000			02260nam a22002177a 4500
005			20231026113602.0
008			230125b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a1841153982
040			_aMCHVL
041			_aEnglish
082			_222 _a153.98 _bBLO
100			_aBloom, Harold
245			_aGenius : _ba mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds / _cHarold Bloom
260			_aLondon : _bFourth Estate, _c2002.
300			_axviii, 814p. : _bill. ; _c24cm.
500			_aFrom the Bible to Ralph Ellison, America's most prominent and bestselling literary critic takes an enlightening look at the concept of genius through the ages in a celebration of the greatest creative writers of all time. With The Western Canon, Yale-based critical eminence Bloom tapped into a strain of the cultural zeitgeist looking for authoritative takes on what to read. Bloom here follows up with 6–10 pages each on 100 "geniuses" of literature (all deceased)—pointing to the major works, outlining the major achievements therein, showing us how to recognize them for ourselves. Despite the book's length, Bloom's mostly male geniuses are, as he notes "certainly not 'the top one hundred' in anyone's judgement, my own included. I wanted to write about these." Bloom backs up his choices with such effortless and engaging erudition that their idiosyncrasy and casualness become strengths. While organized under the rubric of the 10 Kabalistic Sefirot, "attributes at once of God and of Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's Image," Bloom's chosen figures are associated by his own brilliant (and sometimes jabbingly provocative) forms of attention, from a linkage of Dr. Johnson, Goethe and Freud to one of Dickens, Celan and Ellison (with a few others in between them). A pleasant surprise is the plethora of lesser-known Latin American authors, from Luz Vaz de Camões to José Maria Eça de Queiroz and Alejo Carpentier. Many familiar greats are here, too, as is a definition of genius. "This book is not a work of analysis or of close reading, but of surmise and juxtaposition," Bloom writes, and as such readers will find it appropriately enthusiastic and wild.
650			_aNonfiction
650			_a Literary Criticism
650			_aLiterature
942			_cBK
999			_c4254 _d4254