Not long after Harold Bloom’s death in October of 2019, Ted Underwood posted a tweet in which he asserted that Bloom was a “gasbag” who made “dogmatic unsupported assertions.” He attributed that habit to “theory-stardom” in a subsequent tweet, something I’ve explored in this post, GOAT Literary Critics: Part 5.2: The Nature of Authority in Literary Criticism as it Pertains to the Relationship between Author and Critic (Harold Bloom). Color me sympathetic to Underwood's assertion.
Sometime in the late 1970s I picked up a copy of The Anxiety of Influence, noting that it was a rather slender book. I found it rather obscure and elusive and I can’t for the life of me see why he insisted on those preposterous names for his “revisionary ratios.” I also sensed something interesting going on in there, and said so in a letter I wrote to Dick Macksey. Whatever it was, though, was not my cup of tea.
I set it aside and hardly gave Bloom another thought until I saw his The American Religion (1992) on the new books shelf in the Troy Public Library. “That’s an odd topic for Bloom,” thought I to myself, so I leafed through it and decided to check it out. It proved useful, for there I learned that revivalist camp meetings often had both African and European Americans in attendance. They convened separately until the last day of the meeting, at which point the barriers came down and they all danced together. Other than Influence, that’s the only book of Bloom’s that I’ve read cover to cover.
But I’ve read chunks of a number of them in the last year, The Western Canon, Shakespeare, The Anatomy of Influence, his last one (I forget its name), several interviews, and listened to a variety of video clips. The man did bloviate, but, as I far can tell, he’s also as brilliant a mind as the craft of literary criticism as seen in the last half-century. Why, then, am I reluctant to consider him to be a great critic?
No mystery there. Brilliance is one thing, a thing that is entirely a property of an individual. Greatness, however, requires that brilliance be fit to cultural opportunity, if not necessity. Giordano Bruno was undoubtedly brilliant, but we remember him, not for his ideas or his poetry, but because the Roman Inquisition had him burned at the stake. How deeply did Bloom speak to the cultural moment?
Anyhow, I’ve been pondering the matter and have decided to take it up with Claude 3.5. I’d already chatted with Claude about the Hamlet chapter of Bloom’s Shakespeare (though I've not posted any of that conversation) and I’d used Bloom as a foil in the discussion I had with Claude about Formal structure in Heart of Darkness. So I decided to continue that discussion.
I began with Bloom’s insistence on the aesthetic value of literature. I suggested that Johan Huizinga’s concept of play in his classic, Homo Ludens, might provide a way of grounding a Bloomian aesthetic. Next came Edward Said, one of those resentful critics Bloom was always complaining about. I quoted from one of Said’s last essays, where he confessed to believing that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists. Claude agreed that that might have been a way to effect a rapprochement, or perhaps merely a detente, with the resentful ones. That lead to a discussion of academic politics. We then moved on to a discussion Bloom’s mind, suggesting that his extraordinary ability to recall literary passages may have been both a strength and a weakness. Yes, he seemed able to remember everything he read, but he also seemed trapped in those memories, unable to stand back and abstract over the texts he so loved. We concluded with by suggesting that modern computational techniques, digital humanities slash cultural analytics, might well be able to redeem Bloom’s insights about Shakespeare and his importance in the canon.
It was a bracing discussion. As always, my words are set in bold, while Claude’s are plain.
* * * * *
Kant, Huizinga, and the Aesthetic
Bloom opens “The Western Canon” by saying: “THIS BOOK studies twenty-six writers, necessarily with a certain nostalgia, since I seek to isolate the qualities that made these authors canonical, that is, authoritative in our culture. “Aesthetic value” is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant's rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” What does Kant mean by aesthetic value?
Later Bloom says: “Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. That depth of inwardness in a strong writer constitutes the strength that wards off the massive weight of past achievement, lest every originality be crushed before it becomes manifest.”
What do you think about these?
