How to Read and Why - Hardcover

Bloom, Harold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184115038X ISBN 13: 9781841150383

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2000

Synopsis

A new book by America’s leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned ‘How to Read and Why’ is Bloom’s manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.

In the vastly influential ‘The Western Canon’, Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand the individual self. ‘How to Read and Why’ continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain deeper self-awareness. Poems, stories, novels, plays and parables are all analysed as forms of writing as immersion, the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeare’s sonnets, the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes, the novels of Proust and Calvino, Sophocles’s ‘Oedipus Rex’ and Mark’s Gospel. Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of why we read: increased individuality, respite from visual bombardment, a return to ‘deep feeling’ and ‘deep thinking’.

‘How to Read and Why’ is an essential book for any reader, an introduction to the world of written culture, an inspirational self-help book for students and teachers alike.

About this title

Review:

Harold Bloom's urgency in How to Read and Why may have much to do with his age. He brackets his combative, inspiring manual with the news that he is nearing 70 and hasn't time for the mediocre. (One doubts that he ever did.) Nor will he countenance such fashionable notions as the death of the author or abide "the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism" let alone "ideological cheerleading". Successively exploring the short story, poetry, the novel and drama, Bloom illuminates both the how and why of his title and points us in all the right directions: toward the Romantics because they "startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life"; toward Austen, James, Proust; toward Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy; toward Cervantes and Shakespeare (but of course!), Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.

How should we read? Slowly, with love, openness, and with our inner ear cocked. Then we should reread, reread, reread, and do so aloud as often as possible. "As a boy of eight," he tells us, "I would walk about chanting Housman's and William Blake's lyrics to myself, and I still do, less frequently yet with undiminished fervour." And why should we engage in this apparently solitary activity? To increase our wit and imagination, our sense of intimacy--in short, our entire consciousness--and also to heal our pain. "Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others." So much for reading as an escape from the self! Still, many of this volume's pleasures may indeed be selfish. The author is at his best when he is thinking aloud and anew, and his material offers him--and therefore us--endless opportunities for discovery. Bloom cherishes poetry because it is "a prophetic mode" and fiction for its wisdom. Intriguingly, he fears more for the fate of the latter: "Novels require more readers than poems do, a statement so odd that it puzzles me, even as I agree with it." We must, he adjures, crusade against its possible extinction and read novels "in the coming years of the third millennium, as they were read in the 18th and 19th centuries: for aesthetic pleasure and for spiritual insight."

Bloom is never heavy, since his vision quest contains a healthy love of irony--Jedediah Purdy, take note: "Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise." And this supreme critic makes us want to equal his reading prowess because he writes as well as he reads; his epigrams are equal to his opinions. He is also a master of allusions and quotations. His section on Hedda Gabler is preceded by three extraordinary statements, two from Ibsen, who insists, "There must be a troll in what I write." Who would not want to proceed? Of course, Bloom can also accomplish his goal by sheer obstinacy. As far as he is concerned, Don Quixote may have been the first novel but it remains to this day the best one. Is he perhaps tweaking us into reading this gigantic masterwork by such bald overstatement? Bloom knows full well that a prophet should stop at nothing to get his belief and love across, and throughout How to Read and Why he is as unstinting as the visionary company he adores. --Kerry Fried

Review:

John Banville

"The Irish Times"

Bloom is one of the last...of his kind...one of the greatest educators of our time...Wonderful...Bloom writes with passion of those writers whom he loves, and whose work for him affirms life.

Michael Pakenham

"The Baltimore Sun"

Superb...A wonderful, entertaining book...extraordinarily wise, nourishing, and beautiful.

John Sutherland

"The Washington Post Book World"

Harold Bloom is one of the great literary critics of his time..."How to Read and Why" is...the testament of a veteran.

Michael Pakenham"The Baltimore Sun"Superb...A wonderful, entertaining book...extraordinarily wise, nourishing, and beautiful.

John Sutherland"The Washington Post Book World"Harold Bloom is one of the great literary critics of his time..."How to Read and Why" is...the testament of a veteran.

John Banville"The Irish Times"Bloom is one of the last...of his kind...one of the greatest educators of our time...Wonderful...Bloom writes with passion of those writers whom he loves, and whose work for him affirms life.

John Banville "The Irish Times" Bloom is one of the last...of his kind...one of the greatest educators of our time...Wonderful...Bloom writes with passion of those writers whom he loves, and whose work for him affirms life.

John Sutherland "The Washington Post Book World" Harold Bloom is one of the great literary critics of his time..."How to Read and Why" is...the testament of a veteran.

Michael Pakenham "The Baltimore Sun" Superb...A wonderful, entertaining book...extraordinarily wise, nourishing, and beautiful.

Michael Pakenham The Baltimore Sun Superb...A wonderful, entertaining book...extraordinarily wise, nourishing, and beautiful.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 184115038X
• ISBN 13: 9781841150383
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288