哈罗德·布鲁姆

哈罗德·布鲁姆（英语：Harold Bloom，1930年7月11日—2019年10月14日），美国文学评论家，著有《西方正典：伟大作家和不朽作品》。

生平

1930年出生于纽约，受哈特·克莱恩、威廉·巴特勒·叶芝、威廉·布莱克等人的作品影响。就读于康奈尔大学和耶鲁大学，毕业后在耶鲁大学任教，早期研究浪漫主义诗歌，出版布莱克、雪莱、叶芝、斯蒂文斯等英美诗人传记，强调“修正式批评理论”，是美国“耶鲁学派”批评家。1973年推出《影响的焦虑》。1979年与保罗·德曼、杰弗里·哈特曼（Geoffrey Hartman）、希利斯·米勒（J.Hillis Miller）合作出版《解构和批评》。又与史景迁友好。

1994年出版《西方正典》，重新评比26位西方文学家，引起轩然大波。2005年4月2日获得安徒生文学奖。作品还有《误读之图》、《卡巴拉犹太神秘哲学与批评》、《诗与隐抑》等。

观点

布鲁姆长期和20世纪60年代的反主流文化保持距离，并对多元文化主义提出批评。布鲁姆同时认为斯蒂芬·金和《哈利波特》作者J·K·罗琳是蹩脚作家。

Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world". After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.

Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "School of Resentment" (which included multiculturalism, feminism, and Marxism).

Early life and education

Bloom was born in New York City on July 11, 1930, to Paula (née Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew; he learned English at age six. Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in Odesa and his Lithuanian Jewish mother, a homemaker, near Brest-Litovsk in what is today Belarus. Harold had three older sisters and an older brother. He was the last living sibling.

As a boy, Bloom read Hart Crane's Collected Poems, a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry. Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science, where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high. In 1951 he received a B.A. degree in classics from Cornell University, where he was a student of literary critic M. H. Abrams, and in 1955 a Ph.D. from Yale. In 1954–55 Bloom was a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty of New Critics, including William K. Wimsatt. Several years later Bloom dedicated his book The Anxiety of Influence to Wimsatt.

Teaching career

Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, that focuses on primary texts. Fond of endearments, Bloom addressed both male and female students and friends as "my dear".

Personal life and death

Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958. They had two children. In a 2005 interview, Jeanne said that she and Harold were both atheists, which he denied: "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist."

Bloom was the subject of "Bloom in Love", a 1990 article in GQ that accused him of having affairs with female graduate students. He called the article a "disgusting piece of character assassination". Bloom's friend and colleague the biographer R. W. B. Lewis said in 1994 that Bloom's "wandering, I gather is a thing of the past. I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn't very secret for a number of years." In a 2004 article for New York magazine, Naomi Wolf wrote that while she was an undergraduate student at Yale University in 1983, Bloom placed his hand on her inner thigh at a dinner arranged to discuss her writing. Bloom "vigorously denied" the allegation. Camille Paglia criticized Wolf, accusing her of launching a witch hunt and calling it "indecent" to make allegations about events from 20 years earlier. In response, Andrea Dworkin defended Wolf's trustworthiness despite their intellectual and ideological disagreements, while Jenni Murray, Marcelle d'Argy Smith, and Elizabeth Wurtzel responded more critically, casting doubt on Wolf's account and questioning the long gap between the alleged incident and Wolf's disclosure.