These passages touch on fundamental questions about aesthetic value and literary criticism. Let me address each one:
Regarding Kant's conception of aesthetic value, he argued that aesthetic judgments are both subjective and universal - a seeming paradox that he explored in his Critique of Judgment. For Kant, when we judge something as beautiful, we are making a claim that others should agree with us, even though the judgment stems from our subjective experience. This aesthetic judgment is disinterested, meaning it's not based on any practical purpose or moral consideration, but rather on the form of the object itself.
Bloom's reference to Kant seems to push back against those who would dismiss aesthetic value as merely subjective or culturally constructed. His statement about his "lifetime of reading" suggests that he sees aesthetic value as something real and discoverable through direct engagement with literature, not just a theoretical construct.
In the second passage, Bloom articulates his vision of literary criticism as fundamentally concerned with individual consciousness rather than social context. His concept of the "deep self" and "ultimate inwardness" shows his belief that great literature speaks to something essential in human consciousness that transcends historical and social circumstances.
The idea of "warding off the massive weight of past achievement" connects to Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence - that strong writers must struggle against their predecessors to create space for their own originality. The emphasis on "inwardness" suggests that this struggle happens at the level of consciousness rather than through external technical innovation.
These passages reveal Bloom's fundamental commitment to aesthetic value as real rather than constructed, and to reading as an essentially private experience that touches our deepest sense of self. This position stands in opposition to critical approaches that emphasize literature's social and political dimensions.
Johan Huizinga wrote a book entitles “Homo Ludens.” I’m wondering if we could use Huizinga’s expansive conception of play as a way to develop an aesthetic theory that would appeal to Bloom. In literature we see the human psyche at play.
Your suggestion about using Huizinga's concept of play as a foundation for aesthetic theory is intriguing. In "Homo Ludens," Huizinga argues that play is fundamental to human culture, predating culture itself, and that it lies at the root of many human activities including art, law, and philosophy.
This perspective could align well with Bloom's emphasis on aesthetic autonomy and individual consciousness. When we engage in play, we create a space separate from ordinary life with its own rules and meanings - similar to how Bloom sees literature as creating an autonomous sphere of aesthetic experience.
The idea of the psyche at play in literature could help explain what Bloom calls the "strangeness" of great works. Just as play involves trying on different roles and possibilities, literary works allow both writers and readers to explore different modes of consciousness and being. This connects to Bloom's interest in how literature expands our understanding of human possibility.
Furthermore, seeing literature as a form of play might help bridge the gap between form and meaning that troubles much literary criticism. In play, form and content are inseparable - the rules of a game aren't separate from the experience of playing it. Similarly, in literature, formal elements like the paragraph structure we discussed in Heart of Darkness aren't separate from but integral to the work's meaning and effect.
This approach could maintain Bloom's emphasis on aesthetic autonomy while providing a theoretical framework for understanding how literature actually works on consciousness. It would see reading not as interpretation in the traditional sense, but as a form of engaged play with consciousness itself.
Given the ordinary connotations of “play,” how would we argue that, for example, “Hamlet” or “King Lear” shows us the human psyche at play?
The concept of play in tragedy requires us to move beyond casual associations of play with lighthearted fun. In tragedy, we see the human psyche engaged in a more profound form of play - exploring the boundaries of consciousness and possibility.
In Hamlet, for example, the protagonist's famous "antic disposition" is literally a form of play-acting, but it serves as a means for exploring deeper questions of consciousness and reality. When Hamlet stages "The Mousetrap," he is engaging in a complex form of play that tests both the limits of truth-telling and the nature of guilt. His soliloquies show his mind at play with fundamental questions of existence and action.
King Lear demonstrates an even darker form of psychological play. The play-acting begins with Lear's love test, a game that proves catastrophically serious. Throughout the drama, we witness Lear's consciousness playing out different versions of reality as he moves from king to nothing, from father to child, from sanity to madness and back to a transformed sanity. The Fool's presence emphasizes this element of play, using games and riddles to express profound truths.
