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The Western Canon
- The Books and School of the Ages
- Narrated by: James Armstrong
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism.
Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights, poets, or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, and the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition.
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Performance
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“A faithful translation is rare; a translation which preserves intact the original text is very rare; a perfect translation of Montaigne appears impossible. Yet Donald Frame has realized this feat. One does not seem to be reading a translation, so smooth and easy is the style; at each moment, one seems to be listening to Montaigne himself - the freshness of his ideas, the unexpected choice of words. Frame has kept everything.” (Andre Maurois, The New York Times Book Review)
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Ranier Maria Rilke challenges you, "...to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers." Rilke's ability to combine the sensual and the spiritual into an inspired vision of the art of living is brought to vivid life in his letters. Through his eyes, the everyday difficulties of love, sex, solitude, sadness, and doubt are seen as the archetypal elements of the drama called life.
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Priceless Recordings of Intense Feeling
- By David on 10-08-04
By: Rainer Maria Rilke, and others
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All Things Shining
- Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular World
- By: Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them? Distinguished philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach.
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Excellent Book that refreshes the classics
- By Tod on 06-14-11
By: Hubert Dreyfus, and others
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Primitive Mythology
- The Masks of God Series, Volume I
- By: Joseph Campbell, David Kudler - editor
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 19 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The author of such acclaimed books as The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth discusses the primitive roots of mythology, examining them in light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology.
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Epic speculation into the origins of our mythic consciousness
- By BGZ on 01-10-19
By: Joseph Campbell, and others
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
- By: Stephen Greenblatt
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Bolder even than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity's first parents. Comprising only a few ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness.
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For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return
- By Darwin8u on 02-11-18
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The Story of Philosophy
- The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers
- By: Will Durant
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 19 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Durant lucidly describes the philosophical systems of such world-famous “monarchs of the mind” as Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Along with their ideas, he offers their flesh-and-blood biographies, placing their thoughts within their own time and place and elucidating their influence on our modern intellectual heritage. This book is packed with wisdom and wit.
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Fantastic and insightful book
- By ESK on 01-25-13
By: Will Durant
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Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
- Why the Greeks Matter
- By: Thomas Cahill
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.
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Super super
- By Richard on 12-28-03
By: Thomas Cahill
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Angels and Ages
- A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.
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Connecting Darwin and Lincoln
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Adam Gopnik
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Shakespeare's seven great tragedies contain unmistakable elements that set them apart from any other plays ever written. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare embodied in the character of Juliet the world's most impressive representation ever of a woman in love. With Julius Caesar, the great playwright produced a drama of astonishing and perpetual relevance.
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Not one of Bloom's best
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Like a review of my graduate English degree
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Not one of Bloom's best
- By Benjamin Myers on 03-31-17
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Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind
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Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character. The book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.
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Narrative choices at odds with text
- By Bill Bleuel on 04-23-24
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Falstaff
- Give Me Life
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Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare's three Henry plays. He is companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V), who loves him, goads him, teases him, indulges his vast appetites, and commits all sorts of mischief with him. Award-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom examines Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal.
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Falstaff brooks no rebuttal.
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Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history - and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom delivers exhilarating clarity and invites us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime.
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Iliad remains not only among the greatest adventure stories ever told but also one of the most compelling meditations on the human condition ever written.
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Vandiver never disappoints
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In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever.
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Mismatch of text and narrator
- By Greg Camp on 03-14-24
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Lear
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King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character.
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Bloom being Bloom
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The Closing of the American Mind
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In one of the most important books of our time, Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.
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VERY IMPORTANT WORK!
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By: Allan Bloom
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Iago
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In all of literature, few antagonists have displayed the ruthless cunning and unscrupulous deceit of Iago, the antagonist to Othello. Often described as Machiavellian, Iago is a fascinating psychological specimen: at once a shrewd expert of the human mind and yet, himself a deeply troubled man.
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A Moor's Not Nice Guy - friend
- By Darwin8u on 02-13-20
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How to Read a Book
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Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them - from elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading. Audiences will learn when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text.
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An excellent book.
