| critics) at the end. Bloom's revisionary challenge was fresh then, and, like many of the best revisions, it produced a healthy shudder and a shock in the literary establishment. The most recent work, on the other hand, tends largely to consolidate previous Bloomian positions on issues in reading, Romanticism, and literary history; the story of "influence" is extended and fleshed out (in essays on Gnosticism) and nuances are explored (in essays on Freud), but the basic insights remain the same and the polemical exigencies impelling them have only been re-presented, not revised. If Bloom in his recent writings sometimes has become, alas, boring, there could be no greater defeat for a man who has served so relentlessly, with undeniable prophetic intent, to unsettle us, to force us to confront anew the violent transgressions he sees at the heart of reading and poetic history. |
| Yet this defeat, should we choose to grant it, might be said to figure as the inevitable obverse side of Bloom's very real victory. Ironically enough, Bloom, the fiercest canonizer of our time, has himself been canonized over the course of the past decade; in the process his willful and mighty critical voice has been tamed, tidied up, made altogether safer and saner than he no doubt would like. The project called Bloom, or the "anxiety of influence," has become, in short, yet another perspective, one important theoretical voice among many others to be dutifully studied and judiciously assessed in graduate schools, conferences, and all the rest of the institutional forums that help professional academics to define themselves today. If his books no longer shock or surprise, it is perhaps a tribute to the "strength"-a central Bloomian virtue-that his voice has shown in legitimizing itself, and thereby legitimizing the questions concerning literary influence and the nature of reading and Romanticism which have been Bloom's major areas of preoccupation. |
|