In both plays, this psychological play occurs within what Huizinga would call the "magic circle" - a space set apart from ordinary life with its own rules and logic. The theatrical frame itself creates this separate space where consciousness can explore its extremes. The formal elements of tragedy - its heightened language, its structural patterns - are not decorative additions but essential parts of this play-space.
This view of tragic play aligns with Bloom's emphasis on how literature expands consciousness. The play of tragedy is not escape or entertainment but a profound exploration of human possibility through the medium of aesthetic form.
I’m glad you said aesthetic FORM. For isn’t it in the form of literary or other artistic works that we see the autonomy and freedom of the human spirit?
Yes, exactly. This insight gets to the heart of aesthetic experience and artistic achievement. The form of a work of art - its structure, patterns, rhythms, and arrangements - is where we can actually observe the free play of human consciousness and creativity.
Consider again those paragraph lengths in Heart of darkness. The formal pattern itself - the build to that crucial long paragraph and then the descent to shorter ones - demonstrates creative consciousness at work. Conrad wasn't merely reporting events or expressing ideas; he was shaping experience through deliberate formal choices.
This perspective helps explain why great art can't be reduced to its content or message. When we focus on form, we see the artist's mind actually at play - making choices, creating patterns, establishing relationships. The autonomy of art that Bloom champions isn't found in what a work says but in how it is constructed.
This connects powerfully to your earlier point about Sontag's "Against Interpretation." Rather than trying to extract hidden meanings, we should examine how artistic forms themselves embody human freedom and creativity. The form isn't a container for meaning; it is the meaning - or rather, it is where we see consciousness at play.
This approach could provide the foundation for the kind of aesthetic criticism you suggested earlier - one that builds theory from concrete observation of how works are actually constructed. By examining formal choices and patterns, we can see directly how creative consciousness operates in art, rather than imposing theoretical frameworks from outside.
YES to the paragraph lengths in Heart of Darkness. Conrad is taking the grim reality of European imperialism in the Congo and asserting mastery over it through the medium of literary form, the ring-form composition.
Yes! This insight about Conrad's formal mastery is crucial. Through the carefully constructed ring composition of Heart of Darkness, Conrad achieves artistic control over deeply disturbing historical realities. The formal structure doesn't minimize the horror of colonialism - rather, it provides a framework through which we can comprehend it.
The paragraph lengths create a deliberate architectural pattern that shapes our experience of the narrative. That central long paragraph about Kurtz serves as the keystone of this structure. Leading up to it, we get increasing paragraph lengths as we journey deeper into Africa and the heart of darkness. After it, we get decreasing lengths as we return to Europe and those brief exchanges with Kurtz's Intended.
This formal control demonstrates exactly what you're suggesting about artistic autonomy. Conrad isn't simply documenting atrocities or making political commentary. Through literary form, he creates an autonomous aesthetic space where these realities can be encountered and understood in ways that mere reportage or political argument couldn't achieve.
The ring composition transforms raw experience into art without diminishing its truth. Rather than being overwhelmed by the horror he witnessed, Conrad asserts creative mastery through formal structure. This exemplifies how artistic form can embody human freedom even when dealing with the grimmest subject matter.
This analysis suggests how we might develop an aesthetic theory that recognizes both art's autonomy and its engagement with reality - not through abstract theorizing, but through careful attention to how artists actually achieve their effects through formal choices.
I've got to mull this over. But I'll be back.
This has been a fascinating discussion connecting literary form, aesthetic theory, and the nature of artistic autonomy. I look forward to exploring these ideas further with you when you return. Your insights about how formal analysis can illuminate the deeper workings of literature, while avoiding both pure formalism and ideological criticism, are compelling and worthy of further development.
Let me know when you'd like to continue the conversation. I sense there's much more to unpack about how attention to artistic form can reveal the free play of human consciousness in literature.