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Chaucer
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Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400, lived a surprisingly eventful life. He served with the Duke of Clarence and with Edward III, and in 1359 was taken prisoner in France and ransomed. Through his wife, Philippa, he gained the patronage of John of Gaunt, which helped him carve out a career at Court. His posts included Controller of Customs at the Port of London, Knight of the Shire for Kent, and King's Forester. He went on numerous adventurous diplomatic missions to France and Italy.
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first rate
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BBC Radio Shakespeare
- A Collection of Three Roman Plays
- By: William Shakespeare
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- Length: 8 hrs
- Original Recording
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A collection of BBC Radio 3's iconic Shakespeare productions: three Roman plays with all-star casts including Gerard Murphy, Nicholas Farrell, Susannah York, Samuel West, Frances Barber and David Harewood. The plays included in this collection are: Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra.
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Thank you BBC Radio and narrators.
- By Jennifer Baratta She/Her on 01-31-21
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The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis
- By: Louis Markos, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Louis Markos
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- Original Recording
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What can we still learn from C.S. Lewis? Find out in these 12 insightful lectures that cover the author's spiritual autobiography, novels, and his scholarly writings that reflect on pain and grief, love and friendship, prophecy and miracles, and education and mythology.
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Basically a collection of sermons
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By: Louis Markos, and others
What listeners say about The Western Canon
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- AH-SAN WONG
- 04-20-12
The pronunciation of "Borges" is wrong!
What made the experience of listening to The Western Canon the most enjoyable?
The book is too long for me. Having it on audio makes it feel like attending a series of lectures, and it's much easier.
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- EB
- 04-27-15
A true master of literature
This is a wonderful book. Bloom is terrific except that overdoes his complaints about diversity and technology. For lovers of literature the canon continues to be important.
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5 people found this helpful
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- The Masked Reviewer
- 07-30-16
Bloom's True Masterpiece Performed Better Than He
If you could sum up The Western Canon in three words, what would they be?
The Western Canon is Bloom at his natural bent, doing what he was meant to do: defend great literature from the poo poo pseudo-popes of political poppycock.
What about James Armstrong’s performance did you like?
Armstrong does a good enough job, mainly in sounding as we might imagine Bloom to actually sound (though Bloom's own actual reading voice is cracking and brittle in comparison).
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Bloom made me see my own perceptions of canonical authors in light of his own long savoring of them, which is exactly the best one could ever get from Bloom.
Any additional comments?
Bloom DESTROYS Freud, which is a special bonus.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Mark
- 05-12-07
For every student and teacher of literature
This book helps reinforce why the classics are classic and why this generation needs to pass this wisdom to the next.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Daniel
- 11-23-11
Outstanding--a Giant Education
Beautifully written, beautifully read. If you want an introduction to the classics of Western literature, and a deeper understanding of what makes them classic look no further. This is it.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Richard
- 11-26-16
Audible Performance only
This review reflects only the audible performance, and not the book per se (I listened to, and read, the book simultaneously).
First, there are numerous instances of pronunciation that amount to fingernails on a chalkboard (FooKALT, DareEEDuh, YEETS) to name a few. Second, there are several instances of splicing where what appears to be recordings from different sessions are merged together with great differences in sound quality and volume. Third, there is virtually no pause between chapters; there is greater pause between some sentences than the chapters themselves. These issues are responsible for my rating of three stars from a performance perspective. The text itself is a typically brilliant example of Bloom's genius (even if a bit loquacious).
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Overall
- Leslie
- 04-19-10
interesting, but....
You won't get much out of this if you haven't read the specific books he talks about. He makes no effort to provide an overview before discussing each work. After I while, I just skipped over chapters about works I hadn't read. The sound editing is a little poor in places.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Andrew
- 06-16-18
All is Compared to Shakespeare
I first came across this book in my first year of college, a required purchase for a general literature course. Interesting thing was: we never looked inside. I imagine the reasoning behind this was the fact that my college course was not one on Shakespeare’s influence. As amazing an author that Shakespeare was, he is Harold Bloom’s god, and all works and characters discussed herein must be compared to the greatest Shakespearean characters: mainly Hamlet, Iago, Othello, King Lear, and Falstaff. About halfway through the book I noticed that there were not two consecutive pages without comparison to Shakespeare or one of his characters. At first, this bothered me; but, after coming to realize that everyone would be compared, I let it go and enjoyed it.
