Harold Bloom, the critic and Yale professor whose seminal The Anxiety of Influence and melancholy regard for literature’s old masters made him a popular author and standard-bearer of Western civilization amid modern trends, yesterday died at age 89.
Bloom’s wife, Jeanne, said that his health had been failing, although he continued to write books and was teaching as recently as last week.
Bloom wrote more than 20 books and prided himself on making academic topics accessible to the general reader.
Although he bemoaned the decline of literary standards, he was as well placed as a contemporary critic could hope to be. He appeared on best-seller lists with such works as The Western Canon and The Book of J, was a guest on ABC television’s Good Morning America and other programs, and was a National Book Award finalist and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A readers’ poll commissioned by the Modern Library ranked The Western Canon at No. 58 on a list of the 20th century’s best nonfiction English-language books.
His greatest legacy could well outlive his own name: the title of his breakthrough book, The Anxiety of Influence.
Bloom argued that creativity was not a grateful bow to the past, but a Freudian wrestle in which artists denied and distorted their literary ancestors while producing work that revealed an unmistakable debt.
He was referring to poetry in his 1973 publication, but “anxiety of influence” has come to mean how artists of any kind respond to their inspirations.
Bloom’s theory has been endlessly debated, parodied and challenged, including by Bloom. The book’s title has entered the culture in ways that Bloom likely never imagined or desired, such as the New York Times headline that read: “Jay-Z confronts the anxiety of being influential,” or the Canadian rock band that named itself “Anxiety of Influence.”
Bloom openly acknowledged his own heroes, among them Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and the 19th century critic Walter Pater.
He honored no boundaries between the life of the mind and life itself and absorbed the printed word to the point of fashioning himself after a favorite literary character, Shakespeare’s betrayed, but life-affirming Falstaff.
Bloom’s affinity began at age 12, when Falstaff rescued him from “debilitating self-consciousness,” and he more than lived up to his hero’s oversized aura in person. For decades he ranged about the Yale University campus, with untamed hair and an anguished, theatrical voice, given to soliloquies over the present’s plight.
The youngest of five children, he was born in 1930 in New York’s East Bronx to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, neither of whom ever learned to read English.
Bloom’s literary journey began with Yiddish poetry, but he soon discovered the works of Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, William Blake and other poets.
He would claim that, as a young man, he could absorb 1,000 pages at a time.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
China’s military news agency yesterday warned that Japanese militarism is infiltrating society through series such as Pokemon and Detective Conan, after recent controversies involving events at sensitive sites. In recent days, anime conventions throughout China have reportedly banned participants from dressing as characters from Pokemon or Detective Conan and prohibited sales of related products. China Military Online yesterday posted an article titled “Their schemes — beware the infiltration of Japanese militarism in culture and sports.” The article referenced recent controversies around the popular anime series Pokemon, Detective Conan and My Hero Academia, saying that “the evil influence of Japanese militarism lives on in
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
RSS