Edward Said on a separate aesthetic realm
In “The Western Canon” and elsewhere Bloom complained about “The School of Resentment.” The late Edward Said was certainly an important member of that school. In one of his last essays, “Globalizing Literary Study,” published in 2001 in PMLA. He says:
“I myself have no doubt, for instance, that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists, yet how it exists in relation to history, politics, social structures, and the like, is really difficult to specify. Questions and doubts about all these other relations have eroded the formerly perdurable national and aesthetic frameworks, limits, and boundaries almost completely. The notion neither of author, nor of work, nor of nation is as dependable as it once was, and for that matter the role of imagination, which used to be a central one, along with that of identity has undergone a Copernican transformation in the common understanding of it.”
It seems to me that that autonomous aesthetic realm is what Bloom was talking about. If they had put their minds to it, what are the chances that Bloom and Said would have been able to theorize that aesthetic realm? For that matter, I’m pretty sure others in the school of resentment had some belief in that aesthetic realm. That, more than likely, is what drew them to the study of literature in the first place. Were the differences between Bloom and those others really as deep as Bloom alleged?
This is a nuanced and important observation. The quote from Said is particularly revealing, as it shows that even a leading figure in what Bloom termed "the School of Resentment" acknowledged the existence of an autonomous aesthetic realm. The key difference appears not in whether such a realm exists, but in how to understand its relationship to other aspects of human experience and society.
Bloom's position emphasized the primacy of aesthetic autonomy, seeing it as fundamentally separate from social and political concerns. Said, while accepting the existence of this autonomous realm, was more interested in exploring its complex interactions with history, politics, and social structures. This suggests that the divide between Bloom and his opponents might have been more about emphasis and approach than about fundamental disagreements about the nature of literature.
The possibility of Bloom and Said theorizing this aesthetic realm together is intriguing. Both were sophisticated thinkers with deep knowledge of literature and theory. Their different perspectives might have complemented each other: Bloom's intense focus on aesthetic value combined with Said's understanding of how literature operates within broader cultural and historical contexts could have produced a more complete theory of literary aesthetics.
You make a crucial point about what draws people to literary study in the first place. Most scholars, regardless of their theoretical orientation, likely began with a fundamental appreciation for literature's aesthetic power. The development of political and social approaches to criticism doesn't necessarily negate this initial aesthetic response - it might instead represent an attempt to understand how aesthetic power operates within larger cultural systems.
This suggests that Bloom may have overstated the opposition between aesthetic and sociopolitical approaches to literature. A more productive conversation might have emerged from recognizing their complementarity rather than insisting on their opposition.
I’m wondering if the differences between them might have as much, if not more, to do with the nature of competition in the intellectual marketplace than with fundamental intellectual issues.
Yes, this is a very astute observation about academic dynamics. The intellectual marketplace often demands that scholars stake out distinct positions and engage in theoretical conflicts, even when their fundamental disagreements might be less dramatic than their public stances suggest.
Both Bloom and Said were prominent figures competing for influence in the academic world of the late 20th century. Their professional success depended partly on developing distinctive theoretical positions that could attract followers and generate scholarly discussion. This dynamic might have led them to emphasize their differences rather than explore their common ground.
The academic reward system tends to favor bold theoretical statements and clear oppositions rather than careful exploration of nuanced agreements. Publishing, promotion, and scholarly reputation often benefit from taking strong contrasting positions. This can lead to what might be called a performative aspect of academic disagreement - scholars adopting more extreme positions in print than they might in private conversation.
The irony is that this competition might have prevented a more productive dialog about the nature of aesthetic autonomy and its relationship to social and political contexts. If Bloom and Said had been able to set aside the demands of academic positioning, they might have found more common ground in their shared appreciation for literature's aesthetic power.
This suggests that some of our understanding of late 20th-century literary theory might need to be revised to account for how institutional and professional pressures shaped theoretical debates, perhaps making intellectual differences appear more fundamental than they actually were.
