Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present Day (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

New
Paperback
1991
$41.49

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1989, this book surveys the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. The author re-reads 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, Bloom concludes that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.

Synopsis

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1989, this book surveys the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. The author re-reads 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, Bloom concludes that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations.

$41.49

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 214
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 03 Sep 1991
ISBN 10: 0674780280
ISBN 13: 9780674780286

Media Reviews

Bloom's puissance is not entirely his own; for some of it, he is indebted to Nietzsche, Freud, Schopenhauer, Gershom Scholem, and other masters. But enough of it is his own to constitute a distinctive form of splendor. -- Denis Donoghue New York Review of Books The wit, the eclecticism and the gripping paradoxes...the force of [Bloom's] intellect carries the reader from pinnacle to pinnacle, showing a new spiritual landscape from each. -- Roger Scruton Washington Times In some ways the wildest of the wild men (and women), in some ways the most traditional of the traditionalists, Harold Bloom remains serene amid the turbulence--much of it caused by him. He stands dauntless, a party of one, as thrilling to behold up on the high wire as he is (at times) throttling to read on the page...From this strong critic dealing with these strong poets comes a potent mix of insight. -- Mark Feeney Boston Globe