Though he felt he was losing the war, Harold Bloom led the charge to keep great literature alive. He could read 400 pages in an hour
Harold Bloom, Sterling professor Harold Bloom dies at 89
MATT KRISTOFFERSEN & VALERIE PAVILONIS 3:50 PM, OCT 14, 2019
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Harold Bloom GRD ‘55, the Sterling Professor of English and a Yale icon who championed and staunchly defended the Western canon, died on Monday at a New Haven hospital.
The 89-year-old literary critic wrote over forty books in his lifetime and attained widespread academic recognition for his innovative interpretations of poetry. Bloom was known as a “lone warrior in the literary world,” according to a 2003 Atlantic article, because of his passionate defense of romantic poetry.
At Yale, Bloom is teaching two Humanities classes for undergraduates this semester: “Shakespeare and the Canon: Histories, Comedies, and Poems” and “Poetic Influence from Shakespeare to Keats.” He taught his last class at Yale on October 10, 2019.
Bloom joined the Yale faculty over 50 years earlier.
author and literary critic, dies at age 89
He prided himself on making scholarly topics accessible to readers and wrote the bestsellers The Western Canon and The Book of J
Associated Press
Mon 14 Oct 2019 22.53 BST
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Harold Bloom, a writer, literary critic and Yale professor, died Monday at age 89. Photograph: Fairchild Archive/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock
Harold Bloom, the eminent 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, died Monday at age 89.
Bloom’s wife, Jeanne, said that he had been failing health, although he continued to write books and was teaching as recently as last week. Yale says Bloom died at a New Haven, Connecticut, hospital.
Bloom wrote more than 20 books and prided himself on making scholarly topics accessible to the general reader. Although he frequently bemoaned the decline of literary standards, he was as well placed as a contemporary critic could hope to be. He appeared on bestseller lists with such works as “The Western Canon” and “The Book of J,” was a guest on “Good Morning America” and other programs and was a National Book Award finalist and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
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.
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 and he more than lived up to his hero’s oversized aura in person. For decades he ranged about the Yale 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 allege that as a young man he could absorb 1,000 pages at a time.
He graduated in 1951 from Cornell University, where he studied under the celebrated critic M H Abrams, and lived abroad as a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After earning his doctorate degree from Yale in 1955, he joined the school’s English faculty. Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958 and had two sons.
In the ’50s, he opposed the rigid classicism of Eliot. But over the following decades, Bloom condemned Afrocentrism, feminism, Marxism and other movements he placed in the “school of resentment”. A proud elitist, he disliked the Harry Potter books and slam poetry and was angered by Stephen King’s receiving an honorary National Book Award. He dismissed as “pure political correctness” the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to Doris Lessing, author of the feminist classic The Golden Notebook.
“I am your true Marxist critic,” he once wrote, “following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho’s grand admonition, ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it.’”
In The Western Canon, published in 1994, Bloom named the 26 crucial writers in Western literature, from Dante to Samuel Beckett, and declared Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo among the contemporary greats. Shakespeare reigned at the canon’s center.
Many, however, had their own harsh criticism of Bloom. He was mocked as out of touch and accused of recycling a small number of themes. “Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him,” British critic Christopher Ricks once observed.
Bloom’s praises were not reserved for white men. In The Book of J, released in 1990, Bloom stated that some parts of the Bible were written by a woman. (He often praised the God of the Old Testament as one of the greatest fictional characters). He also admired Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Emily Dickinson and the hundreds of critical editions he edited include works on Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Amy Tan. Bloom did write a novel, The Flight to Lucifer, but was no more effective than most critics attempting fiction and later disowned the book. In The Anatomy of Influence, a summation released in 2011, Bloom called himself an epicurean who acknowledged no higher power other than art, living for “moments raised in quality by aesthetic appreciation”.
His resistance to popular culture was emphatic, but not absolute. He was fond of the rock group The Band and fascinated by the Rev Jimmy Swaggart and other televangelists. He even confessed to watching MTV, telling The Paris Review in 1990 that “what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful.”
Harold Bloom教授除了著名的「影響の不安」等，還有「時速上的不安」等。
在這本Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection By Harold Bloom
的中文本《靈知．天使．夢境》：「.....我六十五歲了，......以前的日子到哪裡去了？.......耶魯大學教書正要踏入第四十年頭......歲月如河一閃即逝」
English
哈羅德·布魯姆（Harold Bloom，1930年－），美國文學評論家........
