Posts from — February 2010

The above might be a rather grand title; but then, it is a rather grand subject. In our post-Enlightenment age, there is no area to which we will not bring the blunt hammer—or fine scalpel, however you view it—of science. There is perhaps a certain contingent which will not accept this. Certainly, that’s true of religious fundamentalists, but it’s also true of certain literary figures, who consider a scientific understanding of literature hardly an understanding at all, and only hopelessly and meaninglessly reductive. It’s probably true that it is reductive to think of art as serving a specific evolutionary purpose, or to analyse a musical phrase in terms of its frequencies and the resulting brain-wave reactions. But that is not to say that nothing can be gained from such a reduction. Indeed, it may be true that more can be gained from it, even while accepting that literary criticism, in the classical sense, and a scientific analysis of literature, are, as Stephen Jay Gould might put it, non-overlapping magisteria. [Read more →]

I finished reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence yesterday, and am not quite sure what to make of it. Partly, this is because most of my reading sessions were begun at two in the morning and ended at two fifteen, and so I couldn’t absorb anything other than the most striking of points. But quite apart from that, even if I had read it all while fully awake, I’m quite certain that much of it would have passed me by. This is partly Bloom’s fault and partly mine. It is Bloom’s fault in that he seems to insist, in his writing, on making bold assertions of fact without the kind of backing up that would be accepted anywhere other than in the world of literary criticism. And it is my fault in that I find this style of writing hard to just accept and get on with. [Read more →]