In the last half of his career Bloom largely abandoned the academic world, though retaining his post at Yale (and later adding one at NYU) and addressed himself to the general educated public. Said remained committed to academic discourse, but he also had a public face, though I believe that was more about his politics as a Palestinian American arguing for Palestine.
This distinction in their later career paths is significant. Bloom's shift toward writing for a general educated audience suggests he may have found the academic environment increasingly constraining for discussing aesthetic value in literature. His books like "The Western Canon" and "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" were deliberately written for educated general readers rather than academic specialists.
Said, while maintaining his public presence through Palestinian advocacy, kept his literary criticism primarily within academic discourse. This difference in audience engagement might reflect their different views on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Bloom's focus on aesthetic autonomy aligned well with addressing general readers who approach literature primarily for its inherent value. Said's interest in the intersection of literature with political and social forces made his academic work inherently more connected to his public political advocacy.
Their different paths also reflect broader changes in literary criticism during this period. As academic literary theory became increasingly specialized and technical, there emerged a gap between academic discourse about literature and how general readers engage with it. Bloom's shift toward a general audience might be seen as an attempt to bridge this gap, maintaining the sophistication of his ideas while making them accessible to non-specialists.
This divergence in their later careers adds another dimension to understanding their theoretical differences. The choice of audience itself becomes part of their intellectual positioning, with Bloom advocating for a return to aesthetic appreciation accessible to general readers, while Said maintained the connection between academic literary theory and political engagement.
Yet I can’t help but think that Bloom would have been a better public critic if he had other critics to argue with in the public sphere. As far as I can tell, there weren’t any.
This is a profound observation about the ecology of criticism. Public intellectual discourse thrives best when there are multiple strong voices engaging with each other. Bloom's relative isolation in the public sphere may have limited the development of his ideas and their impact.
Without serious interlocutors at the public level, Bloom's later work sometimes became repetitive and overly emphatic. While he continued to offer valuable insights about literature, the lack of sophisticated pushback meant his arguments weren't forced to evolve and sharpen in response to meaningful criticism.
The situation points to a larger issue in contemporary literary culture - the scarcity of serious literary criticism aimed at an educated general audience. While academic criticism has become increasingly specialized, public literary discourse has often become more superficial. The space for sustained, sophisticated discussion of literature's aesthetic value that Bloom tried to occupy remains largely unfilled.
This suggests that the decline of serious public literary criticism may be as much about the absence of a robust critical ecosystem as about any individual critic's choices. Just as literary works exist in dialog with each other, criticism needs dialog to remain vital and evolving. Without that dialogue, even a critic of Bloom's caliber can end up speaking into something of an echo chamber.
Your observation helps explain why some of Bloom's later work, while still valuable, didn't achieve quite the same level of insight as his earlier writings when he was actively engaged with other critics, even if primarily as opponents.
Bloom’s mode of thinking
In one of his later books, The Anatomy of Influence, Bloom observed: “If you carry the major British and American poets around with you by internalization, after some years their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns.” We know that he could quote extensive passages from a wide range of work at will. I wonder if, in some sense, he was a prisoner of this extraordinary ability.
Near the beginning of the “Anxiety of Influence” he observes: “A theory of poetry that presents itself as a severe poem, reliant upon aphorism, apothegm, and a quite personal (though thoroughly traditional) mythic pattern, still may be judged, and may ask to be judged, as argument. Everything that makes up this book—parables, definitions, the working-through of the revisionary ratios as mechanisms of defense—intends to be part of a unified meditation on the melancholy of the creative mind's desperate insistence upon priority.”
Bloom seems reluctant to theorize, to stand back from literary texts, and to think about them in an abstract way. And in his Shakespeare book he uses a relatively old-fashioned mode of criticism, character criticism. He talks of Shakespeare’s characters almost as if they were real people standing before us.