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BāyazīdBistāmī
BāyazīdBistāmī，實際上是AbūYazīdTaifūribn'Īsāal-Bistāmī（波斯語 ابويزيدطيفورپورعيسىپورآدمپورسروشانبسطامى，DMG 阿布耶齊德Ṭeifūr-PUR-E“ISA-PUR-E ADAM-PUR-ESorūšān-E Bastami * 803的巴斯塔姆，省塞姆南，伊朗 ; † 875）是波斯 伊斯蘭 神秘主義的蘇菲。
生活[ 編輯| 編輯]
Bāyazīd的祖父是波斯的瑣羅亞斯德教徒，後來皈依伊斯蘭教。[1]巴亞吉德根據嚴格苦行和冥想早期伊斯蘭傳記住。[2]與其他許多蘇菲人一樣，飢餓和貧窮是他精神道路的重要組成部分。[3]除了易卜拉欣伊本艾德他是唯一已知的早期蘇非從中獨身壽命得以保留。[4]巴亞吉德寫道：沒有書，他的教學的本質是通過他的學生們傳下來的。[2]
巴亞吉德認為第一蘇菲因為原始分辨率（法納已達到）。他剝奪了他的自我並實現了孤立。有時他已經實現了愛人，愛人和愛的團結。東方學家在這裡看到印度教的影響，尤其是印度哲學家Shankara。當代蘇菲派對這一成功表示懷疑，並對巴亞茲德的錯誤表示惋惜，包括朱奈德和al-Hallāj。他們說巴亞吉德只是在門檻法納來了，停在那裡。[2]
Bāyazīd作為一個陶醉的身影[ 編輯| 編輯]
在許多流行的文本中，Bāyazīd作為一個令人陶醉的蘇菲，形成了他當代的Junaid所描繪的清醒的蘇菲的對立面。這兩個圖都屬於解釋傳統，這一傳統始於 11世紀，由al-HudschwirisSufi手冊Kashf al-mahjub創建。[6]另外，噪音（sukr）的巴亞吉德在此上下文中意味著不僅醉酒或藥物中毒，但也可以理解為一個熱情，愛狂喜。[7]Bāyazīdīs不受控制的中毒在這些文本中被討論為對上帝的一種正常運作但較差的方式，而Junaid的清醒路徑是作為優越變體呈現的。目前還不清楚的生活有多遠Bāyazīds與這些軼事一致是最有可能被後來的作家蘇菲都以其卓越的狂喜能力，因此選擇，因為他的失敗，高層次的團結與上帝為這個角色也。[8]
Einzelnachweise[Bearbeiten | Quelltext bearbeiten]
- ↑ al-Qushayri, Abu 'l-Qasim (2007). Alexander D. Knysh; Muhammad Eissa, ed. Al-Qushayri's Epistle on Sufism : Al-Risala al-qushayriyya fi ʿilm al-tasawwuf. Alexander D. Knysh (trans.) (1st ed.). Reading, UK: Garnet Pub. p. 32. ISBN 978-1-85964-186-6.
- ↑ a b c Eliade, Mircea: Geschichte der religiösen Ideen, Band III/1. Freiburg : Herder, 1983, S. 126–127.
- ↑ Valerie J. Hoffman: Eating and fasting for God in Sufi tradition. Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1995): 470.
- ↑ Andræ, Tor: In the Garden of Myrtles: Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism. Albany : State University of New York Press, 1987, S. 46.
- ↑ Robert Hillenbrand: The Flanged Tower at Basṭām. In: Ders.: Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture. Band 2, The Pindar Press, London 2006, S. 379
- ↑ Jawid A. Mojaddedi: Getting Drunk with Abū Yazīd or Staying Sober with Junayd: The Creation of a Popular Typology of Sufism. In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Vol. 66, No. 1 (2003), S. 1
- ↑ Long, Matthew: Intoxication. In: Morrow, John Andrew (Hrsg.): Islamic Images and Ideas: Essays on Sacred Symbolism, S. 75–100.
- ↑ Jawid A. Mojaddedi: Getting Drunk with Abū Yazīd or Staying Sober with Junayd: The Creation of a Popular Typology of Sufism. In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Vol. 66, No. 1 (2003), S. 12–13.
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