bloom with deconstructionism in the past, he himself never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with the deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology...There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do."

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Bloom has come under critical fire as being reactionary in his dismissal of multicultural literary works, and popular works like Harry Potter.

Related Topics:
Multicultural - Harry Potter

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