Also, one might consider it important that you read the books Bloom speaks of before reading this one. There are major spoilers as he breaks down at least one book or poem by each author and, if you’ve not read them, then you’ll be told nearly every intricate part.
James Armstrong’s reading of the book was alright. It took him awhile to begin to read excerpts in a different voice so that, if I had not been reading along, I probably would not have known that someone was being quoted. About a third of the way in, he began to speak as various characters (sometimes taking on accents) and it helped very much. One strange thing was that the ends of chapters were usually in the middle of a track. Also, there was a distinct difference in sound between the beginning of a track and the end, as if it started out muffled and static, but became better.
All in all, the book was great, and I very much look forward to reading and rereading the books discussed in this book. I highly suggest buying the book, though, because there are four appendixes where Bloom lists the most influential authors of their times (along with their most inspiring works.) I have begun a collection of these books and, even if they are not mentioned in the book but just listed in an appendix, they are wonderful.
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- Steffen
- 07-23-12
A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
My main motivation for writing this review is my disappointment in the other reviews here on Audible so far. There are many much better reviews of this very book on amazon.com, and I would urge you to check them out before being discouraged from picking up Bloom's excellent book.
Most of the reviews here so far either complains about the narration or complains about Bloom's personality and choice of books. Bloom's personality and choice of books has been discussed to death in many other reviews (for example the ones on amazon), so I will mainly focus on the narration.
Luckily, the task of defending the narrator, which I think does an excellent job, is eased through the availability of the audio-preview on this page. Be sure to check it out. The sound quality of the actual download is also somewhat better than the preview. Amongst the complaints that are raised is that the narrator does not emulate, say, the French pronunciation of a French name. This seems petty, and perhaps some of the very same people would complain that the narrator was snobbish if he, say, switched to an upper-class Parisien pronunciation of Foucault. Not only does the narrator manage to read a difficult and almost baroque text in a natural way, he also manages to maintain the calmness, humor and humanity that Bloom's text so beautifully contains. In fact, when I read Bloom's other works, I can still almost hear James Armstrong's voice as I read. Bloom's personality has become forever mixed with Armostrong's interpretation of him.
Amongst the reviews here on Audible, the main attack on Bloom's personality and choice of books is raised by Jerry from Topeka. His rhetoric is that of the rebel. However, other than his supposed authority as a college graduate and having read Ulyesses (not particularly strong arguments), he does not offer any good reason for disliking the book as much as he seems to be doing. His stabs seems to be applicable to any opinionated text on the western canon written by someone famous. It seems that Jerry would rather read a boring and distanced academic treatise on the history of literature, but instead got a charmingly grumpy old man's advice to the younger generation. Bloom has summarized his best findings and perspectives from a lifetime of serious reading and interpretation. It is impossible to have time to read everything, so Bloom's advice is much appreciated. Perhaps the most interesting part of Jerry's review is to point out that not all agree with Bloom. Go figure. Bloom has a very personal and esoteric reading style, and is quite the character. Bloom in no way tries to hide his quite literally religious relationship to Shakespeare, and if that seems annoying, this is not the book for you. Bloom's strangeness is so obvious that I do not think anyone is at risk of being seduced by the devil through reading this book, even if you do not have a PhD in literature.
That being said, this is obviously not an easy book, and Bloom actually expects you to sit down and read (or listen through) Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, etc. He motivates why you should use your time on this, and gives some indication on his way of reading some of the master works in the canon. If it is very unlikely that you sit down and Milton's quite difficult, but very rewarding Paradise Lost, this book is not for you. An introduction to literature critique will also be highly recommended, and for example The Teaching Company's course “From Plato to Post-modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author” by Louis Markos would be a very helpful introduction to the subject.
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- Jonathan B. Gordon
- 10-30-21
Seminal academic work, clearly presented.
This is a plain and proper reading of an important scholastic work. Bloom is famously opinionated and erudite. It is for a serious person with a deep interest in literature.
His is not the only perspective in the the world, but serious thinkers today are well aware of Bloom’s critical Ideas.
For me he is provocative and enlightening.
This is not a survey or an introduction to literature.
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