The Anatomy of Influence

E' il titolo del nuovo libro di Harold Bloom, uscito presso Yale UP. "For me, Shakespeare is God", dice Bloom a un certo punto. "Twice he asserts that Shakespeare's greatest creations are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago and Cleopatra; twice that The Tempest and The Winter's Tale are tragicomedies and not ro­mances; three times that Titus Andronicus parodies the tragedies of Shakespeare's defeated rival Marlowe. Prospero, Bloom shrewdly observes, 'is one of those teachers who is always convinced his auditors are not quite attentive.' So too Bloom, himself a 'professional teacher' for 55 years now, has perhaps learned that the most efficient way to get your point across is to keep making it, the classroom sage's version of staying on message. But a repetitive Bloom, even in his late season of garrulity, still has many arresting things to say and says them, often, with exquisite precision. He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century - and one of the most protean, a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-­pamphleteer... Sam Tanenhaus sul nytbr.