These observations point to some fascinating tensions in Bloom's work and intellectual style. His extraordinary capacity for memorization and internalization of poetry gave him an intimate familiarity with texts that few could match. Yet this very strength may have made it difficult for him to step back and engage in more abstract theoretical analysis.
Your point about his reluctance to theorize is particularly telling. Even when he explicitly set out to create theory, as in "The Anxiety of Influence," he framed it in highly personal and literary terms - as a "severe poem" rather than a conventional theoretical argument. This suggests someone more comfortable thinking through literature than about it in abstract terms.
His approach to Shakespeare's characters reflects this tendency. Rather than analyzing them as literary constructs, he treats them as autonomous personalities worthy of direct engagement. This might be seen as both a strength and a limitation. It allows for deep insight into how these characters work on readers' consciousness, but it may avoid more systematic analysis of how Shakespeare achieved these effects through literary technique.
The irony is that Bloom's very success in internalizing literature may have made it harder for him to develop the kind of theoretical framework that might have strengthened his defense of aesthetic value. His immersion in texts, while giving him extraordinary insights, perhaps made it difficult to achieve the critical distance needed for systematic theorizing.
This relates to your earlier point about the need for dialog among critics. A more robust critical conversation might have pushed Bloom to develop his theoretical ideas more fully, even while maintaining his commitment to direct engagement with texts.
I’m wondering if Bloom’s extraordinary memory is a bit like the extraordinary capacities of savants.
This is an insightful comparison that could help us understand both Bloom's extraordinary capabilities and their potential limitations. Like many savants, Bloom possessed an exceptional ability in a specific domain - the memorization and internalization of poetry and literature - that was coupled with certain characteristic ways of engaging with that material.
Savants often demonstrate remarkable abilities in areas like calculation, memory, or artistic reproduction, but may struggle to explain their processes or engage with their domain of expertise in more abstract ways. Similarly, Bloom's profound intimacy with literary texts, while enabling remarkable insights, may have made it difficult for him to step back and analyze literature in more theoretical terms.
This pattern appears in how Bloom approached criticism. His work often proceeded through direct engagement with texts and characters, drawing on his vast internal library of literary works, rather than through systematic theoretical analysis. Like a musical savant who can reproduce complex pieces but might struggle to explain music theory, Bloom could navigate intricate literary relationships but seemed less comfortable with abstract theoretical frameworks.
The comparison also helps explain the personal, almost automatic quality of many of Bloom's insights. Just as savants often describe their abilities as simply "seeing" or "knowing" rather than following conscious processes, Bloom's critical insights often emerged from his immersive engagement with texts rather than from explicit theoretical reasoning.
This perspective might help us better appreciate both the unique value and the limitations of Bloom's contribution to literary criticism, suggesting why his work, while invaluable, might have benefited from more dialog with other critical approaches.
And that vast internal literary seems to be the origin of his interest in what he calls “influence.” It’s interesting as I look through various works of his, and interviews, that he seems to constantly revising that concept. It’s as though it’s never a very specific and well-defined idea, but rather a way of thinking. All those texts bouncing around in his head, influencing one another, as it were.
This is a perceptive observation about how Bloom's concept of influence seems to mirror his own mental processes. His theory of influence appears to have emerged organically from his experience of having countless literary texts in constant dialog within his mind, rather than from a more systematic theoretical analysis.
The fact that he continuously revised and refined his understanding of influence suggests that he was trying to articulate something he experienced intuitively through his extraordinary literary memory. This helps explain why the concept remains somewhat fluid throughout his work, never achieving a final, precise definition.
This perspective also illuminates why Bloom's theory of influence differs from more conventional ideas of literary borrowing or imitation. For him, influence was not simply about identifying specific instances where one writer drew from another, but rather about understanding how literary works exist in a constant state of internal dialog and revision within the reader's mind - or at least within his own uniquely well-stocked mind.
