Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the PresentHarold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best. |
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Page 37
... object of Virgil's own love , his pride in his own fictive creation . He was not writing the Turneid , but we can suspect he would have been happier doing so , and Book 12 is in any case a miniature Turneid , even as Book 4 belongs to ...
... object of Virgil's own love , his pride in his own fictive creation . He was not writing the Turneid , but we can suspect he would have been happier doing so , and Book 12 is in any case a miniature Turneid , even as Book 4 belongs to ...
Page 119
... object have made that object a hated thing . In terms of what Freud called the family romance , identity is re- garded with all the unresolved ambivalence of an Oedipal crisis in which there is , strangely , no symbolic father to come ...
... object have made that object a hated thing . In terms of what Freud called the family romance , identity is re- garded with all the unresolved ambivalence of an Oedipal crisis in which there is , strangely , no symbolic father to come ...
Page 165
... object ; it does not generate the ego . Doubtless , a strict psychoanalytic reading of Jeremiah would say that he is manic , and stretches his own ego until it introjects God , or the ego ideal , whereas earlier Jeremiah had been ...
... object ; it does not generate the ego . Doubtless , a strict psychoanalytic reading of Jeremiah would say that he is manic , and stretches his own ego until it introjects God , or the ego ideal , whereas earlier Jeremiah had been ...
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Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present Harold Bloom Limited preview - 1991 |
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present Harold Bloom Limited preview - 1991 |
Common terms and phrases
Achilles Aeneid agonistic allegory ambivalence authority Beatrice Beckett believe biblical Blake bodily ego Book Book of Job C. S. Lewis called Christian cognitive critics crucial Dante Dante's death despite divine doorkeeper drive dualism Edmund everything Falstaff father fiction Fortinbras Freccero freedom Freud Freudian Gershom Scholem Gloucester Gnostic Gracchus Greek Hamlet heavens Hebrew Bible Hegelian hero Homer Horatio human Iago Iago's Iliad interpretation irony J's Yahweh Jeremiah Jewish Jewish memory Jews Judaism Kabbalah Kafka King Klamm Lear Lear's literary means Milton mode monism Moses negation negative never Nietzsche normative Odradek originality Othello parable Paradise Lost passion pathos perhaps poem poet poetic poetry precursor Prelude prophet represent representation rhetoric Satan Scholem seems sense Shakespeare speak spirit stance story strong sublime superego thou tion Torah tradition transcendence trope truth Turnus uncanny Virgil vision Weiskel word Wordsworth writer Yahweh Yahwist