Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
There's little camaraderie to be found at the uncomfortable juncture of contemporary literature and contemporary literary theory. It seems poets and fiction writers simply can't produce important new works of art at the same pace at which their theorist peers can dismantle what used to be called the canon. Bloom, who teaches English at Muhlenberg College and is the author of Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, is a scholar of unlikely sympathies and insights. He chooses not to judge the academy's recent distrust of Shakespeare and tradition. Instead, he turns the curious reader's attention to the work of contemporary American writers as disparate as Robert Stone, Tony Morrison and John Ashbery, to demonstrate that despite overwhelming critical and public apathy, current poetry and literary fiction continue to revere a worthwhile and still considerably healthy literary tradition. Stone's Children of Light is Bloom's chief example, but his reading reaches from the Romantics to yesterday's New York Times. At the same time Bloom admits that the literary canon he loves is up against the wall, he reminds us all that literariness is continuing to experience a boom as "cultural capital." Dejected writers and readers need merely return to their adored classics to cash in on Bloom's investment. Apr.From the Publisher
"While most of the smart-alecs in the humanities have been hacking away at literary culture (which is to say, 'deconstructing' it with a vengeance), James Bloom has been reading, reading, reading—and now he has constructed a singularly thoughtful and important synthesis of old and new ways of looking at serious literature and its role in everyday life. His book stands as one of the most valuable contributions to literary criticism in recent years."—Alan Cheuse, book reviewer, NPR's All Things Considered
"Bloom does not so much present a defense of literariness as enact one. The variety of his illustrations and the breathless pace of his prose make an apocalyptic case for the value of cultural literacy in a postliterate culture. In reading, one feels an intimacy with and fondness for Bloom as someone totally immersed in both popular and high culture and committed to making sense of both, without belittling either."—David Van Leer, University of California, Riverside