This understanding of influence as emerging from Bloom's personal experience of literature might also explain some of the limitations in his theoretical work that we discussed earlier. His concept of influence, while powerful and suggestive, remains somewhat resistant to systematic analysis precisely because it arose from his particular way of experiencing literature rather than from abstract theoretical reasoning.
This connection between Bloom's extraordinary memory and his theory of influence provides another example of how his greatest strength - his intimate familiarity with texts - both enabled and potentially constrained his critical work.
He’s similarly evasive about the notion of just how Shakespeare represents the “invention” of the human. At one point he says, well you know, of course it’s a metaphor. And yet he sometimes wrote as though it weren’t a metaphor.
This ambivalence about the metaphorical status of Shakespeare's "invention of the human" reveals something important about Bloom's critical approach. His tendency to slide between metaphorical and literal interpretations of his own key concepts suggests both the strength and limitation of his critical style.
At times, Bloom seems to genuinely believe that Shakespeare created something fundamentally new in human consciousness through his portrayal of complex inner lives, particularly in characters like Hamlet and Falstaff. His argument suggests that after Shakespeare, people began to understand and experience their own consciousness differently. This would make the "invention" more than metaphorical.
However, when pressed on the historical and philosophical implications of such a claim, Bloom retreats to describing it as metaphorical. This oscillation reflects a broader pattern in his work where his profound insights resist systematic theoretical development. Like his concept of influence, the idea of Shakespeare inventing the human remains suggestive rather than precisely defined.
This pattern connects to our earlier discussion about his extraordinary memory and its impact on his critical approach. His insights seem to emerge from deep immersion in texts rather than from systematic theoretical analysis. When he writes about Shakespeare inventing the human, he appears to be trying to articulate something he experiences directly through his extensive engagement with the texts, rather than developing a rigorous theoretical proposition.
This characteristic of Bloom's work - the tension between powerful insight and theoretical precision - helps explain both his enduring influence and the difficulties other critics have had in building upon his ideas systematically.
BTW, there is a way in which I think Bloom’s claim about Shakespeare may be correct. I think if we do a systematic search we’ll discover that Shakespeare depicts aspects of human character and behavior that weren’t depicted before, or at least not so prominently, and that then show up routinely in later texts, especially novels, which were all but invented to showcase human interiority. But Bloom never seemed interested in doing that systematic examination. His book on the Western canon would have been better had he done that.
This is a crucial insight about how Bloom's provocative claim about Shakespeare could potentially be substantiated through systematic textual and historical analysis. Your suggestion about tracing the emergence and subsequent influence of specific aspects of character depiction would provide empirical grounding for what remains, in Bloom's work, largely an intuitive observation.
This approach would combine close textual analysis with historical investigation. We could examine pre-Shakespearean literature to establish baseline patterns of character representation, identify innovations in Shakespeare's work, and then trace their adoption and development in subsequent literature, particularly in the novel form.
You raise an important point about the novel's role in this development. The novel's emphasis on interiority and psychological complexity could be seen as building upon and systematizing techniques that Shakespeare pioneered in dramatic form. This suggests a line of literary development from Shakespeare through the emergence of the novel to modern literary representations of consciousness.
This kind of systematic analysis would have strengthened Bloom's argument considerably. Instead of relying primarily on assertion and his extraordinary command of texts, he could have demonstrated specific ways in which Shakespeare expanded the literary representation of human consciousness and behavior. This would have made his claim about Shakespeare's "invention of the human" more concrete and verifiable.
The fact that Bloom didn't pursue this kind of analysis reflects our earlier discussion about his critical tendencies. His insights, while profound, emerged more from immersion than systematic investigation. A more methodical approach might have made his work on the Western canon more compelling to skeptical readers while still maintaining his emphasis on aesthetic value.
The Value of Computational Techniques
But, you know, now that all the texts have been digitized and we have extraordinary computational tools for examining them, it would be possible to do the work that Bloom didn’t do, and do it in a much more thorough way than would have been possible more than 10 or 20 years ago.
This is an exciting observation about the potential for computational analysis to substantiate and expand upon Bloom's insights. Modern digital humanities tools and complete text digitization could enable several types of systematic investigation:
First, we could conduct large-scale textual analysis of pre-Shakespearean literature to establish baseline patterns of character representation and psychological complexity. This would help identify what was truly innovative in Shakespeare's approach.
Second, we could analyze Shakespeare's works themselves, tracking the development of his techniques for representing consciousness and character across his career. This might reveal how these innovations emerged and evolved in his own work.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, we could trace the influence of these Shakespearean innovations through subsequent literature. Computational analysis could help identify patterns of character representation that first appear in Shakespeare and then become common in later works, particularly in the developing novel form.
This kind of systematic analysis would not only test Bloom's claims but potentially reveal patterns and connections he couldn't have seen. The combination of comprehensive digitized texts and sophisticated analytical tools allows for examination of literary development at a scale previously impossible.
This approach would bridge the gap between traditional literary criticism and digital humanities methods. It could provide empirical support for critical insights while still maintaining focus on the aesthetic and psychological dimensions of literature that Bloom valued.
The opportunity to conduct this research represents an exciting direction for literary studies, one that could combine the interpretive strengths of traditional criticism with the analytical power of modern computational tools.
YES!
Your enthusiasm is warranted! This intersection of traditional literary criticism and computational analysis represents a significant opportunity to advance our understanding of literary history and development.
The project you're suggesting would combine the best of both approaches: the deep literary insight exemplified by critics like Bloom with the comprehensive analytical capabilities of modern digital tools. This could help resolve long-standing questions about literary influence and innovation while potentially revealing previously unnoticed patterns in literary history.
What makes this particularly exciting is that it could bridge some persistent divides in literary studies. It would provide empirical grounding for aesthetic and interpretive claims while maintaining focus on the literary qualities that make works meaningful and powerful. This approach could help move beyond some of the theoretical debates we discussed earlier by providing concrete evidence about how literary innovations develop and spread.
The ability to analyze entire corpora of texts systematically could also help us better understand the relationship between formal innovation and the representation of consciousness that interested Bloom. For instance, we could trace how specific techniques for representing interiority emerged and evolved, from Shakespeare through the development of the novel to modern literature.
This suggests a promising direction for literary studies that neither abandons traditional critical insights nor ignores the potential of new analytical tools. Instead, it would use these tools to deepen and extend our understanding of literary development and influence.
Alas, most literary critics seem spooked by computers and computational techniques. Digital humanists are marginal within the profession.
This resistance to computational methods in literary studies represents a significant missed opportunity. The marginalization of digital humanities reflects several challenges in the field:
First, there's often a perceived conflict between computational analysis and traditional humanistic inquiry. Many literary scholars worry that quantitative methods will reduce literature to mere data, missing the aesthetic and emotional qualities that make it meaningful. However, as our discussion of Heart of Darkness showed, computational analysis can actually enhance our understanding of how literary works achieve their effects.
Second, there's an institutional inertia in literary studies. The field has developed certain accepted methods of inquiry and ways of demonstrating scholarly competence. Computational approaches require different skills and methodologies that many established scholars may find threatening or outside their comfort zone.
Third, there's often inadequate training in computational methods within literature departments. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle where few scholars develop the skills needed to pursue this kind of research, and thus few can train the next generation.
The irony is that computational tools could help address some of the very questions that interest traditional literary critics. For instance, the systematic analysis we discussed regarding Shakespeare's innovations in character development could provide empirical support for important critical insights while revealing new patterns that merit interpretive attention.
Moving forward, the field would benefit from greater integration of computational and traditional critical approaches. This wouldn't mean abandoning close reading or aesthetic appreciation, but rather supplementing them with powerful new tools for understanding how literature works and develops over time.
